Paradoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 1138588660, 9781138588660

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Niebuhr on the ironies of virtue and the virtue of irony
2 Hope, virtue, and politics in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works
3 Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist
4 Reinhold Niebuhr: faith in and beyond history
5 Deceptive honesty: myth and virtue in Reinhold Niebuhr
6 The paradoxes of virtue: agape in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr
7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality
8 The humble place of humility in Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics
9 Choosing sorrow: Niebuhr, contrition, and white catastrophe
10 Reinhold Niebuhr, virtue, and political society: a key to the Christian character of prophetic realism
11 A Niebuhrian virtue of justice
12 Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis
13 Reinhold Niebuhr and the aesthetics of political leadership
14 The virtues of the social critic
Contributor bios
Index

Citation preview

Paradoxical Virtue

Since the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favor of thinking of his work in terms of dispositional ethics. Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr’s dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian Realist, and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally. Kevin Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO. He is Co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics; former President of the Niebuhr Society; and author of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey (2010), From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality (2017), several scholarly articles, and many popular and editorial pieces. David True is Associate Professor of Religion at Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA. He is Co-editor of Political Theology and is author of articles and book chapters on fundamentalism, just war theory, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He has also written for venues such as Religion Dispatches, the Christian Science Monitor, Politico, and Political Theology Today. In addition, he is the Director of Wilson College’s Orr Forum on Religion and The Wilson College Common Hour.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors; international libraries; and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Theology Without Walls The Transreligious Imperative Jerry L. Martin A New Theist Response to the New Atheists Edited by Joshua Rasmussen and Kevin Vallier Biblical and Theological Visions of Resilience Pastoral and Clinical Insights Edited by Nathan H. White and Christopher C.H. Cook The Fourth Pentecostal Wave in South Africa A Critical Engagement Solomon Kgatle Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border A Borderland Hermeneutic Gregory L. Cuéllar Paradoxical Virtue Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition Edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Paradoxical Virtue Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition Edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Carnahan and David True; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kevin Carnahan and David True to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carnahan, Kevin, 1976– editor. | True, David, editor. Title: Paradoxical virtue : Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue tradition / edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019048705 (print) | LCCN 2019048706 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138588660 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429492150 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Niebuhr, Reinhold, 1892–1971. | Virtue. | Political theology. Classification: LCC BX4827.N5 P36 2020 (print) | LCC BX4827.N5 (ebook) | DDC 241.092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048705 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048706 ISBN: 978-1-138-58866-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-49215-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Prefacevii Introduction

1

KEVIN CARNAHAN

  1 Niebuhr on the ironies of virtue and the virtue of irony

19

CHARLES MATHEWES

  2 Hope, virtue, and politics in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works

33

ROBIN W. LOVIN

  3 Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist

48

MARTHA TER KUILE

  4 Reinhold Niebuhr: faith in and beyond history

66

SCOTT R. PAETH

  5 Deceptive honesty: myth and virtue in Reinhold Niebuhr

82

DANIEL MALOTKY

  6 The paradoxes of virtue: agape in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr

98

MARK DOUGLAS

  7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality

115

DANIEL A. MORRIS

  8 The humble place of humility in Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics

132

JODIE L. LYON

  9 Choosing sorrow: Niebuhr, contrition, and white catastrophe CHRISTOPHER DOWDY

144

vi  Contents 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, virtue, and political society: a key to the Christian character of prophetic realism

165

R. WARD HOLDER

11 A Niebuhrian virtue of justice

182

KEVIN CARNAHAN

12 Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis

201

TOM JAMES AND DAVID TRUE

13 Reinhold Niebuhr and the aesthetics of political leadership

220

TOM JAMES

14 The virtues of the social critic

239

JEREMY SABELLA

Contributor bios255 Index258

Preface

The idea for this volume emerged from a series of exchanges between the co-editors (and occasionally Tom James) several years ago. While several scholars had explored Niebuhr in relation to particular virtues or as tangentially related to virtue ethics, we felt that the time had come for a more comprehensive analysis of the relation between the two. K. Healan Gaston (then President of the Niebuhr Society) was extremely gracious in setting up a colloquium at Harvard Divinity School and in allowing us to take over the meeting of the Niebuhr Society in November 2017. Many of the papers in this volume grew from those meetings. We are grateful to Healan and Harvard for their support. We provided an outline of the general topic to our authors and tried to keep them working on different subjects to avoid repetition. At the same time, we allowed the authors to work with their own conceptions of virtue ethics and their own readings of Niebuhr. As the reader will see, the authors don’t always agree with one another. We take that to be a sign of lively dialogue. Portions of Daniel A. Morris’ essay have been previously printed in “ ‘The Pull of Love’: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology” Political Theology 17.1 (2016):73–90. The extracts from this article have been used with the permission of the publisher. All other work contained in this volume is original. We would like to thank the contributors for their excellent work. We would also like to thank our families for putting up with weekly phone and Skype meetings to discuss and edit the papers in this volume. It is often said that one learns a subject best by teaching it. In this process we have learned that editing a book is another way to achieve such a thorough education. It is an education for which we are grateful. Kevin Carnahan David True

Introduction Kevin Carnahan

In 1961, Paul Ramsey’s War and the Christian Conscience was published. While that text set Ramsey on the way to becoming one of the most active just-war thinkers in the late twentieth century, perhaps it is most notable for its contribution to another issue: the fight between deontologists and consequentialists in Christian ethics.1 In an effort that he saw as recovering the deontological grounding of just-war thinking, Ramsey waged his own battle against those ethicists who narrowed moral analysis to an account of consequences. Ramsey had a long list of adversaries in this battle, but on the first page of the first chapter of his book he prominently highlighted “the increasing pragmatism of the Niebuhrians.”2 A few pages later, presumably to illustrate the problem, he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr: “To serve peace, we must threaten war without blinking the fact that the threat may be a factor in precipitating war.” Ramsey follows with his own apparent corrective: “Morality, including political morality, has to do with the definition of right conduct, and this not simply by way of the ends of action.”3 Ramsey thus suggests that Niebuhr is a consequentialist: a theorist who treats morality as a matter of act analysis, treats attaining good consequences as the only end of morality, and treats all other factors only inasmuch as they contribute to the gaining of good consequences of action. Ramsey may have been the first to treat Niebuhr in this category, but he is far from the last. Scholarship following Ramsey (often directly following) has often associated Niebuhr with consequentialism. Keith Pavlischek writes of “the consequentialism or proportionalism of Niebuhr and his modern disciples.”4 In a discussion of just-war thinking Edmund Santurri and William Werperhouski briefly explore Niebuhr’s tendency “toward a rough consequentialism.”5 Eric Gregory writes of “the soft consequentialism of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism.”6 Stanley Hauerwas locates Ramsey’s approach to war as an attempt at “saving Niebuhr from the consequentialism to which (without ‘justice more articulated’) his account of violence seemed to commit him.”7 Samuel Wells writes that “Niebuhr is committed to a consequentialist ethics since he is flexible about means so long as the ends is justice.”8

2  Kevin Carnahan But widespread as association of Niebuhr with consequentialism is, there are significant problems with the claim that Niebuhr was a consistent consequentialist. In 1950, when considering the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike against Russia, Niebuhr warned against “the subordination of moral and political strategy to military strategy.”9 Part of his reason for advocating a refusal to use nuclear weapons in a first strike was that there were some means which no ends could justify. We would be saying by such a policy [refusing first use of Nuclear weapons] that even a nation can reach the point where it can purchase its life too dearly. If we had to use this kind of destruction in order to save our lives, would we find life worth living? Even nations can reach a point where the words of our Lord, “Fear not them which are able to kill the body but rather fear them that are able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” become relevant. The point of moral transcendence over historical destiny is not as high as moral perfectionists imagine. But there is such a point, though the cynics and realists do not recognize it. We must discern that point clearly.10 In 1957, Niebuhr found Karl Barth’s analysis of the Russian invasion of Hungary to be lacking because he read Barth as failing to grasp the similarities between the evil of the Communist regime and that of the Nazis that had preceded them. Barth, Niebuhr concluded, was playing fast and loose with the rules by which he judged international actors. A little concern for “principles” would have instructed Barth that some of the barbarism of Nazism was derived from the same monopoly of irresponsible power from which the barbarism of Communism is derived. Looking at every event afresh means that one is ignorant about the instructive, though inexact, analogies of history which the “godless” scientists point out for our benefit.11 Niebuhr’s rare comments on sexual ethics are perhaps his most deontically grounded. In 1949 he critiqued Bertrand Russel’s claim that modern birth control created room for moral promiscuity. Such a theory obviously disregards one important immutable aspect of the human situation, namely, the organic unity between physical impulses and the spiritual dimension of human personality. This organic unity means that sexual relations are also personal relations and that when they are engaged in without a genuine spiritual understanding between persons and without a sense of personal responsibility to each other, they must degrade the partners of the sexual union.12

Introduction 3 Interestingly, Niebuhr’s private correspondence with Ramsey also reveals his unease with contextualism and situationism in moral theology. In 1966, when Ramsey invited Niebuhr to contribute to a book responding to Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, Niebuhr declined citing health issues. But he was clear in aligning his own thought with Ramsey against Fletcher. “Weakness alone,” he wrote, “forbids me to go into detail on all the knotty problems you discuss wisely.” Concerning the contextual ethics of Paul Lehmann, Niebuhr went on to say: “His pragmatic emphasis is so great that I doubt whether he has studied the whole problem of ethical standards sufficiently.”13 Aside from Niebuhr’s more deontic moments, another, more deeply and consistently ingrained, facet of Niebuhr’s thought distinguishes his approach from consequentialism. Niebuhr is constantly focused upon the dispositions of moral actors. For instance, it is hardly debatable that sin is a central category in Niebuhr’s theology, but sin is not fundamentally categorized in terms of bringing about negative consequences, but in terms of a dispositionally deficient reaction to the human predicament of being both free and finite. In the tension between finitude and freedom, anxiety arises and the human is tempted to seek a resolution by fleeing to one or the other extreme. “It resides in the inclination of man, either to deny the contingent character of his existence (in pride and self-love) or to escape from his freedom (in sensuality).”14 It is these extremes that are constitutive of sin for Niebuhr. If one eliminated the discussions of pride and pretension from Niebuhr’s writings, there would be hardly anything left. Further, Niebuhr’s analyses of sin and how to deal with sin do not appeal to a reductive account of extrinsic goods, but rather rely on deep appeals to meaning that can only be found in the context of a lived narrative and tradition. In this context, Niebuhr explicitly rejects “rationalist” theories that would strip humans of their narratival and embodied context or reduce morality to a formula. Take, for instance, Niebuhr’s treatment of what he calls “the crown of Christian ethics”: forgiveness. “Forgiveness,” he writes, “is a moral achievement which is possible only when morality is transcended in religion.”15 Niebuhr critiques John Dewey for his excessive rationalism, which would seek to “eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions.”16 According to Niebuhr, such a rationalist position attempts to overcome partiality by bringing the agent to a view from nowhere. If only the human could leave behind her or his humanity, then she or he would be able to appreciate the other. Niebuhr rejects this perspective. Purely rational analysis, he suggests, will be insufficient to wrestle with the passions involved in human conflict, especially on a global scale. Participants in these conflicts are “maintained by a demonic fervor in which partial perspectives and devotion to a high ideal are compounded. Where is the rationality which will resolve or modify this fervor?”17

4  Kevin Carnahan Niebuhr then looks to the Christian narrative. Here, Niebuhr finds the stories of Jesus distinguishing himself from the self-righteous and challenging those who would throw stones to own up to their own sinfulness. Far from leading to an attempt to raise oneself up above one’s own humanity, Niebuhr follows these stories toward an acceptance of one’s own human frailty. It is only here that one finds the possibility of a love that can address our vicious fervor. Forgiving love is a possibility only for those who know that they are not good, who feel themselves in need of divine mercy, who live in a dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves as well as their fellow men convicted of sin by a holy God and know that the differences between the good man and the bad man are insignificant in his sight.18 Niebuhr does not believe that this should lead us to an end of relative judgments in the world. Rather, having grasped oneself as fragile and sinful, the actor will be capable of better judgment. Accepting one’s place as a sinful human in need of forgiveness, it becomes possible “to qualify the spiritual pride of the usually self-righteous guardians of public morals. In the same way it is possible to engage in social struggles with a religious reservation in which lie the roots of the spirit of forgiveness.”19 It is worth noting that Niebuhr’s mature treatment of arch-consequentialists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill parallels his treatment of Dewy. Utilitarianism, he argues, is an incoherent form of naturalism, which on the one hand wishes to affirm natural desires, but on the other hand contends that true morality can only be achieved when human reason enforces a kind of stoicism (Mill) or when law enforces a more egalitarian distribution of goods (Bentham).20 Neither, on Niebuhr’s judgment, have plumbed the depths of the paradoxical nature of human existence. Neither has truly understood human moral psychology. Inasmuch as Niebuhr’s interest in disposition is concerned with judgment, it is inevitably relevant to judgments about the consequences of human acts. But it is worth stressing that Niebuhr does not treat dispositions as merely instrumental. Take, for example, Niebuhr’s treatment of bomber pilots in 1943, during World War II. The pilots were obligated, he judged, to participate in their runs. But it was important how they participated. “We can do these things without rancor or self-righteousness,” he wrote. Niebuhr then considers a group of bombing pilots who have refused to take communion. While lauding their conscientiousness, Niebuhr suggests that they continue to participate in the sacramental practice, saying that the Lord’s Supper is not a sacrament for the righteous but for sinners . . . it mediates the mercy of God not only to those who repent of the sins they have done perversely but also to those who repent of the sins in which they are involved inexorably by reason of their service to a ‘just cause.’21

Introduction 5

The poverty of moral language So how did we get to the point that Niebuhr is interpreted by many primarily as a consequentialist? In 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre famously suggested that the language of moral philosophy was in what amounted to a postcataclysmic “state of grave disorder.”22 The cataclysm, according to MacIntyre was the collapse of a worldview which included natural teleology. In a world where beings had functions, it made sense to speak about the qualities that these beings needed to inhabit and fulfill their telos. This system, however, broke down with the collapse of Aristotelian, teleological biology and the rise of nominalist volunteerism. To patch the resulting void philosophers proposed deontological and consequentialist systems of moral thought. But, to no avail. These were edifices without grounding. Whether or not one accepts the details of MacIntyre’s diagnosis or his eventual prescription, it is wise to accept his judgment that the moral language of the late modern period was impoverished. This poverty is relevant to the study of Niebuhr’s ethics in at least two ways. First, Niebuhr’s second order reflection on moral rationality at times exemplifies the lack of adequate moral language to which MacIntyre refers. Second, Niebuhr is often read through the lens of the debates between the impoverished options during this period. An example of Niebuhr’s own fumbling through the philosophical moral categories available during this time can be found in his early justification of the use of violence in Moral Man and Immoral Society. There, Niebuhr lays out an unapologetically utilitarian argument. Niebuhr starts from the claim that “nothing is intrinsically immoral except ill-will” where will is identified with motive. He then goes on: Since it is very difficult to judge human motives, it is natural that, from an external perspective the social consequences of an action or policy should be regarded as more adequate tests of its morality than hidden motives. The good motive is judged by its social goal. Does it have the general welfare as its objective? When viewing a historic situation all moralists become pragmatists and utliltarians. Some general good, some summum bonum, “the greatest good of the greatest number” or “the most inclusive harmony of all vital capacities” is set up as the criterion of the morality of specific actions and each action is judged with reference to its relation to the ultimate goal.23 Internal dispositions are wiped away here in an epistemic fog, and concern about the possibility of intrinsic wrong is eliminated in favor of a consistent extrinsic teleology. As always with Niebuhr, his argument ought to be read in context. Moral Man and Immoral Society is deeply influenced by Marxist theory and Marxism itself had consequentialist tendencies. It is no mistake that Niebuhr

6  Kevin Carnahan includes here the claim that the objectives of “Marxian politics” are “identical with the most rational possible social goal, that of equal justice.”24 Further, as always, Niebuhr’s choice of language here is partially for rhetorical effect. If one is aiming at pacifism, consequentialism is an effective, if crude, cudgel. But the very fact that this seemed the best moral-linguistic option to Niebuhr supports MacIntyre’s point about the poverty of moral language in the early twentieth century. There is a long tradition of Christian non-pacifism which does not reduce to utilitarianism. Niebuhr himself, as the last section suggests, will draw upon a much richer moral analysis in his own later theory and analysis. But Niebuhr is not able at this time to articulate any of this. He is left with the explicitly reductive claim that consequentialism is the only real choice for all moral thinkers. Niebuhr was wrong. There were and are many alternative modes of thought for moralists. And even at this point Niebuhr’s first order moral analysis works out of a broader set of moral concerns. He draws upon narrative, develops accounts of positive and negative dispositions, and works to reshape the moral location of his audience. But his own analysis of what he is doing is impoverished. He does not have a moral-theoretical framework robust enough to make sense of his own moral thought. But this cannot be an end to the story of Niebuhr’s association with consequentialism. It was in 1961, almost thirty years after Moral Man and Immoral Society and after much of Niebuhr’s more developed moral analysis, that Ramsey would link Niebuhr’s analysis with consequentialism, setting the stage for much of the later interpretation of Niebuhr. So, why the characterization? Unfortunately, Ramsey’s analysis suffered from some of the same poverty as Niebuhr’s own self-articulation. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue can be thought of as a book end with another article calling for a revision in moral language in the twentieth century: G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy.”25 In her 1958 article, Anscombe attacked secular deontology and consequentialism (a term she coined in the article). Without a divine law giver, she claimed, the idea of a law or rule governed moral language lacked grounding. But even worse was the vacuousness of consequentialist ethics, which abandoned even the meaningfulness of moral description terms in favor of extrinsic goals. While Anscombe leaves open the option that a theistic deontology might yet be workable she does not see it as a viable option in a secular society. She opts to recommend a recovery of the central concepts of virtue ethics. Unfortunately for the prospects of this recovery, she goes on to state that at that time philosophy lacked an adequate moral psychology to underwrite the development. So, in lieu of going directly to virtue ethics, she then advises that philosophers turn their work to starting with moral psychology. Anscombe was right that the time had not come yet for virtue ethics. But her article did clearly articulate the alternative options that would

Introduction 7 dominate the interpretation of moral argument for the next several ­decades. William Frankena’s popular textbook Ethics, published in 1963, offers deontology and utilitarianism as the two viable theories in moral philosophy.26 Ramsey himself, even when his own first order moral analysis manifested other options, thought largely within the structure of this overarching binary. Within mainline moral theology, the conflict between deontologists and consequentialists reached fever pitch with Joseph Fletcher’s publication of the explicitly consequentialist Situation Ethics in 1966. Ramsey had located himself perfectly to fill out the binary on the deontological side. In this context it was inevitable that moral theologians would be sorted into these two categories, and Niebuhr was certainly not a consistent deontologist. But the categories were never really adequate to make sense of moral thought. Using consequentialism and deontology as the primary lenses through which morality should be understood obscured the importance of tradition, narrative, and character in moral thought. As Edmund Pincoffs argued in 1971, the consequentialist/deontologist debates boiled ethics down to arguments internal to “quandary ethics,” focusing on narrow construals of moral rationality applied to boundary cases and obscuring the full shape of human moral life.27 Here it is worth noting the extent to which Niebuhr’s thought does not fit with the categories at hand. In contrast to Ramsey, Niebuhr’s work never engaged in the kind of abstract case-based analysis that constituted “quandary ethics.” Niebuhr was consistently suspicious of abstraction. He was more interested in actual political and moral events, contextualized in a world of broader narratives. Indeed, many of Niebuhr’s critiques of consequentialism could fit equally well as critiques of deontology. Each had the tendency to treat morality as if it were best engaged with pure dispassionate rationality. There are few positions that Niebuhr more consistently rejected than this. This has led some authors to throw up their hands. H. David Baer writes: “If Niebuhr himself could strike good compromises because of his perspicacious judgment, he bequeathed no workable framework for others. He is a thinker from who one can learn much, but never follow.”28 But if Niebuhr failed to bequeath a framework, that was probably intentional. Not because he advocated a “vague consequentialism,” as Baer posits, but because he rejected the entire modern project of producing a rational formula for ethics. While he left no formula, he may yet have bequeathed dispositions underlying the kinds of judgments he made. This opens a new set of possibilities.

Why not virtue? So, if Niebuhr does not fit as a consistent consequentialist or deontologist, are there any promising alternatives for making sense out of his general position? No doubt, there are some great advantages to conceiving of Niebuhr’s

8  Kevin Carnahan work in the context of his own intellectual milieu. In addition to Marxism, for instance, Niebuhr was influenced by the social theory of Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, by Kierkegaard and Augustine’s conceptions of a depth of human existence that goes beyond both passion and reason, and by William James’ anti-reductive pragmatism. Like Niebuhr, these sources, while not deontological, also resist easy categorization as consequentialist. Troeltsch and Weber were interested in the relation between culture, worldview, action, and social organization. Against reductive accounts of materialism, they both sought to articulate the ways in which beliefs and social traditions influence moral life. From Kierkegaard and Augustine, Niebuhr drew an emphasis on the mystery of the internal reality of human existence. It is here that Niebuhr developed his conception of the human as inextricably caught in the paradox of finitude and freedom, his understanding of sin, and his understanding of tragic history, and eschatological promise. From James, Niebuhr inherited an antireductive phenomenology and an aversion to closed systematic accounts of reality, moral or otherwise. At the very least, we can say that there are no direct paths from these influences to the reductive treatment of morality found in consequentialism. But just as Niebuhr’s ethical thought has roots that extend back before moral discourse was reduced to a battle between consequentialists and deontologists, his thought also resonates with a category that has come to represent an alternative to consequentialism and deontology in recent discussion: virtue ethics. Anscombe, Pincoffs, and MacIntyre, key critics of the reductive tendencies of modern moral language, all pointed the way toward an alternative way of conceiving morality. They rejected the focus on abstract rational formulas, boundary cases, and action analysis and turned attention to dispositions, habits, tradition, narrative, and character. The overlap between this development and Niebuhr’s analysis noted earlier is striking. But while the overlap has been noted by some scholars, a fullfledged exploration of Niebuhr in relation to virtue ethics has been slow to emerge.29 In addition to academic inertia, a few factors intrinsic to the recent recovery of virtue ethics have contributed to inhibiting this development. First, is the ambiguous relation between the origins of the contemporary revival and modernity. MacIntyre and many other virtue ethicists developed their programs in the context of communitarian critiques of modernity. In this process, there was little interest in recovering parallels to immediately preceding moralists. One of the ironies of much of contemporary virtue ethics is that it has proudly declared its emphasis on tradition while obscuring its debts to the traditions that immediately precede it. In this, contemporary virtue ethics has been distinctively modern in presenting itself as an absolute break from its own parents as it appeals to idealized pictures of a return to ancient sources. (An irony Niebuhr would have appreciated.) This tendency makes the recovery of an early twentieth-century ethicist an unlikely project for many contemporary virtue ethicists.

Introduction 9 This tendency is related to the second factor that has delayed a full exploration of Niebuhr’s relation to virtue ethics. One of the modern sources which much of contemporary virtue ethics (especially in the MacIntyrian tradition) simultaneously draws upon and obscures is that of G.W.F. Hegel.30 It is hard to read the work of communitarian virtue ethicists like M ­ acIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas without being struck by the similarities between their thought and the Hegelian notion of communally grounded Sittlichkeit. And the critique of modernity offered by these thinkers parallels Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian moral philosophy. Recognizing this lineage requires acknowledging that this strain of the “recovery” of virtue ethics has always already been involved in ongoing arguments within modernity. In this light it is unsurprising that, while criticizing deontological and consequentialist versions of modern moral philosophy, contemporary virtue ethicists in this school have not doled out their criticism equally. While deontology has been criticized for excessive rationalism and individualism, this does not compare to the depravity that virtue ethicists have located in consequentialism. Sittlichkeit is constructed as an opposite from Kantian autonomous reason, but it is still Kantian in its adherence to duty above all else. With this inheritance, it is not surprising that a moralist whose thought fell more in the Augustinian-Kierkegaardian and pragmatist traditions would be an unlikely choice for a conversation partner, regardless of overlaps in other areas of moral theory. Kierkegaard, it should be remembered, constructed his ethics in part as a critique of Hegel’s. Finally, there is a contingent factor that has already been mentioned. When discussing Niebuhr’s own tendencies toward consequentialism above, it was noted that he deployed this language most readily in his early efforts to counter pacifism. It is notable, then, that the voice most associated with the early recovery of virtue in Christian ethics, Stanley Hauerwas, locates pacifism as central to his own, and his community’s identity. This led Hauerwas to be a natural critic of Niebuhr and a critic who engaged Niebuhr in some of Niebuhr’s most consequentialist moods. In the process, many have questioned whether the image of Niebuhr that Hauerwas produced was accurate to the full depth of Niebuhr’s theology and ethics. Paul Ramsey, himself perfectly capable of criticizing Niebuhr, stated: “It is impossible to recognize Niebuhr in what Hauerwas has written.”31 Given the tensions between Hauerwasian and Niebuhrian theology and the influential status of Hauerwas in the recovery of virtue ethics in theology it again makes sense that a reading of Niebuhr in the context of virtue ethicist might originally not have seemed viable.

Niebuhrian virtue? All of the authors in this volume agree that Niebuhr should not be pigeonholed into the categories of consequentialism or deontology. There is, however, disagreement about the extent to which Niebuhr ought to be

10  Kevin Carnahan understood as a kind of virtue ethicist. This disagreement has to do with differing understandings of Niebuhr’s emphases and with how to construe virtue ethics itself. While Niebuhr lived prior to the renaissance of virtue ethics, it is not quite right to say that Niebuhr has no account of virtue. Niebuhr does talk about “virtue” of a kind, but when he does, he is usually undermining claims to have it. According to Niebuhr, people in all ages overestimate their virtue and the ease of gaining virtue. Humans in their sin claim to be virtuous.32 Classically, virtues were understood as qualities that allowed an individual to fulfill her or his telos, the goal of life, and thus to achieve goodness. Niebuhr rejects the idea that humans can achieve goodness within history. Our finis comes before the realization of our telos, writes Niebuhr, and even prior to that our character lacks the qualities necessary to achieve our telos.33 Further, while most virtue ethics from Aristotle on focuses on practice and habituation, Niebuhr is critical of projects of social engineering and education that claimed to be able to produce morally advanced people. The problem of morality, for Niebuhr is rooted in humanity’s transcendence of all social structures, including education and socialization. This frees us to improve our social setting, but it also inevitably leads to our corrupting our social setting. Social theorists are naive in thinking they could produce a system without corruption and prideful in thinking that they could program others for morality. In all of this, Niebuhr sits clearly within the Augustinian tradition of thought about virtue. Focusing away from human effort, this tradition has tended to emphasize that all goodness comes from God. In its yearning for the Kingdom, it has taken a limited view of what is possible in the time between the resurrection and the Second Coming. Emphasizing the divine turning of the will, it has challenged the efficacy of political and social schemes aimed at perfecting citizens. Of course, at the same time, Niebuhr critiqued Protestant versions of the Augustinian tradition for being overly pessimistic, even specifically on the issue of virtue. “Protestantism,” he writes, “has frequently contributed to the anarchy of modern life by its inability to suggest and to support relative standards and structures of social virtue and political justice.”34 And as noted above, his ethics are more dispositional than they are formulaic. So how should Niebuhr be located in relation to virtue after the renaissance of virtue theory in recent decades? Three general approaches are possible. First, reject the claim that virtue language should monopolize the territory of dispositional ethics, and locate Niebuhr as a non-virtue, dispositional ethicist. This is the strategy endorsed in this volume by Charles Mathewes. Second, critique Niebuhr in the light of more classical virtue theory. One finds some of this approach in Christopher Dowdy’s chapter, which argues that Niebuhr did reflect upon liturgical practice and context when developing his concept of contrition, but failed to adequately expand his social context to fulfill the requirements of contrition concerning race relations.

Introduction 11 A third option is to expand and complicate the category of virtue ethics to include a Niebuhrian dispositional ethics. Most of the authors in this volume follow this path. But they complicate virtue theory in different ways. Robin W. Lovin focuses on the infused virtues, especially hope and the way that hope may allow us to act toward a telos that is impossible for us to achieve. Martha ter Kuile looks to developments within the virtue tradition. Niebuhr had contrasted Aristotelianism and Greek tragedy. Ter Kuile argues that Martha Nussbaum’s picture of fragile virtue, born from a reading of Aristotle and the tragedians, bridges some of the gap between the Aristotelian virtue tradition and Niebuhr’s ethics. Mark Douglas explores the idea of a “red queen” virtue; one which does not so much make one good as it prevents one from being worse. Many of the authors in this volume explore the ideas of “paradoxical” or “ironic” virtue. This is a virtue that is in part constituted by knowledge of one’s own lack of virtue. Paradoxical virtue cannot be resolved. It is not as if one comes to know of one’s viciousness and thereby overcomes it. Paradoxical virtue depends on a continuing lively sense of one’s own failings, including knowledge that one is currently falling short of the ideal even while recognizing that the exact way one is failing is obscured by the self in its viciousness. But equally, paradoxical virtue is not an acceptance of one’s own failing. Paradoxical virtue resides in the dialectical space between one’s knowledge of continuing vice and the impossible possibility of goodness. As such, it is partially constituted by a kind of cognitive dissonance. Not a dissonance, however, that stymies judgment and action. Rather, a dissonance that makes for more responsible judgment and action. In exploring these possibilities, this volume fits with efforts to reimagine virtue under conditions of imperfection, such as can be found in Katie Cannon’s treatment of “Unctuousness as a virtue,” Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtue, and the aforementioned work by Martha Nussbaum on virtue and fragility.35 Regardless of which strategy the reader finds most plausible it is to be hoped that in reading they will gain new perspectives on Niebuhr’s ethics and on dispositional or even virtue ethics in the process.

Chapter outlines We begin with Charles Mathewes, who promptly launches an attack on virtue theory and the idea that Niebuhr should be thought of as a virtue ethicist. Mathewes does believe that Niebuhr’s ethics were broadly dispositional. Niebuhr should be read as opposed to the “juridical” theories of utilitarianism and deontology, and many of Niebuhr’s critiques of ethics in his own times overlap with those brought by virtue theorists. But for Mathewes virtue theory is a theory about stable dispositions drawn from established social custom that make the virtuous person good and allow the virtuous person to gain reliable historical success. Niebuhr’s Augustinianism

12  Kevin Carnahan leads him to undercut almost every part of this kind of theory. Open to socially transcendent criticism, the Niebuhrian should not accept the kind of conservative ethics that depend upon established social custom. Aware of sin, the Niebuhrian should not think at any point that she has been made “good.” And having seen the ironic reversals of the best laid plans of mice and men, the Niebuhrian should never think that any human project produces reliable success. To understand Niebuhr’s ethics more adequately, we need to free “disposition” and “habit” from the hegemonic hold of virtue theory. We need to recognize the tension that has usually marked the relationship between Christian theology and virtue discourse. And, especially in religious studies, we must move beyond our oversimplified view of the options in ethics and our fixation on the framework of virtue ethics. In Niebuhr’s case, Mathewes finds that the language of irony allows Niebuhr to develop a different kind of dispositional ethics, one that recognizes that neither we nor the world are not good, and the world is not under our own control, one that disposes us to bear on even in that kind of a world responsibly. Passing up the option of folding up the whole project in the light of Mathewes’ conclusions, we then move into Robin W. Lovin’s treatment of Niebuhr and virtue. Surprisingly, perhaps especially in the light of Mathewes’ critique, Lovin finds that in The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr deploys the categories of Thomistic virtue theory to articulate his own views of faith, hope, and love. Overlapping the medieval distinction between the natural and theological virtues with his own distinction of humanity as finite and transcendent, Niebuhr adopts a view of the theological virtues completing rather than competing with nature. While the tension between Lovin’s and Mathewes’ approaches to Niebuhr and virtue are real, once one gets past some of the terminological disagreements the overlaps in their positions are as interesting as where they diverge. It is noteworthy that Lovin is approaching the theological virtues, clearly the more “Augustinian” end of Thomas’ virtue theory. And the reading of the Niebuhrian theological virtues that Lovin produces does not fit easily within the kind of virtue theory that Mathewes critiques. Focusing on hope, Lovin finds that the kind of virtue that Niebuhr supports is the virtue of one who is not good and who does not live in a good world. Hope here is a disposition which must break into the world and into the individual from outside of “nature.” To borrow a bit of Thomistic language, hope must be “infused,” because it cannot be justified by historical experience. History does not provide reliable evidence of its own meaningfulness or of the meaningfulness of human activities. Hope must transcend history to exist, and it must ultimately be hope in what God will do with what we have done rather than hope in what we are able to do by ourselves. But while hope must transcend history, our activity within history is dependent upon hope. Indeed, Lovin suggests that hope is necessary for more than motivation. It is in transcending the self and the current situation of history

Introduction 13 that we are able to become conscious of other possibilities, possibilities for life better than the one we know. This capability for hope is a grounding for human dignity. And it is hope that allows us to act in response to this dignity even when we know that our action will be caught up in the irony and paradox of our imperfect world. Thus, Lovin suggests, Niebuhr offers us a kind of virtue beyond virtue. A virtue for when we know that virtue will fail. This virtue does not solve the problem of goodness. It does not allow the bearer to be good. But it does allow the bearer to live and act in the midst of irony. Scott Paeth continues to develop this picture of paradoxical virtue in his treatment of faith. Niebuhr, he argues, should be located in a twentiethcentury movement to understand faith as more than belief in a set of propositions. Following Kierkegaard, and in conversation with theologians like Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, and his brother H. Richard, Reinhold Niebuhr developed a conception of faith that constituted a transformed disposition toward both the content of revelation and the broader world. But this faith is not a simple faith. In relation to revelation, this disposition is “an appropriation of the truth of the foundational absurdity at the core of Christian faith.” Thus faith is belief in that which is unbelievable. Faith then mediates the person’s perception of the world. In faith one is able to see meaning in the world and in action within the world. But this meaning is not inherent in the world or produced by the work finite people do within it. Faith finds meaning in the world in the light of its relation to that which is beyond the world, in relation to God’s ultimate purposes and power. This faith allows the individual to act in a world in which they are a creature, neither in control of the world, nor powerless. Niebuhr’s engagement with revealed truth is also the topic of Daniel Malotky’s chapter, which focuses on Niebuhr’s approach to myth. While Stanley Hauerwas has argued that Niebuhr’s approach to both Christian myth and Christian ethics are finally abortive, Malotky argues that we may be able to see how Niebuhr avoids falling into the traps that Hauerwas sees if we understand his approach to myth in terms of virtue. In particular, Malotky focuses on the virtue of honesty. The virtue of honesty does not follow a formula for speaking truth because it recognizes that truth is complex. Honesty requires tact, attention to genre, and attentiveness to who is due information. This, Malotky finds, overlaps significantly with the way that Niebuhr understands the articulation of myth. Ultimate reality cannot be approached directly and literally. Literalism is an inflexible rule which is insufficient to talking about divine and human mysteries. Niebuhr rejects literalism and embraces a “deceptive” element in all honesty about such truths. The deception is only misleading if one confuses myth with literal speech, however. If one understands the nature of myth, the “deceptive” elements are freed to reveal deeper truths than literalism is capable of holding. Malotky believes this kind of approach fits both with Niebuhr’s approach to myth and with Niebuhr’s anti-formulaic ethics.

14  Kevin Carnahan Returning to a primary focus on ethics, we find Mark Douglas’ analysis of love in Niebuhr’s thought. Douglas charts some of the recent history of Augustinian/Lutheran engagements with virtue ethics before turning more directly to Niebuhr. Agape, in Niebuhr’s thought, is famously located as an impossible ideal. This makes it an unlikely site for an analysis of virtue. But Douglas explores two ways in which agape might influence the Christian in virtue-like ways. First, he explores the possibility that, even in its impossibility, the draw and obligation of self-sacrificial love might serve as a “Red Queen” virtue; this is as a spur that keeps us from falling further behind morally in our condition of sin. Douglas then explores a more positive possibility; distinguishing between the subjective goal of self-sacrificial love and the social goal, Douglas posits that the social goal of harmony may be more historically viable than the subjective goal. As such, he suggests that love would dispose us toward alternatives that increase the relative harmony of the world around us. Continuing the exploration of love, Daniel A. Morris looks toward the development of a virtue of love as mutuality in order to develop a Niebuhrianism that might be more responsive to the concerns of the oppressed in the world. Niebuhr has often been critiqued by feminists and liberation theologians for his emphasis on the ideal of self-sacrificial love. This, they posit, is an insufficient ground for a theology that arises from the margins of society. Marginalized and oppressed populations need to be able to claim their own value. The focus on self-sacrifice is detrimental here. Morris notes that while Niebuhr did emphasize self-sacrificial love, he most often talked about such love as an impossible ideal within history. When dealing with practical political problems, Niebuhr was likely to deploy more realistic forms of love. For Niebuhr mutuality was a form of love that presupposed reciprocation of goods. Morris finds this to be fertile ground for the development of a Niebuhrian virtue motivating liberative action. Jodie L. Lyon also argues that Niebuhr’s theology has more resources for assertiveness than his critics sometimes find. But she finds this in a rather surprising place. One virtue that Niebuhr did explicitly talk about is humility. Given Niebuhr’s tendency to identify sin with pride, one might expect humility to function as the central virtue for Niebuhr. But Lyon points out that while this virtue is often identified with Niebuhrianism, it is not actually located at the center of Niebuhr’s ethics. This is because Niebuhr identifies humility with the self-critical moment in moral judgment. Niebuhr sees this as necessary. But if this is all the further that moral judgment goes, it remains mired in inaction. Thus, humility needs to be balanced with a sense (or perhaps a virtue) of responsibility in the midst of broken history. The opposite of pride for Niebuhr, it turns out, is not humility, but love. And within history love demands humility, but it also demands responsibility. Christopher Dowdy keeps the reader in the territory of humility, exploring the particular disposition of contrition. While Niebuhr is often critiqued for lacking a robust enough ecclesiology and account of practices necessary

Introduction 15 for virtue formation, Dowdy finds that Niebuhr’s treatment of contrition includes substantial engagement with practices of liturgy and prayer. Communal confession, for instance, is an important element in prompting contrition. Further, contrition is a disposition that Niebuhr believes qualifies self-righteousness and opens the self to criticism. However, Dowdy finds that Niebuhr himself was lacking in contrition when it came to the issue of race relations in the 1950s. Following James Cone’s criticism of Niebuhr, Dowdy argues that Niebuhr’s efforts to push for racial equality were too moderate and qualified. Dowdy suggests that we can understand this failing in part in relation to Niebuhr’s own account of contrition. Niebuhr’s contrition arose from his own religious practice in his own community, but that community was not adequately diverse. In order to prompt a more adequate contrition, the present day Niebuhrian needs to purse a consistent project of integration, moving oneself outside one’s comfort zone and into open engagement with the oppressed. Zooming out from contrition to gain a wider view of Niebuhr’s politics, R. Ward Holder explores how the political structures and positions Niebuhr endorsed relate to his account of the virtues and vices of humanity. Far from endorsing a formalistic account of political justice, Holder shows that the dynamism of Niebuhr’s political positions can be read as relating constantly to the central idea of justice funded by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. In some ways echoing Lovin’s chapter, Holder sees the more “natural” standards of justice as dependent on the “infused” theological virtues. Kevin Carnahan continues the emphasis on justice, exploring the prospects for a Niebuhrian virtue of justice. While Niebuhr did not develop such a virtue, Carnahan finds that Niebuhr spent a great deal of time clearing the space for individual agency and judgment in political matters. Against encroachment from deterministic rationalism or natural impulse or from established social structures, Niebuhr constantly asserted the importance of transcendence in allowing the individual to gain critical perspective both on the self and on the social structures in which it lives. Niebuhr also left behind a set of rules of thumb that guide the agent in judgment without determining judgment in the abstract. This, Carnahan posits, provides the Niebuhrian with a site and dispositional guides which are appropriate to a virtue of justice. Carnahan concludes with an argument that this virtue would allow for the development of a more radical ethics than Niebuhr endorsed in the middle of his life. In classical virtue ethics, all of the virtues depend upon phronesis, the intellectual/moral virtue that governs thought about particular situations. Countering the view of Niebuhr as a one-off creative thinker, David True and Tom James examine what phronesis looks like from a Niebuhrian perspective. They argue that Niebuhr’s vision of the world is shaped by a set of enduring themes that provides shape to Niebuhr’s analysis. Their argument is presented through case studies of Niebuhr’s work in two particular areas: his analysis of the Vietnam War and his reaction to the Kinsey Report on

16  Kevin Carnahan sexuality. They convincingly argue that while Niebuhr was not following a systematic set of rules, he was relying on a robust intellectual framework to shed light on contemporary issues. Much of the renaissance of virtue ethics has focused on the way that literary sources shape our views of the world and of moral qualities. Interestingly, Tom James finds that Niebuhr’s analysis of political leadership can be understood in relation to his treatment of different types of literary characters and conflicts. Niebuhr explicitly critiqued the kinds of characters found in the works of John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and Ernest Hemmingway. And he spent time considering the plight of Antigone in the ancient Greek tragedy. This engagement with tragic literature is exactly the kind of thing that has marked more recent virtue theory, especially in the vain explored by Martha Nussbaum. While all of this provides a useful bridge to contemporary virtue ethics, James suspects that in order to gain an aesthetic fitting for today’s politics, one should go further back in Niebuhr’s writing to the character of the fanatic in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Thus, paralleling Carnahan’s essay, James concludes with a critical note about the current need to move in more radical directions than are usually identified with Niebuhrianism. Jeremy Sabella rounds out the book looking not at Niebuhr’s thought, but his activity as a social critic. Sabella argues that Niebuhr’s judgments about society and politics are marked by his dialectical thought, which in an almost Aristotelian way seeks out the mean between extreme alternatives. Niebuhr’s Augustinianism also disposed him against Manichean pictures of the world. In contrast to those who see Niebuhr as offering utterly unrepeatable judgments, Sabella suggests that Niebuhr’s judgments arise from his own virtues, and that Niebuhr can serve for others as an exemplar of those virtues. This provides a remarkably traditional conclusion to this book which struggles with locating Niebuhr in relation to virtue. Perhaps in Niebuhr’s practice, the relation was not so complicated as in his theory. In this collection, the chapters tend to move from abstract to concrete and from theoretical to practical. The book begins with an argument that Niebuhr should be located as a critic of the virtue ethics tradition, moves through multiple accounts of how Niebuhr’s thought or virtue ethics might be complicated in ways that bring them closer together, and ends with a look at Niebuhr as a paradigm for Christian Realist virtue. These chapters do not resolve the question of how to relate Niebuhrianism and virtue ethics. But they do show that there is a great deal to be gained in the exchange between the two. Hopefully this will be a continuing dialogue.

Notes 1 Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey’s popular reader, From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics excerpted Ramsey’s work here to represent the deontological standpoint in Christian ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 212–15.

Introduction 17 2 Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961), 4. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Christian Realism, and Just War Theory: A Critique,” in Christianity and Power Politics Today: Christian Realism and Contemporary Political Dilemmas, ed. Eric Patterson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5 “Augustinian Realism and the Morality of War: An Exchange,” in Augustine and Social Justice, ed. Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth (Lexington Books, 2015), 168–69. 6 “Remember the Poor: Duties, Dilemmas, and Vocation,” in God, the Good and Utilitarianism, ed. John Perry (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 192. 7 “A Church Capable of Addressing a World at War,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Duke University Press, 2001), 447. 8 “The Nature and Destiny of Serious Theology,” in Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics: God and Power, ed. Richard Harries and Stephen Platten (Oxford University Press, 2010), 85. 9 “The Hydrogen Bomb,” in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1957), 237. 10 Ibid. 11 “Why Is Barth Silent on Hungary,” in Essays in Applied Christianity, ed. D. B. Robertson (New York: Living Age Books, 1959), 187. 12 Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 181. See also Niebuhr’s reaction to the works of Alfred Kinsey, “Kinsey and the Moral Problem of Man’s Sexual Life,” in An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female, ed. Daniel Geddes (New York: Dutton, 1954), 62–70. 13 Reinhold Niebuhr to Paul Ramsey, 18 June 1966, Box 20, Paul Ramsey Papers, Duke University Library. 14 The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (London: Nesbit and Co., 1941–43), 1:178–79. 15 An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 223. 16 Ibid., 224. 17 Ibid., 225. 18 Ibid., 226. 19 Ibid., 229. 20 Nature and Destiny, 1:107. 21 “The Bombing of Germany,” in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1957), 223. 22 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 23 Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 170. 24 Ibid., 171. 25 “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, 33:124 (January 1958), 1–19. 26 William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1963). 27 “Quandary Ethics,” Mind, 80:320 (October 1971): 552–71. 28 H. D. Baer, Recovering Christian Realism: Just War as a Political Ethic (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 4. 29 For a treatment of Niebuhr’s relation to virtue ethics, see Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),

18  Kevin Carnahan 89–105, 153–57; Daniel A. Morris, Virtue and Irony in American Democracy: Revisiting Dewey and Niebuhr (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). 30 On this point see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 137–38; Richard Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 138–39. 31 Richard John Neuhaus, Reinhold Niebuhr Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 105. 32 See, for instance, Nature and Destiny, 1:99–205. 33 Ibid., 2:297. 34 Ibid., 1:64. 35 Katie Canon, Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998); Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

1 Niebuhr on the ironies of virtue and the virtue of irony Charles Mathewes

In this chapter I want to make three points: one exegetical, one substantive, and one disciplinary. My exegetical point is that Reinhold Niebuhr didn’t have a theory of virtue, and would have had a hard time developing one. My substantive point is that this isn’t a bad thing, because virtue ethics as an approach has some real limitations, for Christian ethics in general and for Christian political ethics in particular. My disciplinary point, made mostly indirectly, is that the fact that virtue ethics is so prominent in the sub-fields of religious ethics and Christian ethics – both of which are effectively within religious studies – suggests something of how those sub-fields have a confused picture of the opportunities and challenges of philosophical discussion, because we are not properly educated in disciplinary discussions beyond our own. I hope this argument will teach us something about Niebuhr, to be sure, but I hope it will also give people a view of virtue theory that is, I think, as important as it is commonly neglected, and for the same reason: that it suggests limits to the usefulness of virtue-theoretical approaches for understanding human life, limits that make the vast and uncritical use of virtue theory in Christian ethics, and in religious ethics as well, questionable, and questionable in a way that has heretofore gone unqueried.

The recovery of virtue in twentieth century thought Virtue is a popular language in religious ethics and Christian ethics these days. It is so, I think, because we religious ethics scholars are impressed with what Anglophone philosophical ethics has done with it. Indeed, we have done little but transpose philosophical conceptions of virtue into a religiousstudies idiom, and typically with very little if any modification. Why, then, is it important in philosophy? It developed, I think, as a reaction. “Virtue” was rediscovered in the twentieth century by thinkers trying to find a way around the two dominant ethical positions, namely deontological ethics, typically of a Kantian sort, and consequentialist ethics, usually of a Millian sort. These two were both caught in a metaethical stalemate over the ontological status of ethics and ethical reasons; furthermore, many

20  Charles Mathewes felt that neither was properly adequate as a philosophical anthropology or, more precisely, a moral psychology – that these proposals’ visions of ethical theory as juridical or technocratic rather than developmental were false.1 Of course, virtue ethics is not the only expression of deep disaffection with the twentieth century’s dominant moral theories. An analogous approach is visible in the work of Iris Murdoch’s (mostly abortive) Platonism, which was to some degree followed up by John McDowell and Sabina Lovibond, and has a fellow traveler in Robert Merrihew Adams. Another is the broadly Humean approach, an anti-metaphysical common-sense appeal to basic dispositions, followed by thinkers like Annette Baier or (arguably) Allan Gibbard, and I think also deeply attractive to many ethical naturalists and anti-realists who seem to dominate philosophical metaethics today. And of course there are very many deontologists and consequentialists who recognize these same worries, feel their power, yet remain committed to revising their own ethical approaches from the inside – thinkers like T.M. Scanlon, Christine Korsgaard, or Barbara Herman in philosophy, and John Hare in philosophy of religion; and the vast alp of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters – a work that may turn out to substantially alter the direction of moral philosophy, though I suspect it will take several decades to digest.2 Indeed it is the case that, in Anglophone philosophy anyway, most ethics are done in one of these two styles, and not as virtue ethics. That the fields of religious ethics and Christian ethics barely register any of these facts is, I think, significant – significant of what, I will come to later. Furthermore there are other, perhaps more radical and (I think) still more powerful alternatives to virtue theory, beyond the ken of most analytic philosophers. Many of these approaches are broadly Nietzschean and ascetic in character, and they describe the moral adventure of the human more primarily in terms of suffering rather than doing. This distinguished line of thinkers includes figures such as Benjamin Constant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno, and contemporary and near-contemporary figures would include Bernard Williams, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Jonathan Lear. Nonetheless, virtue theorists were some of the first to elucidate these worries in an analytically legible way. Hence virtue theory appealed to many scholars because it seemed able to identify usefully distinct facets or relatively discrete capabilities in a human personality, and to offer an account of both how those capabilities develop and how they may be activated in certain moral scenarios in a reasonably predictable manner and with reasonably predictable consequences. Thinkers like Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot blazed this trail and were followed by later writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum. But for all of these thinkers, note, virtue theory appeared dialectically as a way to articulate a series of quite fundamental concerns about other options available. Anscombe employed virtue theory to orient her worries about the nihilism of consequentialism; Foot did so to enunciate her concerns regarding the inhumanity

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 21 of deontology; Nussbaum deployed Aristotle against a “Platonism” which was really more a Kantian denial of tragedy; and MacIntyre basically didn’t like anybody, and said everyone was most fundamentally described as being after virtue. These twentieth-century reappropriations of virtue theory are often called “neo-Aristotelian,” and for good reason. As some have noted, this appeal to virtue ethics remains distinctly modern, even historicist, because its advocates were more or less Hegelian (or post-Hegelian) in their selfconscious attention to context and local community, which earlier virtue theories rather notoriously did not theorize. This virtue theory is shaped by two, perhaps contradictory, ambitions: one, to speak beyond the bounds of Aristotle’s moral imagination of adult Greek males in a self-governing polis, to make this ethic something realizable by all of humanity; and, second, to recognize the contingency, perhaps even constructivist, nature of the goodness or excellence that is achievable thereby. This dual attention – to historical and cultural context and to the universally inclusive ambitions of our ethical ideals – is admirable. But as critics of modern reappropriations of virtue theory have pointed out, these commitments have created other problems as well. In one way, modern virtue theory has had a hard time either, first, pressing against the bounds of whatever normative context in which it finds itself – of offering a means of radical critique of the social context the virtue theorist finds herself in, and the social practices she deems it necessary to master in order to achieve the postulated good life; or, second, providing an account of how the virtue system so cultivated is in fact part of a morally realist vision of the human good – that is, how virtue theory so construed offers more than a strategy for simply tweaking the local cultural etiquette of some community, how it might speak to the deeper good of the human as a whole. (These complaints go back to older complaints of Kantians against Hegelians.) I am not saying that advocates of these views have not responded to these problems; I’m just saying that the critics – ranging from Kantians through Adornians to straight-up Nietzscheans – haven’t found the responses satisfying.3 I called virtue theory “bourgeois” just above, and since I mean something more than a gauchiste sneer by that term, I owe you an explanation of it here. By “bourgeois” I mean something unreflectively committed to their local communities’ conventions about good and bad, unimaginatively materialist and relentlessly short-term, powerfully unwilling to ask questions about the frame of reference within which it comfortably exists. I do not mean that a bourgeois mindset cannot be morally serious: no one is more morally earnest than a bourgeois about saving the norms within which they have their being. (The fact that Aristotle’s citizens lived in a polis and Bürgers lived in cities is, I think, not accidental.) It simply asserts that they care about the frame of understanding they possess more than they do about the reality or truth that that frame is supposed to bring into focus for them, and they will defend the frame even against concerns that it is inadequate.

22  Charles Mathewes Wittgenstein once used the word in this way, critically but descriptively, to describe the work of his friend and colleague the mathematician-­philosopher Frank Ramsey.4 It is worth noting, by the way, that Niebuhr used this term as well, and used it not just ornamentally but functionally (possibly more than he did the term virtue, by the way), in something like the way I mean it here – not to sneer, nor simply to designate a socio-economic class, but more broadly to identify a kind of moral imagination (however emaciated) that is representative of that class. What he was trying to get at with the term was a disaffection with less radical analyses of the community. And that suggests the real point of using the term: it highlights a dangerous complacency to a moral worldview, one which renders it potentially vulnerable to anesthetizing of our moral anxieties. The kinds of concerns I mean here did not emerge with the coining of the term “bourgeois,” of course. They have a much older pedigree, and have been provoked not only by virtue theories but also by idioms analogous to virtue. Examples are not very hard to find. For a pre-modern one, we might look to Abu Hamid al-Ghazâlî’s The Deliverance from Error. In that book al-Ghazâlî talks about the problem of taqlîd, or social conformism, the prereflective authority of parents and teachers, the sheer droning momentum of habit. The book is sparked by his realization that he would have been just as fervent a Jew or Christian as he was a Muslim, and so he needed to find a way. Escaping the bonds of taqlîd was central to al-Ghazâlî’s life and the radical changes he narrates in The Deliverance.5 Similarly, Christian languages of apocalypticism, or Kierkegaardian ironism about whether one can be a Christian in Christendom, are potential hosts for these worries as well. Perhaps it might have been more theologically honest to employ one of these. But for now I am simply trying to offer an immanent critique of virtue theory, especially as it is deployed in contemporary academic discourse, and for this “bourgeois,” I think, will do, and do nicely. What all of these concerns share in common is the idea that a given social order may provide a sufficiently coherent way of life to reproduce itself successfully, generation after generation, yet still may have things radically wrong – that the patterns of a reasonably flourishing human society can very well still not be in alignment with the way things “ought” to be, that the fundamental principles that should guide successful action, and form proper humans, may not be reasonably accessible from within a roughly coherent form of life. The worry about virtue theories that is consequent to this concern is that virtue theory, because it is so fundamentally an immanent theory of moral critique and moral formation, cannot accommodate this deep metaphysical concern, and so suffers from a lack of truly radical critical energies. It is important to see what these critics mean by this worry, and what they do not need to mean. First of all, they do not need to affirm that there were no “cracks” in the social order through which especially perceptive

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 23 or morally sensitive or courageous (or, on the contrary, especially demonic) individuals might “escape” the immanent normativity; indeed, by and large, they would argue, they themselves had escaped through such fissures. (This is in some ways the common story shared by, say, Plato, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frederick Douglass.) Nor, second, would an argument that an imperfect human society was “bound” to collapse be finally satisfactory to them as a counter-argument; human societies have taken the most diverse forms, and many of the most terrible of them have been quite successful, and intergenerationally sustainable, on any reasonable definition of success; consider pre-Columbian Aztec society, say, or Tokugawa-era Japan, or Feudal Europe, or the slave societies of the southern United States before the Civil War, and the Jim Crow United States, north and south, after the Civil War. Even in recent decades humans have been taught this again and again, by totalitarian regimes and by concentration camps; as Dostoevsky said, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.”6 The human is too plastic to be relied upon to stand upright on their own. Virtue theory fondly assumes that it can rely upon a convenient resilience and facile elasticity in human beings, a more durable capacity to “snap back” into our “right” form once fundamentally alien and extrinsic pressures are relieved.7 Nor, third, do they need to deny that human morality is deeply implicated in a larger picture of human psychology, with matters of character and disposition and motivation and appetite and desire and nature. Virtue theory has too often made a virtue out of the vice of “straw-manning” its opponents, as Christine Korsgaard’s work (among many other responses to virtue theory) very ably demonstrates.8 The fact that humans are fundamentally creatures of routines, structures, drives, and even habits (“habit” as a category should not be simply ceded to virtue theory) ought to be commonplaces of almost any analysis of human morality. And indeed they are. Iris Murdoch famously accused mid-century Anglophone and Continentalexistential philosophy alike of focusing too exclusively on “the quick flash of the choosing will,” and she demanded a more realistic account of the human be a part of any future ethical theory.9 Charles Taylor’s first book was on The Explanation of Behaviour, and it intentionally critiqued reductionistic determinisms in favor of a more richly hermeneutical philosophical anthropology, while Allan Gibbard’s rich expressivist-naturalist account of morality cannot be dismissed as ignoring human psychology or our embeddedness in a natural history, though it is premised on basically Humean premises, not Aristotelian ones.10 The question is not whether these are all important features of (features that need to be factored into) any adequate account of human morality. The question is how, and in what ways, and in what hierarchy of importance. In the world of religious ethics, however, “virtue theory” has grown to almost swallow the tradition of ethical analysis entirely. We take the superiority of virtue theory over all other approaches as effectively axiomatic.

24  Charles Mathewes We then silently assume, I suspect, that virtue theory is not simply superior to its live-option rivals; we assume it is, in fact, true. It seems to press itself on us with a power we take to be like the power of Newton’s theory of gravity. But this impression can be questioned, and in fact we err if we think that the word “virtue” simply and unarguably picks out a straightforward “natural kind,” a feature of human nature, a set of capacities humans inevitably possess. It is neither nature’s language, nor God’s; it is not unmistakably legible on the surface of reality, nor is it uniquely obvious as a description of the deep structure of human affairs.11 It is rather a historically contextualized idiom, a human language we use to make sense of the moral life, a contingent descriptive tool. It is not only that most religious and theological ethicists have mistakenly assumed that virtue theory is the universal consensus among our philosophical colleagues, and ontologically cosmically obvious to boot; it has also become so popular that our fields need to be reminded that “virtue” was often quite suspicious to significant strands of Christian thought. But in fact that is true: Christian thought has often had an ambivalent relation with virtue. There is a very old tradition of Christian critiques of virtue language, beginning perhaps in Paul’s quasi-Stoic anthropology that may itself at least tacitly critique certain construals of virtue language. More well known is Augustine’s engagement with virtue theory, which is substantial. He critiqued it in two ways. First, he argued it must be rooted in theological energies not obviously (to us) immanent in the experienced created order of nature (the theological virtues of faith, hope, charity). Second, he so emphasized the providential inscrutability of the everyday and the semiotically transcendent character of action, so as to undo the confidence that typically accompanies virtue theory – the confidence that actions are what they present themselves to be in the moment, and that the immediate context of an act is decisive in making it what it is.12 Broadly Protestant moral thought has had a long-standing and in some ways polemical relationship to such virtue theories as well, though some recent work seems to have forgotten that.13 Certainly Protestants agreed with virtue accounts on the importance of dispositions and the psychological orientation of the self coram Deo, but they were quite dubious about the possibilities of organizing a theologically viable picture of the human life around a developmental picture of the human. Luther’s well-known suspicion of Aristotle is more than ad hominem, and Calvin’s own discussion of sanctification goes well out of its way to emphasize its Stoic and dispositional character rather than its areteological character. In general, we can say that the magisterial Protestants’ emphasis on grace is a mark of how deeply they drank at the apocalyptic and revolutionary wells which watered so much of early Christianity, and how suspicious they were of the sacramental/confessional and penance structure of high medieval moral thought, practically and conceptually. Later Protestants, especially Reformed scholastics, re-appropriated the language of virtue in interesting ways, but it

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 25 always sat uneasily beside the sharper, and more stochastic, emphasis on radical divine sovereignty and grace.14 Despite recent efforts, Protestantism has never been especially hospitable to virtue theory.

Niebuhr the ironist, not the virtue theorist Given that Niebuhr himself was a Protestant theologian who repeatedly emphasized his inheritance from Augustine, it should be perhaps more recognized than it is that he would be suspicious of virtue. For that he is, is undoubtable. The essays in this collection confirm this, though they try to put a more positive spin on Niebuhr’s relation to “virtue” by offering different construals of what that term might mean. That is fine, just so long as we acknowledge that virtue theory has historically been, and remains today, in its neo-Aristotelian manifestations, the kind of thing that Niebuhr rejected. Certainly he also critiqued contemporary philosophical ethics as did virtue theorists, though in a less explicitly academic register. Most commonly he critiqued what he saw as the modern belief that all evil is simply the result of ignorance or imperfect social systems, and was therefore removable. More specifically, he condemned the sterility of contemporary ethical frameworks, whether the confident technocracy of normlessly smug utilitarianism or pragmatism, or the sadistic severities and “humorless idealism” of a Kantian-juridical moralistic “view from nowhere” that was tone deaf to the worries about its psychological plausibility for actual human beings. (Niebuhr offered a parallel critique of Roman Catholic “Natural Law” accounts as well.) But none of that means that Niebuhr would have felt comfortable with a virtue theory. On the contrary, following earlier Protestant thinkers and Augustine, whenever he studies it, he troubles virtue. He wants to do so via the register of irony, which so far as I know none of the earlier worriers about virtue explicitly employ. I have constructed a very provisional database on every use of “virtue” or “virtuous” in Niebuhr’s Interpretation of Christian Ethics, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Faith and History, The Irony of American History, and the collection Love and Justice.15 In all these books I looked at each use of the word, and in none of them – by a quick survey, at least – did I find any substantive discussion of virtue. Niebuhr certainly used the word “virtue,” but to me it seems safe to say that there was no explicit theory of virtue prominent, functional, or even visible in Niebuhr’s moral theory. “Virtue” is not a discrete weight-bearing term in his theological ethics. Why would he not use virtue? Obviously any answer must be hypothetical, because he does not directly answer, but here is one proposal. Virtue theories assume a reliability of character, a durability to moral progress, and the stability of the moral context; they posit the in-principle clarity or at least intelligibility of the psyche, and the general prospective legibility of

26  Charles Mathewes moral scenarios; and opposition to each of these features was structurally quite central to Niebuhr’s own work. We might say that virtue theory seems to stand opposed to just those aspects of Christian tradition which Niebuhr deemed central to his construal of the Christian faith: virtue theory insufficiently accommodates and represents the dynamic dialectic of sin and grace, and fails to make sufficient room for the dynamic agency of the human’s enframing moral and spiritual order, which is another way of saying providence, or a living God. Instead, virtue is asymmetrically dynamic: while the agent’s enframing context is understood to act upon the agent in a slow and steady manner, the self is truly the actor in this story.16 Furthermore, for Niebuhr, happiness is not what he would call a “simple possibility.”17 He does not grant the stability of the moral self, or the stability of the moral horizon; he thinks both forms of stability are in fact delusions, and any moral theory that does not recognize that fact and incorporate it into its foundational picture of the world is misdirected. This is what he meant when he said, The real question is whether a religion or a culture is capable of interpreting life in a dimension sufficiently profound to understand and anticipate the sorrows and pains which may result from a virtuous regard for our responsibilities; and to achieve a serenity within sorrow and pain which is something less but also something more than “happiness.”18 Finally, Niebuhr was interested especially in responsible action in public life, and while that meant he was directly concerned with the dispositional development of citizens and leaders to take on these duties, he may have worried that the discourse of virtue would be too parochially individualcentered, even with a serious Hegelian attention to Sittlichkeit, to bring into proper focus the full scope of the ethical situation. Furthermore, virtue theories seem interestingly ill-equipped to handle the complicated scaleproblems of public action, by which I mean the fact that an individual’s public actions may lead to consequences tremendously out of scale to the initial acts. These differences of scale may speak to some crucial distance between the moral drama of the deliberating self and the at times tremendously consequential global effects of their local little dramas. Virtue theory seems almost uniquely unhelpful in grappling with this problem, and given its inescapability to Niebuhr’s primary context, it poses especially pointed difficulties for an incorporation of the theory into his thought. Instead, he employed a language of tension, contradiction, and paradox – in short, a language of irony. As he said, “Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature of history.”19 As he defined it: Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous.

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 27 Incongruity as such is merely comic. It elicits laughter. This element of comedy is never completely eliminated from irony. But irony is something more than comedy. A comic situation is proved to be an ironic one if a hidden relation is discovered in the incongruity. If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits – in all such cases the situation is ironic. The ironic situation is distinguished from the pathetic one by the fact that the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it. It is differentiated from tragedy by the fact that the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution. While a pathetic or tragic situation is not dissolved when a person becomes conscious of his involvement in it, an ironic situation must dissolve, if men or nations are made aware of their complicity in it. Such awareness involves some realization of hidden vanity or pretension by which the comedy is turned into irony. This realization either must lead to an abatement of the pretension, which means contrition, or it leads to a desperate accentuation of the vanities to the point where irony turns into pure evil.20 Note the allowance of responsibility in that description, indeed its essentiality to his vision. A recognition of the fundamentally ironic quality of human existence alters one’s expectations for what humans can amount to, and thus decisively informs the quality and quantity of advice one can give humans in order to allow them to amount to even that little bit, but it does not make moral guidance utterly impossible. In lieu of the idea of virtue as any sort of durable moral armor or habit of prospective action that can equip us to master the vicissitudes of history, he proposed an ethic fundamentally of responsive, petitionary appeal to others, and especially the divine other, a recovery of a relationship, not the fabrication of a persona: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.21 Of course, such a vision still allows for an effort to cultivate dispositions, but the dispositions differ from virtues in not being fundamentally an orientation for or springs of action, but rather responses to what our actions are already

28  Charles Mathewes seen to be. In fact this seems phenomenologically more accurate to the vast and typically untheorized mass of human existence; for most of life is not active but reactive, then responsive, only tertiarily pro-active. This vision, then, may be less prospective than retrospective, less pragmatic than contemplative, leaning towards brooding, crucially reflexive, but it may be all the more truthful for that. Thus we must learn to cultivate a character in which: the possibility and the necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinate to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves.22 Awe, modesty, contrition, gratitude; hope, faith, forgiveness: all these are reflexive, self-referential, subject-sensitive; does that make them distinct from virtues such as courage, justice, prudence, and the like? Those are typically more immediately “outside-sensitive,” more a matter of sensitive awareness of the context, not the subject. It is easy to overstate this; after all, courage is indexed to the person as a mean between rashness and timidity. Nonetheless, as a matter of emphasis it seems plausible; again in the case of courage, the main prompts to determine and orient the courageous action are features of the situation, not aspects of the agent. In contrast, the theological “virtues” emphasized by Niebuhr focus their primary attention on the subject, to their relationship to their environment and to the determining features or agents in that environment. The self-referential awareness inherent in the dispositions is the device that cultivates irony, as subjects so constituted see themselves within a frame, being acted upon, rather than as a god, acting upon that frame. To learn irony, then, is to learn in this way to be a creature – not just a natural animal, but a being playing a role in a larger whole where there is an author, but the author is simply not me, but rather a commanding intelligence transcending and overseeing the immanent natural powers which we perceive. The fundamental question here to be asked, then, is not: how do I become what I am designed to become? but rather how do I find my “role” in the drama that is being enacted in this life?23 Some may find in that the roots of Niebuhr’s own virtue theory. I allow that it is how a language of “virtue” can find its way into Niebuhr’s idiom. But that is quite some distance from enrolling him in the club of virtue theorists who would have Aristotle as their leader. Niebuhr’s account of the self shares many words and not a few concerns with virtue theories; but its originary impulses, and fundamental apprehension of the world, seems to me distinct enough to not be countable among its conquests.

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 29

Conclusion The initial invitation to write this chapter came in the form of a letter, and the letter proposed that “reading Niebuhr in the context of virtue ethics is an extremely profitable undertaking.” I agree with this, but perhaps not in the way that the authors intended. Niebuhr did not use a language of virtue, and while he used the word “virtue,” he never seems to have considered taking it very seriously as a functional category in his thought. And, as I hope is clear to readers by now, I think he was wise not to spend any time considering it. It would ill-fit his sense of the complex tragedy of human life in general and public life in particular; it would not comport well with his vision of the human as caught by God’s grace as an act of extraneous and alwayssurprising mercy; and it would run against his larger vision of the human as caught amidst the ironies of history and their own existence in this dispensation, where their virtue lies mostly in their constant pleading for forgiveness. This suggests something that is important to keep in mind, and that our field as a whole has seemed to forget, in our eagerness to embrace virtue theory. Most basically, virtue theory is a deeply conservative language. It presumes the basic stability and reliability of the moral order in its cognitive and affectional dimensions, and a fundamental continuity between different levels of the moral universe. It is also, in this way, very much a parochial moral language, a language of the parish, of the village, not of the cosmos. In both ways it is, at its heart, a radically non-revolutionary moral language. But Christian ethics, arguably even more than most other religious traditions (due not least to its apocalyptic strands), is or of right ought to be at heart revolutionary – radically transformative, calling its listeners to a kind of life they have barely begun to imagine could be real, a life that is true life, not a life lived on the outside of creation’s skin, but life lived inside its veins, drenched in its living blood. It seems to me that virtue theory fundamentally stands in real tension with any vision like this – a vision of a cosmos dynamically governed by a living and surprising God, whose actions may be at least superficially inscrutable, not infrequently more disruptive than restitutive, and definitely unpredictable. Niebuhr, like many Christian thinkers, had very little elective affinity for virtue’s presuppositions. Despite virtue theory’s many insights, it remains unclear, at least to me, why other Christian ethicists should want to think otherwise.

Notes 1 See Jennifer Welchman, “The Fall and Rise of Aristotelian Ethics in AngloAmerican Moral Philosophy: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Jon Miller (New York: Cambridge University, 2012), 262–88. I must acknowledge the importance of several decades’ conversation with my friend and UVA colleague Talbot Brewer; see especially his The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009). 2 Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

30  Charles Mathewes More generally, see David Bourget and David J. Chalmers, “What Do Philosophers Believe?” Philosophical Studies, 170:3 (2014): 465–500. 3 For an example of such a project, see Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). For a critique of Nussbaum’s “capabilities” project as still caught in a parochial mindset despite its disavowals of such, see S. Charusheela, “Social Analysis and the Capabilities Approach: A Limit to Martha Nussbaum’s Universalist Ethics,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33:6 (November 2009): 1135–52. For critiques of Nussbaum’s virtue theory as unable to accommodate the kind of radical critique she sometimes says she seeks to offer – especially in her writings on tragedy – see Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Jonathan Lear, “Testing the Limits: The Place of Tragedy in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Aristotle and Moral Realism, ed. R. Heinamann (London: University College Press, 1995), 61–84. I think that the best attempt at bringing together the “virtue approach” and the “critique approach” – and one of the few from the Anglophone side of ethical reflection – is Sabina Lovibond’s Realism and Imagination in Ethics (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), which attempts to fuse a Wittgensteinian deflationary approach about the moral life with a Foucauldian genealogical one, but how exactly her approach is a “virtue theory” is open to debate. It is better described, I think, as a “sensibility theory,” a fairly distinct ethical position in anglophone philosophical ethics. Other reflections on this project include Bernard Williams, “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology,” in Making Sense of Humanity: And Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65–78; Amy Allen, “Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered,” Philosophical Forum, 40:1 (Spring 2009): 1–28. 4 “Ramsey was a bourgeois thinker, i.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state – or at least he did not like doing so – but on how this state might reasonable be organized. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one partly disquieted him and partly bored him. He wanted to get down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations – of this state. This was what he was good at and what really interested him; whereas real philosophical reflection disquieted him until he put its result (if it had one) on one side as trivial.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 17. 5 al-Ghazâlî, The Deliverance from Error, trans. R.J. McCarthy S.J. (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2000). 6 Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 9. See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951); Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London: Secker and Warburg, 1953); Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: Orion Press, 1958). 7 A separate but not entirely unrelated point is the problem of the so-called fundamental attribution error often employed (I think philosophically naively) in empirical psychology to discredit any account of durable character. This is a large topic and, so far as I can tell, one entirely unknown in religious ethics and Christian ethics; for some useful pieces on this, see Candace Upton, “The Empirical Argument Against Virtue,” Journal of Ethics 20 (2016): 335–71 and the essays collected in the double issue of Journal of Ethics, 13:2–3 (September 2009). 8 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), would demonstrate my point just as well.

The ironies of virtue and virtue of irony 31 9 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 53. 10 Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1964); Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 11 For example: we often say things like “Chinese thought had a virtue theory just as sophisticated as any Aristotelean account,” but what we mean is that different idioms are broadly comparable in some interestingly salient ways. We do not mean to say, for instance, that ren – a Chinese term that is sometimes attempted to be passed off to us untroublingly, as having a semantic range that encompasses “humanity,” “humaneness,” “goodness,” “benevolence,” and “love” (the range and diversity of terms itself suggesting how distant this concept is from ones more familiar to native English speakers) – we do not mean to say, I say again, that ren is somehow the same thing as any of these; it merely, as it were, gestures in their direction. It is more right – though of course much less illuminating, indeed almost (and I think appropriately) apophatic – to say that the gestures that ren makes are gestures akin to those made by the terms “humanity,” “humaneness,” “goodness,” “benevolence,” and “love” in English. Whether all these terms are picking out some relatively distinct segment of human reality, and whether they are all picking out the same segment, are further questions. 12 The first theme is visible as early as de moribus, but the latter really comes into its own in Augustine’s critique of virtus in Book 5 of City of God, and in later reflections in that work on this; consider virtues as forma amor, to which we adhere in his Ep. 155.12–13. The second is scattered through his work but most powerfully visible in City of God 19 and 20, regarding the moral obscurity of moral reward and punishment in this world; see City of God 19.27. “In this life justice consists more in the forgiveness of sins than the perfection of virtue.” These worries about a too-straightforward appropriation of virtue language in the past few decades’ redeployment of Augustine’s thought in Christian ethics and religious ethics go back to one of the earliest moments of that redeployment, namely, James Wetzel’s groundbreaking Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 13 For an example of one recent Protestant (especially Reformed) attempt to fuse with scholastic thought, see Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen, Aquinas Among the Protestants (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018). For a rival view, one with which I have some real sympathies, see Gerald McKinney’s “Karl Barth and the Plight of Protestant Ethics,” in The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist, ed. Brian Brock and Michael Mawson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2016), 17–37. 14 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2017), tries to develop Stoic theories of moral dispositions and habits as virtue talk for Protestants. The question of whether virtue theory can be readily bendable in Stoic directions is discussed a little later in this chapter. 15 The database I used was hastily and generously constructed as a collection of PDFs by Kevin Carnahan and Christopher Dowdy after a lamentation I posted on Facebook in the summer of 2017. I could not have done this without them, or my research assistant Gabrielle Boissoneau who compiled the overall data for me. 16 He seems to have shared the suspicions of his brother H. Richard Niebuhr regarding the idea of “man the maker,” as the latter unfolded those suspicions in The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). I come back to this later. 17 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 46.

32  Charles Mathewes 18 Ibid., 52. See also: “final wisdom of life requires, not an annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.” Ibid., 62–63. 19 Ibid., 156. 20 Ibid., xxiii–iv. For a suggestive post-Kierkegaardian version and expansion of parallel ideas, see Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 21 Niebuhr, Irony, 63. 22 Ibid., 174. 23 Echoes of Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self are not accidental.

2 Hope, virtue, and politics in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works Robin W. Lovin

Introduction Embedded in The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr offers this summary of three key Christian ideas: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.1 In the chapter where these aphorisms appear, they are a counter to the American “pursuit of happiness,” with its conviction that everything we ­ might reasonably desire is at our disposal. Niebuhr quickly moves on to a critique of the drive for mastery that characterizes liberal idealism as much as its Marxist and Fascist ideological rivals. The brief evocation of hope, faith, and love is memorable, even inspiring, but taken by itself, the paragraph gives little hint of how important these theological virtues are to his work as a whole. Partly, this reflects the dialectical method in Niebuhr’s work. He never claimed to be a systematic theologian, and as Scott Paeth and Mark Douglas point out, his studies of faith and love sometimes fail to make his theological presuppositions explicit2 and sometimes, perhaps, lack an adequate theologian foundation.3 But the light theological touch in The Irony of American History may also be deliberate on Niebuhr’s part. In his works from the 1950s, he does not delay the secular reader with the details of doctrine or historic theological debates. He writes instead in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. What matters is that his readers grasp the judgment that falls on them, and on him as well. “The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.”4 Anything that conveys a claim of privileged moral status, special access to

34  Robin W. Lovin religious truth, or a suggestion that the writer knows something the reader could not be expected to understand just gets in the way of the message. So it falls to us to discern the theological position behind Niebuhr’s aphorisms in order to see the deep themes that run through all his work. Those themes become clearer when we follow his dialectical method, which begins with a criticism of prevailing attitudes and values and then reconstructs a more realistic alternative, drawing on biblical sources. Often, this dialectic emerges in the trajectory of Niebuhr’s own work. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, he made his mark on American social thought by demolishing both the pious confidence that love could transform the social order and the liberal faith in progress based on reason and technology.5 But a dialectical turn from criticism to reconstruction began almost immediately, as questions from theologians obliged him to reconsider the dominant role of Marxist materialism in his critique. In response, Niebuhr moved to provide a biblical account of moral meaning that reasserts the importance of grace, as well as judgment, in the search for social justice. This reconstruction of Christian ethics around prophetic themes is set out in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, and it is also important in Reflections on the End of an Era.6 But we see the turning point most clearly in the transition from the first to the second volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man. In the first volume, based on Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures in the spring of 1939, the Christian view of human nature exposes the excesses of pride and destroys all claims to ultimate meaning or final judgment within history.7 The overall effect of this Christian critique is at least as comprehensive as the social criticism in Moral Man and Immoral Society, and it cuts even deeper, since it is human nature itself that is flawed, and not just human society.8 None of our truths is completely true, and none of our achievements is permanent. We commit our worst sins in the course of trying to deny this. The second volume, based on lectures that began in October, nevertheless affirms possibilities that lie beyond pride, failure, and self-deception. There is a human destiny that transcends the failures of every scheme and system and survives even the catastrophes that result from well-intentioned efforts to make limited goods perfect and permanent. Understanding human nature need not lead to cynicism or despair. Beyond Marx and Machiavelli, there is Augustine.9 Some interpreters relate this encouraging message to the beginning of the Second World War between the first and second series of lectures. Bombs were falling, sometimes as Niebuhr spoke, and the audience needed at least to hear that all was not lost.10 As a lecturer, Niebuhr was certainly responsive to the moods of his audience, but the turn here is not just rhetorical. His elaboration of the Christian view of human destiny predates his Gifford Lectures and, indeed, runs parallel to the criticism of liberal optimism in his occasional writings.11 What appears already in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics receives a full statement in Nature and Destiny: the fulfillment of history will not be found within it. The human destiny announced by the Hebrew prophets, the

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 35 teaching of Jesus, and the theology of Augustine is not just another version of the fulfillments preached by social reformers, pious moral crusaders, and Marxist economists. History will not be brought to completion by human pride, and forgiveness for the evils wrought by that pride must enter into history from beyond it, with a word of judgment that precedes the word of grace. That is the message of prophetic Messianism, incorporated into Augustine’s great Catholic synthesis and never quite grasped by apocalyptic, revolutionary, or utopian models, which have to see results now.

The theological virtues and Niebuhr’s theology of history The succinct, memorable, and readily accessible statement that we are saved by hope, faith, love, and forgiveness thus has complex theological origins. Most readers of The Irony of American History would have recognized the familiar trio of faith, hope, and love, slightly reordered in Niebuhr’s presentation from their original appearance in I Corinthians 13:13. Probably only those few familiar with the details of Roman Catholic moral theology would have thought of these three as the theological virtues. (And what would a good Catholic be doing reading a Protestant theologian in 1952?) Yet it is precisely at the turning point between the two volumes of Nature and Destiny that Niebuhr enters into unusually detailed treatment of the virtues of faith, hope, and love, drawing on the important distinction made by Catholic moral theology between these three “theological” virtues and other “moral” or “natural” virtues, such as courage, temperance, prudence, or justice.12 This systematic exposition is located just here, Niebuhr suggests, because it informs our questions about whether history ends only in frustration of human nature’s excessive ambitions or has a destiny that includes human fulfillment.13 Somewhat surprisingly, his structuring of the questions draws on a Thomist account of virtue in which grace completes nature, rather than replacing it. Niebuhr is normally resistant to the fine distinctions of Scholastic theology, and even here he interjects a warning against a “sharp and absolute distinction” between moral and theological virtues.14 But the way in which faith, hope, and love perfect and transform the human capacity for courage, justice, and other virtues provides him with an analogy for the way that faith, hope, and love point to the fulfillment, rather than the negation, of human history.15 Taking hope seriously as a theological virtue turns out to be crucial for understanding how human nature and human destiny are related. Niebuhr’s turn to the theological virtues for this purpose is all the more interesting because virtue did not occupy a prominent place in Protestant ethics at the time. As Kevin Carnahan has pointed out, the theoretical question that preoccupied those who had to think about hard choices was the contest between rules and consequences, whether conformity to duty or realization of good should be the measure of our actions.16 Niebuhr had little interest in such abstractions, and while he intuitively gravitated toward

36  Robin W. Lovin a richer language of moral evaluation that included intentions and dispositions, as well as goals and duties, he did not often gather the various attitudes he wanted to commend under the general term “virtue.” In fact, he uses “virtue” and “virtuous” most often to indicate a self-asserted righteousness that he calls into question, as in the addendum immediately attached to the statement that we must be saved by love: “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”17 Here, love is not a virtue that is commended to us. It is something which we need from others, and finally from God, because our own claims to virtue are always exaggerated and our accomplishments less durable than we suppose. That nicely summarizes the critical task that dominates his account of human nature in the first volume of Nature and Destiny. It is distinctive to human nature that it is composed both of nature and spirit. We are limited to a finite, physical life, and yet we are capable of an “indeterminate transcendence” of these limitations. As a result, we always want more of life than we can obtain from it. And always – “inevitably but not necessarily,” as Niebuhr puts it – we claim for ourselves and from others more than we deserve. To give purpose to our lives and meaning to our collective history is not in our hands, no matter how often we tell ourselves how good we are and how much we have accomplished.18 So what could ideas about virtue contribute to this “most vexing” of human problems, the problem that we ourselves are?19 For Niebuhr, it seems that the account of virtue developed in Christian tradition, and especially in Catholic moral theology, provides the most realistic statement of the relationship between human sin and human possibility. At the same time it offers a practical understanding of the moral life that does not presume the perfectibility of human lives or human institutions. The aspirations that transcend our limited circumstances can be fulfilled only in a destiny that lies beyond history and thus beyond human achievement. The basic problem, which Niebuhr delineates in sharp contrasts, is that the account of sin that is central to the Christian understanding of human nature seems to preclude any meaningful human destiny. Every facet of the Christian revelation, whether of the relation of God to history, or of the relation of man to the eternal, points to the impossibility of man fulfilling the true meaning of his life and reveals sin to be primarily derived from his abortive efforts to do so.20 Yet the church also seems to contradict this, both in its performance and its proclamation. The church does things that are intended to make a difference in history, and it proclaims that fulfillment of life is available through Jesus Christ. The Christian gospel nonetheless enters the world with the proclamation that in Christ both “wisdom” and “power” are available to man;

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 37 which is to say that not only has the true meaning of life been disclosed but also that resources have been made available to fulfill that meaning.21 In the Protestant tradition that Niebuhr usually presents so fluently and intuitively, the resolution of this tension is usually found in an appeal to grace alone. Nothing can prepare us for God’s presence in our lives except the experience itself. Karl Barth radicalized this theology of grace with his insistence that there is no “point of contact” between human nature and the knowledge of God, and he made this a criterion for Protestant theology in the crisis years of the 1930s.22 Niebuhr resisted this “radical Protestantism” from the beginning.23 If there is no point where human nature seeks God’s grace, Niebuhr argues, we cannot account for the human aspirations for the moral meaning that grace supplies. The whole conception of life revealed in the Cross of Christian faith is not a pure negation of, or irrelevance toward, the moral ideas of “natural man.” While the final heights of the love ideal condemn as well as fulfill the moral canons of common sense, the ideal is involved in every moral aspiration and achievement. It is the genius and task of prophetic religion to insist on the organic relation between historic human existence and that which is both the ground and the fulfilment of this existence, the transcendent.24 Even if the search for meaning inevitably falls short in its quest for final answers and ultimate meanings, it is a part of human nature, and its partial and incomplete achievements are nonetheless real in their context. Thus Niebuhr rejects formulations of original sin that deny fallen humanity any knowledge of the good they have lost. “Faith in Christ could find no lodging place in the soul, were it not uneasy about the contrast between its true and its present state.”25 Nor are all moral efforts to conform our lives to the true meaning of life destined to make our last state worse than the first.26 We are a problem to ourselves precisely because no simple account of our moral possibilities can be adequate to the reality. Every statement we make, positive or negative, about our “stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analyzed.”27 Niebuhr’s search for a relatively more adequate formulation regarding human virtue begins by mapping his distinction between the person as creature and the person as spirit onto the distinction between the moral and theological virtues.28 In the search for a good life that all human beings share, everyone has abilities to determine what is worth pursuing and to order community more or less successfully. We can identify the habits of mind and the developed propensities for certain kinds of choices that lead toward those ends. With some necessary adjustments to culture and conditions, the virtues of courage, prudence, moderation in our own habits, and justice in our dealings with others are generally recognized in human society, and

38  Robin W. Lovin lives ordered by them are regarded as better lives than those that miss these targets by way of excess or defect.29 Given a life that offers choices to make and some leisure to reflect on the choices, people will discover in experience the virtues that make up a good life. But the connections here are not as certain as mathematics, or even as the order of the natural world. Good lives can be undone by bad luck. Anxiety can lead to miscalculations. Justice can be overruled by power and ambition. Precisely because the human person combines the realities of nature and spirit, human experience – even when it goes unusually well – is never enough to validate the pursuit of virtue in all circumstances. Virtue may generally lead to happiness. But what of those occasions when you can see that acting virtuously will lead to failure, criticism, even persecution and death? Do you adopt the cynical course of doing whatever will get you out of the situation? Do you seize the situation by an act of will and set yourself beyond good and evil, vice and virtue? Or do you persist in virtue in the expectation that those choices remain meaningful, even when they do not lead to the results you were seeking.

Hope as a theological virtue For Niebuhr, those questions take us to the center of the vexing problem that we pose to ourselves. Nothing that is within the reach of our human experience can fully resolve the anxiety we feel when we confront our own contingency. We can wish for luck and try our hardest, but the results remain uncertain. We can try to construct meaning within history by devoting ourselves to a cause, or a leader, or an idea that is larger than ourselves. Or we can surrender to the flow of events and try to convince ourselves that this surrender is itself the meaning of life. But the prideful and passive strategies that human nature devises always fail to provide the meaningful history for which the human spirit longs.30 Nevertheless, the longing persists. We deny our humanity if we abandon hope, refuse forgiveness for our own and others’ failures, or lose faith in a meaningful history. Faith, hope, and love are requirements of our human nature. But these requirements of human nature are not validated in ordinary experience in the way that the requirements of moral virtues are validated. We learn in experience that prudence, courage, temperance, and justice generally guide us to our goals better than recklessness, timidity, excess, and exploitation. That is just the kind of world we live in. But confirmation of a meaningful history and a loving God is not available in the same way, and we cannot convince ourselves that history has meaning in the same way that we can learn to be prudent and fair in the choices we make. Faith, hope, and love, Niebuhr suggests, appear to us as laws until grace provides what we need to fulfill them.31 Here again, an analogy to the moral virtues helps to explain how grace provides a conviction of the “meaningful existence” that makes the moral

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 39 life possible.32 We know from ordinary moral experience that virtues require both “power” and “wisdom.” That is, we cannot be courageous, or generous, or just without the power to discipline our will actually to make the choices that virtue requires. This habitual disposition to make certain kinds of choices, even when they are difficult or the results are uncertain, is what we usually focus on when talking about virtues. But moral virtue also requires a kind of practical wisdom about the world, so that we understand what the results of our choices will be in the real conditions under which we live.33 In the same way, faith, hope, and love are not just a matter of will power. They require an understanding that life is meaningful beyond its disappointments and failures, and grace must supply that wisdom as well as the power to act on it. The invasion of the self from beyond the self is therefore an invasion of both “wisdom” and “power,” of both “truth” and “grace.” The relation of insight to will, of wisdom to power in this experience is too intricate to be subject to precise analysis.34 Both the distinction that the Catholic tradition has made between moral and theological virtues and the analogy that Niebuhr has drawn between them tell us something important about the moral life. A settled disposition to think clearly about the goals of our action and to make choices in accordance with those goals is central to ethics, and this is what we ordinarily mean by moral virtue. But virtue will not likely be sustained without a similarly settled confidence that these virtuous actions are ultimately worthwhile and not merely concessions to expedience or social expectations. To sustain the moral life, we need both to know that we live in a moral universe and to make good choices about the problems that face us at the moment. But we usually cannot attend to both of those concerns at the same time. The distinction between moral and theological virtues is one way that Christian ethics has acknowledged and explained the two different kinds of disposition that together make the moral life possible. At the same time, Niebuhr warns against theological accounts that distinguish the two kinds of virtue too sharply. He draws the lines between grace and nature and deploys the distinction between moral and theological virtues primarily as analytic tools to show that both our aspiration for ultimate meaning and our inability to supply it for ourselves are part of the moral life. What all virtues, whether moral or theological, have in common is the combination of power and wisdom. That is, they both enable us to act and tell us something about the world. The ordinary practical wisdom of the moral virtues rests on a solid foundation of experience of how the world works. Prudent, courageous, or just choices are not merely acts of will. They involve judgments about human goods and deliberation about possible means to those ends, and the moral virtues incorporate that wisdom into the habits of choice they sustain. In an analogous way, faith, hope, and love

40  Robin W. Lovin give power to act by transforming human will, and they impart wisdom that enables us to see meaning in our moral action, quite apart from its result. Niebuhr thus rejects as contrary both to Christian tradition and moral experience what he calls the “radical Protestant” insistence that there is no “point of contact” between God’s grace and the human search for meaning. This notorious point of contention would separate Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth for the rest of their theological careers. Nevertheless, the difference this makes in Christian moral experience can be overstated. While Barth insists that there can be no “point of contact” from the human side with God’s self-revelation, he allows in his pastoral theology that the Holy Spirit forms a point of contact in the human, around which there is formed an attitude that learns and develops and becomes a part of the experience of those who hear the Word of God.35 Whatever the theological problems involved, the completion of nature by grace and the fulfillment of moral aspiration by both wisdom and power seem to be part of the Christian experience. Niebuhr and Barth converge on this point in practice, despite their theological differences, and in this they join a long tradition that both distinguishes and relates the moral and theological virtues. Niebuhr might well regard this as confirmation of his point that some distinctions made by theologians analyze relations that in experience are “too intricate to be subject to precise analysis.” Niebuhr’s brief remarks in The Irony of American History about hope, faith, love, and forgiveness thus provide a starting point for Christian ethics that is deeply embedded in the history of Christian thought and in a theory of virtue. With this outline of the history and the theory in mind, we can attempt a Niebuhrian restatement of the virtue of hope.

Hope Hope might seem an unlikely starting point for a twentieth-century theology of virtue. Niebuhr, as we have noted, begins his career with a negative dialectic that systematically rejects the main movements and systems that were promising historical fulfillment to a generation already unnerved by the First World War and global economic instability. He warned that the liberal program of social transformation could not withstand a Marxist critique of its economic underpinnings, and then he added that the triumph of the proletariat would likely result in its own form of oppression.36 Hope cannot s­ urvive within the limits of human experience alone, but as we have just noted, neither can it maintain itself in theological isolation from that experience. The twenty years that elapsed between Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History made Niebuhr a leading public intellectual in part because those decades provided textbook illustrations of the dynamics he set out in the first volume of Nature and Destiny: vulnerability to the forces of history leads to the creation of systems that promise amazing transformations; pride makes enemies whose very existence becomes an

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 41 explanation for the failure of the promises; and then the system collapses under the weight of external resistance, internal failures, and impossible expectations. Repeat. Niebuhr offered a historically grounded alternative to this cycle in his “vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense.”37 The Western democracies can maintain more realistic and limited expectations for themselves because they have absorbed the prophetic tradition of selfcriticism and do not need to promise the fulfillment of history within their own history. After the Second World War, he was alert to the danger that American democracy might remake itself into an ideology comparable to the Stalinism of its Soviet rival, with nuclear destruction as the likely outcome. But The Irony of American History is a testimony to the resilience of American democracy, in spite of the failures and incongruities in its past. An ironic sense of humor allows Americans – some of them at least – to accept their shortcomings without having to find someone to blame for them. Still, the ability to laugh at ourselves is not quite the same thing as having a meaningful history. Nor does ironic laughter address the experiences of those Americans whose history has been, in fact, tragic. If The Irony of American History remains an important guide to global politics in the twenty-first century, as Andrew Bacevich holds it to be,38 that is at least in part because Niebuhr leads his readers beyond secular irony toward the theological virtue of hope constructed in the second volume of Nature and Destiny. We can see how this works in some detail by reconstructing the three forms of hope that are in dialectical tension in Niebuhr’s work: hope as consciousness, hope as law, and hope as virtue. Hope enters human experience as consciousness of possibilities. What makes us human is that at some point, both as individuals and as a species, we begin to think about a reality that lies beyond individual memory and extends beyond immediate consequences. For Niebuhr, this is an aspect of human nature that Christian thought calls “the image of God,” with its Augustinian combination of reason, memory, and imagination.39 This consciousness marks the beginning of ideas of a meaningful history that extends beyond an individual’s lifetime and thus anticipates the prophetic Messianism on which the Christian understanding of human destiny is built.40 Marilynne Robinson has recently summarized what it means to bear the image of God in these terms: We are a part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things – justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.41 For many people throughout history this consciousness of possibilities, the awareness that things could be otherwise, has been their basic form of

42  Robin W. Lovin human dignity. They understand themselves to be more than their circumstances or their oppressors allow them to be. Hope is thus the starting point for liberation, and that hope has been central in recent decades to Christian theologies that contrast it to futures built on armed force, economic power, or technological mastery.42 Niebuhr’s account of human nature includes this hope for liberation, but he does not give it much attention. He is more focused on the experience of some modern people who seek to master hope and bring it back into the realm of immediate, individual experience. For those who are used to control, possibilities create anxiety, and anxiety gives rise to pride, and pride insists that the end of history and the fulfillment of human destiny is at hand in the transformation of society by some new ideology. Many of the world’s problems from 1932 to 1952 were the result of this reduction of hope to ideology, and much of Niebuhr’s writing during those two decades was a response to it. Pride, however, is not the only response to anxiety. There are also those who choose the cynical pursuit of self-interest or withdraw into private despair. One response to the realization that “nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime” is precisely to do what satisfies purely personal ambitions, even if it is worthless over the long run. Passive hedonists, cynical careerists, and oligarchs who build personal financial empires out of the wreckage of communist utopias are more familiar figures in our time than the ideologues who posed the problems for Niebuhr. It may even be that what Niebuhr called “sensuality” is the characteristic form of sin today, rather than pride.43 Niebuhr’s analysis is capacious enough to encompass both possibilities. In either case, the constriction of hope within the limits of ideology or desire means that hope enters modern life as law.44 Just as in classical moral theology justitia originalis gives rise to a natural law that limits human choices in a fallen world, Niebuhr suggests that justitia originalis gives rise to a hope that cannot be entirely destroyed by pride, cynicism, or sensuality. A meaningful history that is measured by something more than our achievements and failures is something we must suppose in order to make sense of our lives. Hope is thus the law by which we formulate our obligations to those who share history with us, even when we do not feel any connection to them. It also reminds us that those obligations are grounded in human nature and human dignity, rather than in religious or political orthodoxy. Hope as law enables Niebuhrian realists to ally themselves with those who make a social commitment to justice, rather than withdrawing into a community of faith obsessed with protecting the purity of its theology from worldly influences. There is, however, a further possibility that takes us beyond hope as law. The limits of the struggle for justice within history make an opening for hope as a virtue. Our legal justice fails to provide an authentic representation of divine justice, but the ironic awareness of our own failures and

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 43 our need for forgiveness may become for us the image of God’s laughter, rather than God’s wrath.45 When we reach the limits of our abilities and lose hope in our own laws, there remains the possibility of hope as “the invasion of the self from beyond the self.” Grace leads to transformations of the self that look very much like virtues in the moral life. Hope becomes a habit, reflected in choices that we make without the need to think our way to them in every case. As Niebuhr points out, that is a matter both of power – the strength of will that rejects the temptations of cynicism and self-deception – and of wisdom – a knowledge of how the world works that cannot be reduced to a set of facts, but nonetheless directs action into channels that accomplish things that last beyond our lifetime and run beyond, if not against, our intentions. In this kind of virtue, there is irony, for what we do is never quite as virtuous as we think it is. There is also this paradox: when we are aware that our actions are part of a meaningful history that exceeds our understanding, we are just at that point free to pay attention to the immediate context and the real choices that are before us. It is because we are human beings and not God that we are responsible for making choices between greater and lesser evils, even when our Christian faith, illuminating the human scene, makes it quite apparent that there is no pure good in history; and probably no pure evil either. The fate of civilizations may depend on these choices between systems of which some are more, others less, just.46

Faith, hope, and love Hope thus appears closely connected to the moral virtues of courage and prudence that enable us to make wise choices between multiple possibilities, all of which are limited in some way and none of which can be completely known. Precisely because this is the condition of all human life, we would expect that those with sufficient experience, intelligence, and awareness of their own limitations would arrive at moral judgments similar to those informed by the Christian virtue of hope. In both cases, they will accept the responsibility for making the choices. They will anticipate the ironic reversals and unintended consequences that ensue, and they will build into the structures of political and social decision-making mechanisms that permit reconsideration of choices in light of actual outcomes. They will reject ideologies that subsume responsibility for particular choices in a single, comprehensive system, and they will not justify the evils that result from proximate decisions by referring them to ultimate ends. That, in broad outline, is a political ethics on which morally virtuous people from many different cultures and convictions could agree, and one which has stood the test of a century in which it was challenged by many different systems and schemes that claimed to triumph over the ironies of history.

44  Robin W. Lovin Niebuhr is convinced that this hope depends in the end on prophetic faith in a judgment beyond history, in a human destiny that cannot be lost to us by our defeats or denied to us by our own failures. Without this transcendent source of meaning, we inevitably lose confidence that there is a meaning to the struggle, and we resort to some finite good and set it up as ultimate. The future, as Niebuhr put it, “is a realm where infinite possibilities are realized and which must be a realm of terror if it is not under the providence of God.”47 Like Scott Paeth’s chapter on faith in this volume, this study of hope must conclude with a reminder of the Christian tradition of unity of the virtues.48 To have one disposes a person to acquire the others. To lack any of them risks the loss of all. This seems to be particularly true of the theological virtues. Hope detached from faith becomes either an anxious quest for immortality through one’s own achievements or an easy confidence in historical progress that will not survive the next political revolution, natural disaster, or economic depression. Faith and hope are thus united in a moral universe that extends beyond a single lifetime and makes sense of things in a way that is not dependent on success in the immediate historical context. Faith and hope are also united with love, which likewise must transform the self from beyond itself, lest the anxiety which is the inevitable accompaniment of human nature defeat every attempt to accomplish something greater than the satisfaction of our own needs, however much hope and faith we may seem to possess. Faith, hope, and love are thus unified as theological virtues. The transformative relationship with a source of meaning beyond ourselves brings into being characteristics that we could not acquire or sustain on our own, and these virtues in turn shape our actions and bring to completion the moral virtues we may have acquired with good training, steady habits, sufficient resources, and a little luck. But love is more than a virtue that relates us to the source of ultimate meaning. Love is itself that source. The ultimate confidence in the meaningfulness of life, therefore, rests upon a faith in the final unity, which transcends the world’s chaos as certainly as it is basic to the world’s order. The unity of God is not static, but potent and creative. God is, therefore, love.49 This theological statement about the nature of God at the beginning of Niebuhr’s first exposition of the ethics of Jesus is uncharacteristically direct for one who always hesitated to call himself a theologian. Niebuhr retreats almost at once from the nature of God into a further exposition of the ethical implications of love. As Mark Douglas reminds us in his chapter in this volume, this leaves Niebuhr open to complaints that his theology is incomplete or inadequate, and in this context to charges that precisely at this point, an underdeveloped Christology fails to account for the transformation of the self by love that Niebuhr’s ethics requires.50

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 45 However, we should perhaps expect that of a thinker who stressed the fragmentary and incomplete character of every system of thought and warned against pressing concepts into service beyond the loads they were meant to bear. Niebuhr almost always develops his ideas by setting them in conversation with a different way of thinking, rather than by trying to make a single, comprehensive statement that encompasses both of them. He is reliant on others to clarify his thought, and particularly reliant on those with whom he most sharply disagrees. Perhaps that is itself a virtue that expresses the truth that “nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.” If his interlocutors find Niebuhr’s dialectical use of their work a less than adequate statement of their positions, we can only add that the final form of love is forgiveness.

Notes 1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 63. 2 Scott Paeth, “Reinhold Niebuhr: Faith in and Beyond History,” at note 1. 3 Mark Douglas, “The Paradoxes of Virtue; Agape in the Work of Reinhold Niebuhr,” at note 36. 4 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 110. 5 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013); Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934). Jeremy Sabella has called attention to the first appearance of many of the ideas in An Interpretation in the now overlooked Reflections. See An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 37–42. 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964). 8 Niebuhr remarked ruefully in later years that the title of his earlier book should have been “The Not So Moral Man in His Less Moral Communities.” See Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–49. 9 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964). 10 Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 191. 11 See Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956). Also Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937). 12 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:269–76. 13 Ibid., 1:298. 14 Ibid., 1:280–81. 15 Paeth, “Reinhold Niebuhr: Faith in and Beyond History,” at note 37. 16 See Kevin Carnahan, “The Virtue of Reinhold Niebuhr,” at note 13. The sharply defined choice between rules or results, set out in “situation ethics” came somewhat after Niebuhr’s time of greatest productivity, and as Carnahan points out, he considered that he was too ill to enter into the fray himself. But the problem began to take shape as early as the 1930s, and arguably it was the

46  Robin W. Lovin hard choices of war and politics that forced the question on both philosophers and theologians. See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). 17 Niebuhr, Irony, 63. 18 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:251–60. 19 Ibid., 1:1. 20 Ibid., 2:98. 21 Ibid. 22 Karl Barth, “No! An Answer to Emil Brunner,” in Natural Theology, ed. John Baillie (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 120. 23 Niebuhr rejects this “radical Protestantism” just at the point where he begins to set up his own account of relationship between human nature and human destiny. See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:269. 24 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 104–5. 25 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:266. 26 Cf. Matthew 12:43–45. 27 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:1. 28 Ibid., 1:269–76. 29 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30. I borrow Aristotle’s summary description of the virtues to suggest that there are ideas about virtue that are generally shared in Western thought, and quite possibly beyond. 30 Niebuhr identifies “pride” and “sensuality” as the basic forms of sin to which human nature is susceptible. See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:178–79. 31 Ibid., 1:278–79. 32 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 105. 33 Again, Aristotle’s account of how virtue involves both habituation and practical wisdom is basic to subsequent Western ideas of virtue. See Nicomachean Ethics, 23–25, 196. 34 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:100. 35 Richard E. Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 63. 36 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 156–57. 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). 38 See his “Introduction” to Irony, xix–xx. 39 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:12–17. 40 Ibid., 2:15–126. 41 Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), 231. 42 It is important that this fundamental form of hope as consciousness be related to a source that transcends reason, history, and experience. Otherwise, as Miguel De La Torre has pointed out, hope itself can be a tool of oppression, binding those on the margins of society to false promises made by those who are, in fact, limiting their possibilities. See Embracing Hopelessness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). 43 Cf. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:228–40. I have made this point about contemporary sensuality at greater length in Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143–57. 44 See above at note 32. 45 Psalm 2. See Niebuhr, Irony, 63. 46 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Theology and Political Thought in the Western World,” in Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald Stone (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 56.

Hope, virtue, and politics in Niebuhr’s work 47 47 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:271. 48 Paeth, “Reinhold Niebuhr on Faith,” at note 44. On the unity of the virtues, see, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I–II, Q. 65, a. 3. 49 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 38. 50 See Mark Douglas, “Agape as a Virtue in Niebuhr’s Thought,” at note 38.

3 Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist Martha ter Kuile

The center of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theological insight is that the situation of humanity is irreducibly ambiguous. Niebuhr observed, relentlessly, that it is the human condition to live at once in a contingent and an ultimate reality. The human being is ambiguously both bound and free, both child of nature and spirit standing outside of nature, both great and vulnerable.1 It is the difficulty of untangling our greatness and our vulnerability that puts us most at risk.2 He argues that it is precisely when we confuse what is contingent with what is ultimate that we go wrong. When we mis-identify our provisional and limited efforts at progress as bearing transcendent or eternal significance, human society opens itself to severe distortion. The ambiguity of the human condition gives special poignancy to the ageold question, how should we live? In practical terms, what does it mean for a human being to live well, recognizing both our possibilities and our limits? What does it mean to take to heart the overwhelming needs of our brothers and sisters, given the inadequacies of our response, and the incompleteness of our insight? How, in particular, does the person dedicated to working for social and political justice remain committed in the face of setbacks, discouragement, and the overwhelming nature of the challenges? How can one persevere, without giving in either to optimistic delusions or to pessimistic cynicism? The intuition which this paper explores is that the virtues are key to answering these questions. Recognizing that Niebuhr did not formulate a sustained reflection on virtue ethics, and was arguably a critic of ‘virtue’ as he conceived it, the essay proposes that the development of a Niebuhrian Christian Realist virtue ethics is both possible and valid. In order to avoid the pitfalls of conservatism, parochialism, and perfectionism that appear in many virtue ethics traditions, I introduce Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of human fragility and Aristotelian virtue. By placing Martha Nussbaum in dialogue with Niebuhr, I suggest that we can construct an account of a dialectical psychological cycle in which the ambiguous, fragile human being is strengthened in virtue. While Nussbaum’s formulation is entirely secular and lacks a notion of grace, her insight that cultivated natural virtue serves to help us embrace

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 49 rather than flee from our fragility is helpful in understanding the role of grace in Niebuhr. In Christian realism, grace brings us down to earth – through forgiveness and empowerment for work for justice. At the same time Niebuhr’s realism offers Nussbaum a formulation of the Christian tradition in which the purpose of transcendence is not to escape the world but to embrace it.

Niebuhr’s critique of virtue The first challenge is to determine whether virtue ethics is an appropriate approach at all, given the concerns of Christian realism. Although Niebuhr was certainly busy with other things, his neglect of virtue signifies more than simple oversight. His lack of concern for the categories and insights of virtue ethics reflects the broader liberal Protestant tradition of disregard and distrust. The stress that virtue ethics places on self-improvement and perfectionism has ironic parallels with the unrealistic aspirations of Social Gospel liberals that Niebuhr found superficial and infuriating.3 Niebuhr’s suspicion resonates with the history of Western Christian thought. Christian concern that emphasis on virtue may be a problem – that it implies that we can make ourselves into the people who deserve salvation – dates back to the letters of Paul and is formulated forcefully in Augustine. Augustine rejected the pagan virtues as ‘splendid vices,’ on the grounds that “ordinary habituation in virtue simply entrenches the vices of pride and self-love.”4 Especially in Protestantism, the idea has persisted that God’s grace and human effort are somehow a zero-sum game. The notion that grace can (and perhaps must, to make theological sense) work alongside human effort – that in Aquinas’ terms, both acquired and infused virtue are part of the human picture – is a source of anxiety and ambivalence. In tracing the development of this ambivalence through the centuries, Jennifer Herdt shows how a hyper-Augustinian logic eventually, in Hume, detaches virtue from Protestantism altogether, and places it in the secular world. Arguably, part of Niebuhr’s disagreement with Social Gospel liberals was his critique of the implied pagan virtue ethic that he believed they embodied. Niebuhr’s few references to virtue use the word in a much more general sense than is meant by the term virtue ethics. Langdon Gilkey’s description of virtue as “a minimal sense of moral adequacy, of being in the right, and being on the right side”5 gives a sense of Niebuhr’s semantic field in his use of the word virtue. This minimalist idea of virtue as a general synonym for goodness, referring to any behavior showing high moral standards, was quite common in American Protestant theologians of his time. What Niebuhr does say directly about the minimalist idea of virtue reflects his critique of what he considers the naïve ideas of self-sufficiency found in both secular and theological liberalism. For Niebuhr, the idea of virtue is linked with optimism, one of the very opposites of faith (the other

50  Martha ter Kuile being despair). “Most optimistic creeds, when reduced to their essentials, prove themselves to be confidence in some human virtue or capacity.”6 It is the arrogance of the optimist that Niebuhr rejects. Niebuhr’s reading of history also reveals his doubts about virtue. He criticizes the classical formulation of virtue as both lacking a sense of the “defect in the center of human personality,” and as elitist.7 He finds that virtue in medieval mysticism is to be achieved “only by the annihilation of the will,” and by escaping from the world through absorption into the divine.8 His argument against virtue that is based either on nature or on rationality, as found in philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, is that it fails to take seriously the “obvious facts” of sin and chaos.9 He charges that such an approach minimizes the problem of sin by imagining that virtue will definitively overcome it. In his suspicion of virtue, Niebuhr also reflects the traditional Protestant bias which combines a tendentious misreading of medieval Catholic moral theology with a sense of virtue as “an expression of pride, self-love, and thus as inherently hypocritical or false.”10 Niebuhr saw claims about virtue as ways of claiming unambiguous goodness of the self when the self is always morally ambiguous. He saw virtue language as an attempt to escape the messiness of the moral life.

Niebuhrian resources for virtue Granted that Niebuhr expresses these reservations about virtue, nevertheless there are grounds to argue that his theological anthropology can plausibly serve as a basis for a Christian Realist virtue ethics. Geoffrey Scott has noted that despite his ostensible rejection of virtue ethics, Niebuhr’s construct of the human being implies and entails a concept of virtue, understood as “the human response which grace elicits” and affirms true human agency.11 Robin W. Lovin points out the resonance of Niebuhr’s description of the “attitude” appropriate for a Christian with contemporary understandings of a virtue as habitual disposition.12 Niebuhr also stresses corrigibility. Niebuhr’s emphasis on the need to be open to correction, and to be active in the effort to self-correct, suggests an orientation toward virtue that goes beyond his critique of optimism. Niebuhr explicitly rejects the Calvinist Reformation doctrine of total depravity and affirms that human freedom implies human responsibility.13 Though he was not a Lutheran, Niebuhr’s liberal Protestant background may have been more influenced by Lutheranism than by Calvinism.14 To explore whether Luther rules out virtue, Gilbert Meilaender analyzes Luther’s Against Latomus, and concludes that Luther postulates two different ways of thinking about virtue, and holds them in tension.15 First, he finds a substantive understanding of virtue, in which traits of character can and should be developed over time by intention. At the same time, he finds in Luther a relational understanding of virtue, in which, through grace, the traits of character are integrated and the human being is brought into right relationship with God. Both moral agency and passivity before God play a

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 51 part in this model, which implies a continual surrender to the divine initiative. Meilaender concludes, Luther’s view seems to be that the examined life is necessary but not, finally, worth living – that we should make what progress we can in virtue but always without anticipating that it could make of us what we want to be.16 In this sense, even considered as a Lutheran, Niebuhr too can be interpreted as open to a virtue ethics which affirms notions of habituation and character development. Niebuhr’s understanding of the self as dialogical17 makes clear that he believes that the self develops continuously through self-reflection, through interaction with other people, and through communion with the divine. In each of these three dialogues the person is formed, and reformed, in relation to the social, historical, and physical context. The dialectical self identifies its life goals dynamically, both within the ethos of the community in which it lives its life and through its powers of deliberation. Thus the self is developed by deliberation and in community such that it can sustain the habitual dispositions of virtue. Nevertheless, any virtue ethics based on Niebuhr will have to take human sinfulness very seriously, and eschew any claim that the virtuous person can become self-sufficient. That is, Christian Realist virtue ethics will be antiperfectionist and will emphasize corrigibility. Virtue will refer to the habits required for living amidst ambiguity, rather than the sustained achievement of excellence. Along with human efforts, this will involve a continual return to reliance on God’s grace.

Tragedy as a bridge to virtue While many contemporary approaches to virtue lack fully Niebuhrian appreciation of the ambiguity of the human situation, they are also not all as facile as what Niebuhr thinks of when he uses the term ‘virtue.’ Some overlap with Niebuhr in wishing to make sense of the moral life in a morally complicated and even tragic world. Secular philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s depiction of the fragility of the human condition resonates with Niebuhr’s sense of its ambiguity. If it is true that there is a lot about us that is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt and standing helplessly in the rain, it is also true that there is something about us that is pure and purely active, something that we could think of as “divine, immortal, intelligible, unitary, ever self-consistent and invariable”.18 Nussbaum offers a finely wrought picture of the human being, making the case that the person of virtue will recognize and even embrace the fragility

52  Martha ter Kuile of our condition, while at the same time working tirelessly for social justice. Nussbaum’s central insight is that “human limits structure the human excellences, and give excellent action its significance”.19 She, like Niebuhr, sees the wish to escape from the fragility of the human predicament as a paradigmatic mistake from the perspective of a truly human ethics. Her reading of Aristotle elucidates the way human vulnerability to loss and suffering determines the requirements of virtue. Nussbaum’s insistence on holding perfect and imperfect together parallels Niebuhr’s basic anthropological claim that the human condition is one of both finitude and freedom, even transcendence. The tragedians In The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum begins with chapters on Aeschylus and on Sophocles’ Antigone in which she probes the nature of moral conflict, and the attempts of modern philosophy to deny it. Tragic conflict she defines as “wrong action committed without any direct physical compulsion and in full knowledge of its nature by a person whose ethical character or commitments would otherwise dispose him to reject the act,” and claims that the objective of the tragedians was precisely to give the audience a means of struggling with the pain this engenders.20 What makes this wrong action especially appalling is the sense that it is the very virtue of the protagonist that makes the conflict impossible to resolve. A less virtuous character wouldn’t have the problem.21 Nussbaum notes attempts since Socrates to dismiss the concerns raised in tragedy as morally primitive, and describes the role of Kantian and existentialist ‘solutions’ to the problem of conflict as both a signal of the pain the tragic view evokes, and as a symptom of our need to master it.22 Nussbaum’s reading insists that the tragedies require us to acknowledge tension and disharmony, and the fear that underlies our attempts at control. The demands of piety and the demands of fatherly love in Agamemnon’s dilemma are irreducibly at odds. Aeschylus does not so much try to solve the moral problem of competing ethical demands as to insist that we recognize the complexity of it, and at the same time, be prepared to blame Agamemnon as he capitulates to the demands of piety and proceeds without remorse. The attempt of Hegel to resolve the tensions of conflict by seeking an underlying harmony, Nussbaum also rejects.23 Antigone’s sense of the love and honor owed to her brother Polynices compels her to bury his body against the express command of the city’s ruler, Creon. Nussbaum argues that Sophocles shows both Creon and Antigone as being at fault for their willingness to create (falsely) a world where insoluble conflicts cannot arise. It is single-mindedness itself – whether on behalf of civic love or family love – which distorts. Real life, and the fundamental mystery of the human being, more appalling (deinon) even than the gods, are recalcitrant to the false simplification of a supreme law, and the price of harmonization is

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 53 moral impoverishment.24 Incommensurable goods give rise to irreducible conflicts, and acknowledgment is the key. Plato Nussbaum continues her narrative of the ancient Greek attempts to come to grips with the problem of human vulnerability in a discussion of four of Plato’s major works. In response to the dramatists’ depiction of endless calamity, Plato seeks to find a means of keeping humanity safe. Nussbaum traces the development of the idea in the Protagoras that philosophy is a techne – a human art, craft, or technical method – for reducing our human exposure to tuche, the capriciousness of fate. “Techne, then, is a deliberate application of human intelligence to some part of the world, yielding some control over tuche.”25 An adequate techne will find a way to measure competing values and commitments against each other, and offer a practical means of making choices among alternatives. It will enable us to order our commitments in such a way that we can live without confusion. This science will be universal, teachable, precise, and explanatory. In the voice of Protagoras, Plato argues that the salient characteristic of the human being – a characteristic which is not merely additive or instrumental to some other goal, but constitutive of humanity – is the ability to reason. Thus, the techne required for human excellence will be the one that most develops the powers of reason.26 Plato therefore proposes philosophy as a means to overcome confusion and conflict among our commitments, and the insecurity that arises from human vulnerability. Nussbaum goes on to describe the ‘god’s eye view’ that Plato wants his readers to adopt by the use of this techne. The god’s eye view provides the perspective of purity, stability, and truth that will support the development of philosophy. In turn, philosophy teaches that this ‘standpoint of perfection’ will confer upon the one who chooses it a comprehensive protection from the excesses of passion.27 The problem with this, as Nussbaum observes, is that it is “nothing like the standpoint of the normal human being.”28 Moreover, there is something precious which is lost – the possibility of love. The eros that Plato has described here isn’t in the end very erotic, as the comic/tragic plight of Alcibiades shows – for a person cannot really be in love with a statue, however impressive. What makes this problem even harder is that the dialogue indicates that it is not possible to retain openness to a particular, living, breathing love while embracing the philosophical standpoint. “One sort of understanding blocks out the other. The pure light of the eternal forms eclipses, or is eclipsed by, the flickering lightning of the opened and opening body.”29 Nussbaum argues that the Symposium, instead of presenting a simple case for the god’s eye view, shows us both what we gain and what we lose when we opt away from tuche to techne. “We see now that philosophy is not fully human; but we are terrified of humanity and where it leads to.”30

54  Martha ter Kuile Aristotle For Nussbaum’s Aristotle, ethics is a field for the practice of virtue in part exactly because morality is not delivered from on high by infallible reason. Morality is built from the ground up in a tragic world. Moral norms represent collections of moral perceptions across communities, and they are constantly revisable on the basis of experience. This kind of morality requires deliberation which is not scientific in the ‘god’s eye view,’ fully commensurable, disengaged sense of Plato, which he rejects as futile and destructive: “Futile, because such a vantage point is unavailable, as such, to human inquiry; destructive, because the glory of the promised goal makes the humanly possible work look boring and cheap.”31 Nor does virtue lead us to absolute security. Tragedy provides the context in which morality is meaningful, and the emotional dispositions that constitute virtue continue to function even in tragic situations when there is no option to be fully good. Nussbaum concludes with Aristotle (and possibly beyond him), that the good human life, in order to be good, must embrace rather than flee from the adventures which tuche brings. The pity and fear that we feel when we see, in life or in drama, the suffering that humans fall into give us insight into the very things we value. The only protection we have is the rather light raincoat of practical reason, which informs itself by careful observation of our actual circumstances, including our emotional responses, and draws general conclusions from contingent particularities. These judgments must be open to correction. We can train and direct our attention to the phainomena of reality as our source of understanding. We can school ourselves in moderation such that even the force of our passions and appetites may be constructively channeled within a moral community. However, there are limits to the safety we may wisely seek. In her final chapter, Nussbaum returns to the tragedies to recall that the eudaimonia of a human being will always involve the exposure to risk and suffering that a rich array of commitments and loves will bring. The good person must remain open and receptive to the pain that life delivers. In Hecuba’s implacable rage over the murder of her son, she is entirely undone and ceases ultimately to be human. Driven mad by sorrow and revenge, she strikes out to blind and to kill, and in the end is transformed into a dog. Human flourishing, as human, is constituted at least in part by the possibility of its own destruction by irresolvable moral conflict. There is nothing that can prevent such conflict arising from without and within, and it is the condition of good character to be fragile in its presence. That is, what we lose may be not simply our beloved, or our country, or our good name, but our own self – “If we could not be turned into dogs, we would no longer be human.”32 Nussbaum remembers that the human being is, in the end, deinon – appalling to behold – and that tuche is ever recalcitrant to the

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 55 works of techne. This insight, which resonates strongly with Niebuhr’s sense of the person as both limited and free, will be critical in the construction of a Christian Realist virtue ethics. Nussbaum’s depiction of tragedy, and thus her framework for virtue, is not the same as the one Niebuhr critiques. For Nussbaum, virtue is not moral escapism. It rejects attempts to achieve moral purity at the cost of a realistic view of the ways that goods can clash in the world. Virtue is not self-made. The goodness of the self depends on conditions outside the self both for its creation and for its continuation. This all creates a conception of virtue that is capable of more humility than Niebuhr imagines. Finally, virtue influences not only how one navigates the world in search of greater harmony, but also how one is disposed when harmony is not possible. This does not make Nussbaum a Niebuhrian. But Nussbaum does provide us with an account of virtue that suggests qualities that a Christian Realist would look for in a virtue theory – that it will be deliberative, corrigible, and formed through experience.

Niebuhr and Nussbaum on grace, sin, and transcendence If Nussbaum is not a Niebuhrian, then neither is Niebuhr a Nussbaumian. What Nussbaum lacks, for a Christian Realist virtue ethics, is a hypothesis on the origin of freedom and of corrigibility. If virtue ethics is to be neither conservative nor parochial, there must be some ‘place’ outside the existing social framework that will give purchase for reform. Grace and natural virtue The Niebuhrian picture of morality depends upon grace. There is a limit to the human ability to do what is good – “an inner contradiction even in acts of obedience toward God . . . insofar as the self is centered in the self, it can only offer coerced obedience.”33 It is grace that moves us in Aristotle’s sense from continence to virtue. Although for Niebuhr all systems of morals are aimed at the endpoint of love, human love itself is “only a possibility by way of the love of God . . . [and when] it is not a possibility, it points to God as the final realization of the possibility.”34 Grace in Niebuhr is in this sense analogous to the infused virtue of the Thomist tradition, as it works with and corrects the ‘aim’ of human virtue. In particular, for Niebuhr, grace does not “actually lift man out of sinful contradictions of history and establish him above the sins of the world,” an interpretation he rejects as perfectionist.35 Instead grace is the revelation of divine mercy, which both forgives and empowers. Grace answers the anxiety produced by our apprehension of freedom and enables our responsible re-engagement with the real world of human fragility. Nussbaum, in contrast, operates in a natural universe, in which all transcendence is ‘internal.’ The objective of self-transcendence in Nussbaum’s

56  Martha ter Kuile world is to increase the scope of one’s humanity through compassion and attachment. Through this self-transcendence we increase rather than decrease our vulnerability, and in a sense take on the fragility of others. She remains sanguine about the capacity of human beings to accomplish this through social formation and cultural education that develops the moral imagination. One can imagine that Niebuhr might consider Nussbaum an example of the misguided optimism that he criticized in his contemporary liberals. In response to her faith in the cultivation of good deliberation and compassion in the face of human fragility he might insist on the impossibility of natural virtue meeting the need. Relying on the Christian tradition of virtue, he would point to grace as the hidden but utterly real source of the human power to act for good. Even so, where he might find more resonance, and where a Niebuhrian may learn from Nussbaum, is in her insistence that virtue does not help us escape the vulnerability of our lives, but instead helps us to accept and embrace it. Her embrace of vulnerability as genuinely human helpfully illuminates a method of moving toward virtue that is not perfectionist. The virtues we should cultivate expand our compassion and perseverance in adversity, because they do not deny fragility. It seems clear that this is a helpful way to understand the function of grace in Niebuhr. Grace brings the human being back to fragility and limit, rather than away from them. It is grace that empowers the work for justice that Niebuhr and Nussbaum agree is the priority of the virtuous citizen and the virtuous Christian. For Niebuhr as well as for Nussbaum, the objective is to engage rather than to flee from the human condition, and it becomes clear that Niebuhr and Nussbaum are not as far apart as might be assumed. Human sinfulness Would Niebuhr find Nussbaum naïve on the question of sin? Sin is central to Niebuhr’s understanding of the human condition. Much of his frustration with his own liberal tradition is that it so underestimates the recalcitrance of human sinfulness. He has a non-traditional (that is, not biological) but clear conception of original sin. By contrast, as noted above, Nussbaum rejects original sin, “as a doctrine that diminishes the force of this-worldly moral distinctions based on this-worldly conduct and acts.”36 That is, if all are sinners, then what is the difference between being a good person and a bad person? Moreover she sees in the notion of radical evil a troubling tendency toward quietism among those who are oppressed. Thinking Augustinian thoughts of radical evil mitigates the suffering of having to obey the powers of this world. It supplies the powerless with a project – coming into God’s presence. . . . Instead of taking action as best we can, we had better cover ourselves, mourn and wait.37

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 57 Her complaint about the concept of original sin is that in her view it fails to recognize that “there is a world of difference between the evil and the good.”38 Even so, Nussbaum does see that people are often ill-intentioned – v­ iolent and vengeful, as well as weak and callous. Human beings are capable of committing acts of great evil against one another. She certainly considers these acts blameworthy and considers the tendency to do them recalcitrant. Fragility in Nussbaum is not only helplessness and limitation, but also includes vulnerability to the pride and fury which may destroy all that is humanly good. As she argues in her discussion of the Hecuba, it is precisely this possibility of moral catastrophe – losing our goodness to “become dogs” – that makes us most human.39 Nussbaum’s quintessential human being must retain this ostensible flaw in order to flourish – it is “constitutive” in her words, or what might be called original. She repeatedly rejects the urge to leave behind the “constitutive conditions of our humanity, and to seek for the life that is really the life of another sort of being.”40 In this she is more like Niebuhr than unlike him. Transcendence Nussbaum identifies ambivalence at the heart of the human struggle to come to terms with limitation and fragility. She rejects the draw of transcendence if what we mean by the term is an appeal to the ‘god’s eye view.’ Gods have no need of politics, or social justice, because they have no need to support one another – “beings who lack our vulnerabilities to hunger, thirst, heat, cold and disease, beings who don’t need to educate their children, to raise an army, to arrange for the fair distribution of life-supporting property and other goods don’t really need politics.”41 The fellow-feeling and compassion that make society possible and justice desirable are unavailable to the gods. Indeed, the heedlessness of the gods as we see it in Greek mythology, their insensitivity by human standards, is based on their lack of neediness – immortality and invulnerability make one incapable of virtue. It is, precisely, human limitation which gives virtue its significance.42 When humans turn their attention too exclusively to the divine dimension, from which both human anguish and human virtue are absent, efforts to build a wholesome society here will always be in danger of compromise – as they say, becoming too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. But Nussbaum does find a kind of transcendence that she believes positive.43 Her understanding of the good life for the human includes the aspiration toward transcendence as a genuine if complicating aspect of eudaimonia. This kind of transcendence is “internal and human,” and might be described as descent, as well as ascent. This transcendence is to be distinguished from the desire to escape completely from the “constitutive conditions of our humanity” or “to seek for a life that is in reality the life of another sort of being.”44 Internal transcendence involves engaging and confronting the

58  Martha ter Kuile exigencies of human life, spurred by compassionate appreciation of the way these limitations impose unduly on some. It is precisely in the discernment of the space that exists – between the vulnerability that constitutes us and the vulnerability that we can justly imagine reducing – in which the practical tasks of ethics consist. “What is recommended is a delicate balancing act between the claims of excellence, which lead us to push outward, and the necessity of the human context, which pushes us back in.”45 Nussbaum identifies as hubris the failure to perform this balancing act well. Hubris causes one to abandon the appropriate human striving in order to pursue the striving to become something that is not human. The good human life, in Nussbaum’s estimate, will be a life that does not deny, but instead holds on to the dynamic tension, which she calls “close to a contradiction” between our longing to be free of grief and limit and loss, and our recognition that it is also our grief and limit and loss which define us as human.46 Where Niebuhr and Nussbaum differ most clearly is on the questions of grace, sin, and transcendence. This difference highlights the question of the origin of the virtue which permits us to live a good human life. For secular philosopher Nussbaum, all virtue is natural – it is acquired, through upbringing, education, and the cultivation of habits of imagination and compassion. She insists that one of the functions of virtue is to allow us to accept the fragility that makes us truly human. For Christian theologian Niebuhr, virtue is both natural and given by grace – the infusion of virtue through grace is central to the possibility of hope, as it gently reorients us to our true nature as bound and free. Grace reorients and empowers natural virtue. Niebuhr insists that the ambiguity of our condition must be lived out and not denied, and that grace helps us to do this. Although they differ on the question of its origin, for both writers the objective of virtue is the abundant human life lived in service to others.

Virtue in a tragic, ironic, fragile world I will conclude here with a sketch of how a human being might develop the kind of dispositions that are imagined here as virtues. In the light of what we have explored in this chapter, we see that this must be a dynamic and ongoing process. Virtue on this account cannot be a stable disposition that one can rest comfortable in. It is not a matter of reaching a state of goodness, but rather a constant dialogue to find appropriate choices in the particular contexts offered up by human life. This does not prevent cultivation – one does learn something about life by living. But it is not a process that is ever done. Nor is it one that offers moral security even once it has been enacted. There are interesting parallels between Niebuhr’s and Nussbaum’s depictions of the human predicament. They share a sense that what we face is fragility, ambiguity, and responsibility. They share a pattern that will be key for the development of a Christian Realist virtue ethics. The following analysis takes as its starting point Rebekah M. Miles’ insight that in a feminist

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 59 Christian realism which holds boundedness together with freedom, there is a cycle of creative transformation, in which “both persons and communities are unceasingly dynamic.”47 Miles does not examine the elements of this cycle, nor make the link to virtue ethics. However, following up the image of a cycle shows that the general contours of such a process of iteration and the quality of dynamism in the cycle are common to both Niebuhr and Nussbaum. In both pictures, there is a circular dynamic by which humanity attempts to escape the problem of fragility, is confronted by the inadequacy of this move, and then circles around to the starting point, having gained, it is hoped, new insight and appreciation of reality. Both Niebuhr and Nussbaum make this circle in four moves that are roughly parallel. Nussbaum is describing intellectual history, first in ancient Greece and then in the West, while Niebuhr speaks in theological terms – however, the basic pattern is common to both. The elements of the pattern are anxiety, escape, recognition of loss, and re-embrace. The pattern assumes that human beings live in two dimensions – v­ ariously identified as time and eternity, real and ideal, contingency and universality – and that the acceptance of both these dimensions is what gives human life its unique character. Niebuhr identifies this quality as freedom and distinguishes it from simple rationality, which he calls part of nature.48 Nussbaum identifies what she calls internal transcendence as a simple fact of human experience.49 First move: anxiety as a response to ambiguity The first move occurs when a person recognizes the fragility and ambiguity of the human condition, and responds with anxiety. Niebuhr describes the human being as both bound and free. We are both critically limited by time and place, by community and obligation, by physical frailty and death, while being at the same time alive in an eternal realm which utterly transcends this earthly life. For Niebuhr, the eternal realm is quite specifically the reality of God. The experience of grasping the truth of our dependence includes also the intimation of a reality on which we depend, however unfathomable that reality may be. When the human being apprehends this ambiguous truth – which is in itself a moment of transcendence – the response is anxiety.50 Knowledge of our limitation, dependence, and fragility brings anxiety straightforwardly. Yet this anxiety is compounded by a sense of the enormity of our human freedom to do good or ill.51 A quintessential example of this two-edged anxiety is the overwhelming experience of new parenthood, with its combined sense of vulnerability and responsibility. The situation of humanity as Nussbaum presents it is fragile, but ambiguous. In the language of the Greek tragedies, the human being is deinon – strange, formidable, and appalling. We live both in the rain and in the ­sunshine. Nussbaum portrays Greek tragic theater as a complex wrestling with the anxiety that is created when human beings find themselves accosted

60  Martha ter Kuile by misfortune and forced by circumstances to reconcile impossibly conflicting demands. Humans are made vulnerable to luck (tuche) through being attached to objects and persons who are vulnerable. There is dismay and anxiety when this is recognized. She presents the development of philosophy as a response to the anxiety that this truthful depiction of the human condition occasions. Second move: escape from reality The second move is the attempt to quell the anxiety of fragility by finding and claiming something else as the ‘real’ reality which makes this reality less significant. In Niebuhr’s reckoning, in order to make this anxiety more manageable, human beings make a misguided attempt to gain control. We falsely identify some contingent ‘earthly’ project as bearing ‘eternal’ significance. We ascribe to God’s will our own limited and self-serving goals, a misidentification which is in Christian terms essentially idolatrous.52 Even when theism itself is removed from the equation, the false claim to transcendence recurs. From the divine right of kings to the utopian pretensions of communism, Niebuhr sees this idolatry as an escape from the reality of our fragility and as a source of great evil in the world.53 Nussbaum describes a similar escape move in Plato’s response to the observation that the things we most cherish are not within our control, but vulnerable to loss or damage. Plato sees that we are faced with impossible choices and pushed around by our passions. He wants to find a craft or method, a techne, that will make us safe from the ravages of tuche. He proposes philosophy as the ascent to a ‘god’s eye view,’ from which we will be able to order our choices without conflict, and be spared the pain of our misfortunes. This aspiration to the standpoint of perfection will deliver a reality that is stable, impartial, and universally true. While Nussbaum sees this move to the god’s eye view as more mistaken than pernicious, she observes the moral damage that its narrow perspective may inflict. Nussbaum describes a similar move in what she calls the ‘ascent’ traditions of Western philosophy and literature – “in which the aspiring lover climbs a ladder from the quotidian love from which she began, with all its difficulties, to an allegedly higher and more fulfilling love.”54 Third move: recognition of loss The third move is the recognition that in the attempt to escape anxiety, something precious and central has been lost. Niebuhr sees human beings as inherently structured to recognize the false pretensions of the move to escape. He says that, paradoxically, it is the fact of our genuine transcendence that allows us to glimpse the truth of our self-deceit when we claim transcendent validity for contingent realities. Our self-glorification just won’t stand up to honest scrutiny.55 He identifies this

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 61 as the moment of contrition, when the sin of pride, hubris, is overcome by the power of grace, and the human tumbles back ‘down’ to earth. The contrition that Niebuhr describes is not simple repentance for large and small sins, but a kind of existential dismay that can only be met by the greatness of God. Here grace forgives, and brings humility.56 Nussbaum attributes both to the later Plato and to Aristotle the insight that the god’s eye view is in the end not sustainable because it leaves out too much that is genuinely important. At the top of the ladder of love, the lover is oddly uncomfortable and out of place – quoting D.H. Lawrence, she notes that “even if you reach heaven, you can’t sit down there.”57 The relationships and belongings and accomplishments which comprise a good human life do have value. It is precisely our tendency to care about people and things over whose well-being we do not have power which defines us as humans. That is, our vulnerability and limitation define our humanity. Hubris as Nussbaum uses the word entails a failure to understand what the nature of human life is – it is “the failure, being mortal, to think mortal thoughts.”58 The desire to escape to another life will have negative consequences for moral life here. Aristotle rejects Plato’s notion of the ideal, and insists on beginning ethical inquiry in the here and now, by asking what ‘most people’ think. The fragile deliberator has returned to earth. Fourth move: re-embrace with humility and resolve The fourth move is reengagement with the work for justice without the need for delusions of grandeur. Niebuhr calls for the embrace of a life that recognizes its embeddedness and its limitation. He insists that we must remain open to correction. He rails against the false innocence of modernity, with its bland expectation of continuous progress by people of good intention. Only self-giving love, in which our own sense of fragility is engaged by the need of others, will serve as the right foundation for justice.59 Yet we must be constantly vigilant for the possibility of self-serving pretension in the expression of that love. His strongest criticism is for the self-righteousness and self-importance of the do-gooding church, as he calls for a humble recognition of Christian fallibility.60 The grace of empowerment allows re-engagement in the tasks of compassion and justice.61 Nussbaum follows Aristotle in her account of the value of the life lived in full cognizance of limit. The excellent life for a human will have to include – not evade – the dangers of love here on earth, of activity and striving, and of exposure to risk. Even further, the good life will include a wide compassion – through which our sense of vulnerability extends to include the vicissitudes of others. The fourth move in the cycle brings renewed commitment to the challenges and tribulations of work for the world. For both Niebuhr and Nussbaum the pattern described here is something more fundamental than a correctable mistake or two. It is a genuine part

62  Martha ter Kuile of being human. Both affirm that there is something truthful and accurate about the human impulse toward a reality ‘beyond’ or ‘deeper than’ the everyday world. Moreover, however unfathomable, that reality is apprehended as utterly good. Although only Niebuhr describes that reality as divine, both take it as one of the great mysteries with which humans will always have the need to grapple. Both recognize that our ideas about vulnerability and transcendence will be critically, even determinatively, linked to the question of justice. It is when we perceive both our own fragility and also the possibilities of the greater reality in which we live that we experience the imperative of responsibility. Their objective is not to erase or deny transcendence, but to understand its place in the life we are called to live. Transcendence reminds us of the real boundaries of human experience. A Christian Realist virtue ethics will have resonance for its secular colleagues. This form of virtue ethics has much in common with a secular liberal virtue ethics, though it disagrees with the secularist that only natural virtue is relevant. It is intelligible to non-Christians, but holds to its own convictions about the operation of God’s grace. Indeed, the Christian ­Realist will make a point of watching for signs of God’s grace at work in the world.

Conclusion I have said that Niebuhr didn’t talk about virtue as habit, but this claim should be qualified. Let me give him the last word: I can see, of course, that all good things depend in part upon right habits. Customs, attitudes and actions which are desirable cannot always depend upon impulse and will. . . . Yet habitual actions easily become meaningless and institutions which depend upon them lose their vitality. If habitual actions are not continually revitalized by the compulsion of ideals and the attraction of the values involved in them, they may easily become useless.62 Christian realism tells us that by the grace of God, there will always be something new on the horizon, a larger story, and a deeper reality. For the justice-seeker, then, the most important virtue of all will be the openness to the journey – to the correcting, revitalizing, and refreshing wind of the spirit which continually calls us forward.

Notes 1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941, reprint Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 1:3. 2 Ibid., 1:181.

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 63 3 Ibid., 2:93; Gary Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 88. 4 Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2. 5 Langdon Gilkey, On Niebuhr: A Theological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8. 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937, reprint 1965), 115. 7 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:9. 8 Ibid., 1:58. 9 Ibid., 1:93–94. 10 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 341. Niebuhr was less virulent than some of his colleagues. Protestant skepticism of virtue can be summed up in this quote from Emil Brunner, “Today we are rightly suspicious of all talk of ‘virtues,’ indeed we are tired of all such language. For the ancient conception of virtue, which also dominates the whole medieval morality . . ., turns a quality which depends for its very existence upon the reality of the Divine action into a human acquisition . . . all this talk of ‘possessing virtues’ or ‘being virtuous,’ indeed even the striving after such virtue, and even the mere ideal of virtue is presumptuous. The idea of virtue leads man to justify himself – and this is the very opposite of genuine goodness.” The Divine Imperative, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957), 165. 11 Geoffrey Scott, “Christian Realism and the Viability of the Concept of Virtue in Protestant Moral Theology,” in Religious Studies in the Pacific (Auckland: Colloquium Pub., 1978), 105. 12 Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95–96. It is this intuition that the paper follows up. 13 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:266, 2:119. 14 Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 4, 140. 15 Gilbert C. Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 118ff. 16 Ibid., 120. 17 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 4–5. 18 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4. 19 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 378. 20 Nussbaum, Fragility, 25. 21 In The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), Niebuhr distinguishes between what he calls “tragedy” and “irony.” For Niebuhr, irony is a category that moved beyond mere tragedy. Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous. Incongruity as such is merely comic. It elicits laughter. This element of comedy is never completely eliminated from irony. But irony is something more than comedy. A comic situation is proved to be an ironic one if a hidden relation is discovered in the incongruity. If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own

64  Martha ter Kuile limits – in all such cases the situation is ironic. It is precisely this hidden relation between conflicting moral requirements that Nussbaum identifies as the essence of tragedy. Laughter soon gives way to dismay. 22 Nussbaum, Fragility, 31–32, 48–49. 23 Ibid., 52, 63, 67–68. 24 Ibid., 73. 25 Ibid., 95. 26 Ibid., 101. 27 Ibid., 136. 28 Ibid., 153. 29 Ibid., 195. 30 Ibid., 201. 31 Ibid., 258. 32 Ibid., 421. 33 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:293. 34 Ibid., 1:294. 35 Reinhold Niebuhr, “An Open Letter to Richard Roberts,” Christianity and Society 5 (Summer 1940): 30–33, reprinted as “An Open Letter (to Richard Roberts),” in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. B.D. Robertson (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1967), 269. 36 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 550. 37 Ibid., 556. 38 Ibid., 551. 39 Nussbaum, Fragility, 421. 40 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 379. 41 Ibid., 373. 42 Ibid., 375. Nussbaum points out here, without developing her view, that Christianity offers a profound response to this picture of the divine reality through its depiction of a God who intentionally becomes subject to limit and death through incarnation. 43 Ibid., 378. 44 Ibid., 379. 45 Ibid., 381. 46 Ibid. 47 Rebekah M. Miles, The Bonds of Freedom: Feminist Theology and Christian Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155. This analysis of the cycle follows up her compelling idea. Her larger objective is to modify the Niebuhrian picture of the person in response to feminist and liberation critics. The feminist critique which developed in the ’70s disagrees that pride is the predictable and most destructive sin which is inevitably implied by the structure of the human being. Indeed, the autonomous, self-transcendent individual Niebuhr describes is not ‘realistic’ at all, is actually a person of social privilege and power. Instead of denying limitation, the less powerful person may be tempted to deny freedom. In both cases, the sin arises out of the basic human orientation to the good – ­confusing from opposite directions a proximate good with an ultimate good. The sin of the less powerful person (which Niebuhr alluded to as ‘sensuality’) may be closer to the classical sin of acedia, the sloth that signifies spiritual apathy or lack of purpose. See Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, 147 ff., for a discussion of sensuality as sloth. 48 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:96, 119. 49 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 368 ff.

Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist 65 50 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:168. 51 Miles, Bonds of Freedom, 142. 52 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:164. 53 The other version of this move, implied by Miles and perhaps more likely to occur in a person who is socially less powerful, is the same mistake made in the reverse direction. In this case the person falsely denies the possibility of the transcendent, and rejects the freedom (and responsibility) that it implies. This imposes false limits, which can be just as ethically harmful as false freedom. 54 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 469. 55 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:166. 56 In the more symmetric version suggested by Miles, the moment of truth for the person less powerful would be the recognition that limits imposed by self or society are not absolute. Here grace forgives and empowers, and the sin of acedia is transformed into responsible engagement. 57 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 682 (quoting D.H. Lawrence). 58 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 381. 59 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:296. 60 Ibid., 2:88. 61 For those whose acedia has been converted by grace into resolve, it becomes clear in this move that within the embeddedness and limitation of human life there will always be found resources for transformation. 62 Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1934, reprint. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 68.

4 Reinhold Niebuhr Faith in and beyond history Scott R. Paeth

Introduction The central challenge in any consideration of Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of faith is the unsystematic and ad hoc nature of much of his writing. Because Niebuhr self-consciously applied himself to understanding the relevance of the Christian faith to the central questions of his historical moment, he never set down and penned a piece in which the concept of “faith” was thoroughly defined. That having been said, the idea of faith is all over his writing. Faith played a central role in Niebuhr’s analysis of the role Christianity plays within the historical drama, and in his understudying of Christian responsibility within social and political life. In this chapter, I will examine the way in which the idea of faith is deployed within Niebuhr’s writing. By examining the ways in which Niebuhr utilizes the concept of faith throughout his writing, we can begin to develop an understanding of the role of faith in his overall theology. In particular, how Niebuhr understands the relationship between the virtue of faith and the historical dimensions of the human situation can help to clarify the relationship between his religious and social thought.

The idea of faith in Niebuhr’s context Before turning to Niebuhr’s own understanding of the nature of faith, I want to place Niebuhr’s understanding of faith in the context of the contemporary world to which he belonged, and particularly in the context of those contemporary theologians with whom he was most consistently in conversation, specifically his brother Richard, Paul Tillich, and Emil Brunner. Niebuhr’s conception of faith was developed and articulated in conversation with these figures, and their influence can be seen throughout his work. Therefore an understanding of Niebuhr’s conception of faith can be aided by a discussion of how his conversation partners conceived of it. Beginning with Richard, it is clear that, while Reinhold and he had many (and occasionally public) theological disagreements, Reinhold developed an account of faith in conversation with his brother’s perspective. Richard

Reinhold Niebuhr 67 wrote more systematically about the subject than did Reinhold, and articulated what Richard R. Niebuhr describes in one place as a “phenomenology of faith” which can be traced through several of his works.1 For Richard, faith and revelation are inextricably intertwined. Revelation is “this intelligible event which makes all other events intelligible,” which is to say that it is rational illumination of the underlying meaning and structure of the world and its significance.2 He compares it to a sentence in a complex book which, once read, illumines the meaning of what one is reading. Revelation in this sense grasps both our reason and our imagination and leads them to a deeper understanding of our experience. It is, he argues, “divine self-disclosure rather than the communication of truths about God” which results in a “permanent revolution in religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith.”3 Faith then is a response to the reality of this divine self-disclosure in the midst of human experience. However, the nature of this response is central to how Richard conceives of the meaning of faith: “On the one hand it is trust in that which gives value to the self; on the other hand it is loyalty to what the self values.”4 Thus, insofar as revelation illuminates our center of value, faith then impels us into a condition of trust and loyalty toward that value-center. Furthermore, in the Christian sense, that value-center must necessarily be a source outside of and beyond ourselves. In the same way that revelation makes faith possible, faith makes it possible to understand that which has been revealed. In this sense, faith is always an “insider” perspective on its value-center. While it is possible to describe and explain the experience of faith, it is not possible to convey its significance to one who has not themselves experienced it. It is for this reason that theology, as reflection on revelation from the place of faith, is “objectively relativistic,” because “one can speak and think significantly about God only from the point of view of faith in him.”5 Tillich, in a similar vein, defines faith as “ultimate concern.”6 As with Richard’s definition of faith as loyalty to a center of value, Tillich’s conception of faith does not begin with the specific content of the Christian tradition. Just as there are many potential centers of value in which one may place one’s loyalty, so there are many possible concerns that vie for the status of “ultimacy” in the human condition. The nature of any concern that we might define as ultimate in this sense is its requirement of “unconditional demand” on the one hand, and its promise of “ultimate fulfillment” on the other.7 As a centered act of our whole selves, it defines our relationship to the world by making a claim to the entirety of our being. Tillich and Richard Niebuhr both recognize the problem of idolatry that underlies all such claims to ultimacy to the degree that they do not derive from a source that is, in point of fact, actually ultimate. The key distinction between true and false faith is whether the object of faith has a rightful claim to that ultimacy, and the fundamental religious problem is the recognition

68  Scott R. Paeth that there is no possible object of human experience that can genuinely be said to have such a rightful claim. Only God, in Tillich’s terminology the “Ground of Being,” is capable of claiming such genuine ultimacy, and thus to the degree that we give our ultimate concern to penultimate objects – including the very symbols of faith that themselves are intended to point toward the Ground of Being” – we are engaged in acts of idolatry. Faith then, for Tillich, is always at risk of falling into idol worship, just as for Richard even a genuinely “radical monotheism” runs the risk of collapsing into mere tribal religion to the degree that it mistakes the symbols and language of faith for the reality of what is worshiped. Emil Brunner concurs with both Richard and with Tillich insofar as he understands that “revelation always means that something hidden is made known, that a mystery is unveiled.”8 However, an important distinction between the way Brunner approaches the issue compared to the others is that, whereas they begin conceptually and phenomenologically from the experience of faith per se, Brunner begins with biblical revelation as his starting point, and thus from within the concrete Christian tradition. Thus, for him “Biblical revelation is the absolute manifestation of something that has been absolutely concealed.”9 He describes it as “a supernatural kind of knowledge . . . of something that man, of himself, could never know.”10 This gives structure to the nature of the specific revelation in which Brunner is interested, namely the revelation of the biblical God, and specifically how that God is revealed in and through Jesus Christ. He describes the knowledge given in revelation variously as “unusual,” “sudden,” and “unexpected,” in addition to being supernatural. It is the disclosure of the reality of God and of our condition before the divine, of God’s “unfathomable” love for humanity and the free gift of God’s grace.11 Thus for Brunner revelation in the biblical sense is always revelation of Jesus Christ. At the same time, Revelation is always divine action (in this respect echoing the definition of revelation as “divine self-disclosure” in Richard’s definition). It is objective in the sense that it comes from outside of human experience and is not, in itself, dependent upon human reception. However, Brunner insists that “revelation only reaches its goal in the subject, man.”12 He goes on to state: Revelation is not a fact in itself, but it is this fact, plus an illumination, a disclosure, which makes the “fact” known. The fact of the illumination is therefore an integral part of the process of revelation; without this an event is no more a revelation than light is light without the seeing, illuminated eye. Revelation is a transitive event which proceeds from God and ends in man, a light ray with these two poles. There is therefore no point in setting the objective fact of revelation over against the subjective act of receiving the revelation, because the revelation actually consists in the meeting of two subjects, the divine and the human, the

Reinhold Niebuhr 69 self-communication of God to man. Jesus Christ is not “revelation” when He is not recognized by anon as the Christ, just as He is not the Redeemer if He does not redeem anyone.13 Thus revelation and the act of faith are indelibly intertwined for Brunner. Faith, like revelation, is then a form of knowledge. It is “awareness of the God who reveals Himself.”14 As with Richard, faith is relational and rooted in the subjective trust of the believer, though for Brunner it is only true faith when it is faith in the concrete and specific revelation of God in Jesus Christ. To be clear: Brunner and Richard Niebuhr (and arguably Tillich as well) are not in disagreement about the content of faith. However, they are operating out of two divergent approaches to the subject. Brunner is interested in understanding the structure and dynamics of Christian faith, and in articulating that faith from within the Christian tradition per se. Richard and Tillich are concerned with understanding faith in its general sense and working their way into the Christian tradition from that general outline. Their destination is the same as Brunner’s, though they take a different route. For our purposes, these three perspectives are significant insofar as they provide the raw material out of which Reinhold Niebuhr will develop his own conception of faith. He will draw at various times from each of these wells, often creatively combining conceptual approaches in order to articulate an understanding of faith that can undergird his own theological project.

Faith as a disposition Niebuhr’s conception of faith needs to be understood in the context of his anthropology and his understanding of the relationship between God and history. Niebuhr views a key problem of the human condition as our incapacity to reconcile ourselves to our own human limitations. In particular, it makes us uneasy with the reality of mystery. Because there are dimensions of existence that not only do we not understand, but which we are incapable of understanding, we seek to reduce the world to that which we are capable of understanding. He refers to faith, echoing his brother, as “the ultimate trust,” standing between the twin perils of optimism and despair – of which optimism is the more dangerous.15 Optimism impels us to trust in our own capacities, rather than give ourselves over to the underlying mystery of existence. On the one hand are those who reject any religious dimension to the nature of mystery. They deny that there is a genuinely mysterious dimension to existence in the first place, but seek to understand everything through the lens of scientific materialism. Anything that is unexplainable on those terms is, on that basis, unimportant to human life.16 On the other hand are those who reduce the mystery of existence to overly simple religious answers, who “so mix and confuse reason and faith

70  Scott R. Paeth that they pretend to be able to give a rational and sharply defined account of the character of God and the eternal ground of existence.”17 This tendency within religion to overdetermine the object faith and reduce God’s mystery to something easily grasped and easily explained reduces the symbols of faith to mere items of comprehension. “They,” as Niebuhr puts it, “know the geography of heaven and of hell, and the furniture of the one and the temperature of the other.”18 Neither of these options, as Niebuhr sees it, understands the true nature of faith, which he says “must recognize the fact that it is through a dark glass that we see.”19 Yet, that glass does not obscure everything. Rather, the mystery of our existence points beyond itself to God. What this means for Niebuhr is that “the mystery of life does not dissolve life into meaninglessness. Faith in God is faith in some ultimate unity of life, in some final comprehensive purpose which holds all the various, and frequently contradictory, realms of coherence and meaning together.”20 This faith, however, is not simply an amorphous acknowledgement of something beyond the merely human. Rather, it is faith in the revelation of God that comes to us through the biblical narrative, and finally in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith, in this respect, is a particular disposition of the person rather than a question of intellectual assent to a set of propositions. Niebuhr sees it not as rooted in a cognitive or deductive process (though both cognition and deduction are elements of a faithful disposition), but rather in the orientation toward trust in something which is larger than ourselves. Here again we can see the influence of Richard’s thought on Reinhold. While he does not use Richard’s formulation of faith as “trust in a center of value,” that conceptualization permeates his discussion of the role of faith in Christian life. It is, as noted above, “ultimate trust.” His invocation of trust in the mystery of God which provides a meaning capable of resolving the mystery of the self resonates with Richard’s conception of faith as a value-center through which our world and its condition are made intelligible to us. Similarly, he frequently appropriates Tillich’s language of God as the “ground of Being” in his writing. However, with Brunner, he is at pains to insist that the faith of which he speaks is not any sort of generalized faith in an unspecified source. Rather, as with Brunner, the faith that is central to Niebuhr’s own thought is the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. This faith gives structure and meaning to human experience in a way that other faiths cannot, because it offers us an understanding of the paradoxical and yet grand condition in which we find ourselves – finite and yet free, fallen and yet redeemed, sinners and yet forgiven. Faith provides the hermeneutical key that unlocks the tragedy and grandeur of human existence while providing an impetus for human responsibility within history and for the sake of society. This can be seen in his discussion of Christ’s identity as the messiah in The Nature and Destiny of Man. The discussion of what it means to understand

Reinhold Niebuhr 71 Christ as both true God and true human, as beyond the limitations of time and history and yet bound by them, to be both unconditioned and conditioned at the same time, are not mere cognitive assertions to which we are capable of offering intellectual assent. On the contrary, our intellect rebels against the paradox of Christ’s identity. Thus he writes: All definitions of Christ which affirm both his divinity and humanity in the sense that they ascribe both finite and historically conditioned and eternal and unconditioned qualities to his nature must verge on logical nonsense. It is possible for a character, event or fact of history to point symbolically beyond history and to become a source of disclosure of an eternal meaning, purpose and power which bears history. But it is not possible for any person to be historical and unconditioned at the same time. But the logical nonsense is not as serious a defect as the fact that the statement tends to reduce Christian faith to metaphysical truths which need not be apprehended inwardly by faith. The relations between “power” and “wisdom” is thereby destroyed because the final truth about life is not apprehended in such a way that the “existing individual” (Kierkegaard) is shattered in his self-esteem at the very center of his being; his insecurity as a finite individual in the flux of time is not robbed of all false securities of power or pride; his anxiety is not heightened until it reaches despair. Out of such despair contrition is born; and of contrition faith is conceived; and in that faith there is “newness of life,” which is to say “power.”21 There is a great deal to analyze in this one passage. At its core however is this understanding of the way in which the very core conception of Christianity – the dual nature of Christ as God and human – demolishes our human self-conception and our confidence in our own capacity to adequately comprehend the world and our place in it. Thus the confrontation with Christ’s messianic identity impels us toward faith as a non-cognitive disposition toward a reality greater than we are capable of conceiving. Once we begin to come to terms with that possibility, we are called upon to reunderstand our own centrality in the grand scheme of things. As Niebuhr says, our “self-esteem” is shattered on that reality. This destruction of our self-concerned ego is what leads us to the contrition which produces genuine faith – again, not as an idea which we affirm or a thought we are capable of analyzing, but as a disposition of trust in God as our center of value. The parenthetical reference to Kierkegaard in this passage gestures toward another significant aspect of Niebuhr’s conception of faith, namely his increasing reliance on the Danish philosopher as a theological touchstone.22 One can see the increased influence throughout Niebuhr’s writings during the period in which he was composing The Nature and Destiny of Man. Kierkegaard’s anthropology clearly influenced Niebuhr’s analysis of sin, which was lifted virtually whole from The Concept of Anxiety.23 And

72  Scott R. Paeth Niebuhr wrote a highly positive review of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript in The New York Herald Tribune in 1941, which read in part: The inwardness of Kierkegaard expresses itself not in introversion to the point where contact with the external world is overcome. It expresses itself in “faith.” And faith is the discovery of God as refuge against the perils of man’s paradoxical existence. . . . All those who think that religious faith is a substitute in the lives of simple people for what sophisticated people achieve by philosophy would learn a great deal from Kierkegaard’s discussion of despair as the ultimate consequence of trying to comprehend the world from the standpoint of the finite self, and of faith as the possibility on the other side of despair.24 In his personal correspondence as well Niebuhr gave credit to Kierkegaard’s influence on his own outlook. In an exchange with Morton White he cautioned against a Hegelian reading of his thought, writing: You accuse me of going back to Hegel’s dialectic when I confront the paradox of responsibility and inevitability in man’s self-regard, but you will remember that Kierkegaard had his own dialectic and that was taken straight from him – I didn’t have to go back to Hegel.25 The Kierkegaardian dialectic which exists between anxiety and faith thus underlies Niebuhr’s analysis of faith. But how is it appropriated? Kierkegaard emphasizes the individual, subjective nature of truth, particularly in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in opposition to speculative and metaphysical theories that seek to contain or eliminate the paradoxes of human nature. Kierkegaard seeks to turn away from metaphysical system building and toward the particular experience of truth – truth internal to the human subject. Thus he defines truth as: “An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.”26 He then goes on to note however, that this is simply another way of referring to faith: But the definition of truth stated above is a paraphrasing of faith. Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still have faith.27 Thus the “objective uncertainty” at the heart of faith is a feature, not a bug. The attempt to overcome it through philosophical proof is to attempt to render faith faithless. Rather, it is that subjective apprehension of the truth of

Reinhold Niebuhr 73 God’s existence that constitutes genuine faith, through which we can accept the absurdity at the heart of Christian faith: “That God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, etc., has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being.”28 This conception of faith permeates Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis in Nature and Destiny of Man. Genuine faith is that subjective appropriation of the truth of the foundational absurdity at the core of Christian faith. Being indemonstrable, it can only be appropriated in a condition of trust in the God of Jesus Christ as the center of value. Thus the dispositional character of faith for Niebuhr is that which enables us to perceive of the truth of Christianity, in opposition to “objective” attempts to find the truth of Christianity as disclosed in reason or nature. It is by going beyond reason and nature that we express the trust which is the heart of faith. Yet faith is not the mere contradiction of experience. Faith “illumines experience and is in turn validated by experience.”29 Yet at the same time, faith is also not mere empty sentiment. Faith is oriented toward its particular object, which in Christianity is the self-disclosure of God in Jesus Christ. As it is the messianic character of Christ’s identity that exposes us to the absurdity of the eternal dwelling within the temporal, and thus the paradox at the heart of faith, so it is that the content of faith is for Niebuhr rooted inescapably in the life, death, and teaching of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God in time and history. Faith becomes the lens through which revelation shines light on human experience, allowing us to understand the natural world, as well as our own nature in a new way. We come to see that the coherence of the natural world “points to a realm of power beyond itself,”30 as well as that we as creatures are both bound by the limitations of nature and yet are also capable of striving toward transcendence.31 Through faith we are capable of seeing that this is neither an illusion nor a contradiction, but is deeply rooted in who we are shown to be in Jesus Christ: We are a mystery to ourselves in our weakness and or greatness; and this mystery can be resolved in part only as we reach into the height of the mysterious dimension of the eternal into which the pinnacle of our spiritual freedom seems to rise. The mystery of God resolves the mystery of the self into meaning. By faith we find the source of our life. . . . This is to say that despite the height of our vision, no man can complete the structure of meaning in which he is involved except as by faith he discerns that he “is known,” though he himself only “knows in part.” The human spirit reaches beyond the limit of nature and does not fully comprehend the level of reality into which it reaches.32 In a similar vein, he writes in The Nature and Destiny of Man: “In this answer of faith the meaningfulness of history is the more certainly affirmed because the consummation of history as a human possibility is denied.”33

74  Scott R. Paeth

Biblical faith and history This connection between the hermeneutical lens of Christian faith and our understanding of the human role in history, Niebuhr argued, is central to the biblical narrative. In the absence of faith, history has no underlying coherence or sense. It is simply, to borrow a phrase from Arthur Toynbee (of whom Niebuhr was fond), “one damn thing after another.”34 Niebuhr, like Toynbee, rejected this view. On the contrary, human history could be seen to have an underlying pattern, but that pattern was, for Niebuhr, ultimately discernible through the eyes of faith. It is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.35 On the contrary: There is, in short, no possibility of preserving the sense of universal history, except by faith, even in a highly sophisticated culture, commanding all the resources of modern historical science. While cultures are integrated, they remain so disbarred that they cannot be easily brought into a single story by empirical correlations. The Biblical faith in a divine sovereignty which unifies history is not merely a primitive conception which cultural progress outmodes. It remains a permanently necessary basis for the idea of universal history. Various religious, philosophical and scientific efforts to fill this wide frame of potential meaning with specific correlations of detailed meaning will of course, continue to be made and must be made. But insofar as they are bound to betray man’s forgetfulness that as a creature of time he is incapable of being completely the master of time, either as agent or observer of historical destiny, they will result in schemes of meaning which will fail to do justice to the whole panorama of the historical scene.36 For history to have a sense of unity, it needs to be ultimately rooted in the sovereignty of God. Precisely by calling into question all human pride and pretension, and exposing every culture and society to divine judgment, is it possible to relativize the particular claims of peoples and nations to the overarching story of God’s action within history. Biblical faith provides a counter to the idolatry of human self-aggrandizement (although even Christian nations are subject to that temptation). In abandoning any such idolatry “it becomes apparent that the real center of meaning for history must transcend the flux of time.”37 History’s meaning can thus only be discovered beyond history, not within it. But the view beyond history is only possible with the eyes of faith, because only with those eyes do we begin to acquire the humility that enables us to recognize that the human powers of reason and science cannot, in themselves, answer the fundamental questions of human existence.

Faith and political progress Nevertheless, this realization does not for Niebuhr demand a retreat into quietism, or a retirement from the active engagement in the struggles for

Reinhold Niebuhr 75 justice within the political realm. On the contrary, the ambiguity of the human situation requires that we engage actively in those struggles, but not with a sense of our own innate rightness, but in the realization of the relativity of our own perspective, and the fragmentary understanding we have of right and wrong in their fullest sense. Thus our engagement in political life itself must be rooted in that faith that there is a meaning and purpose to history beyond what we can know of it, and humility in assuming that our own answers are perforce the correct ones. Faith in narratives of inevitable human progress lead us away from the realization of the relativity of our own perspectives. The various forms of modernity have allowed us to deceive ourselves that the path of progress is a smooth, if not always consistent, upward slope toward a utopian destination. Thus messianic forms of modernity, whether in the form of Comptian scientific positivism, revolutionary Marxism, or other modes of progressive optimism, preach a gospel whereby faith in the human power to rationally control our own destiny will allow us to overcome any obstacles, even those within ourselves. Yet reason, in itself, cannot produce moral progress or social justice. Reason can as easily be manipulated as a tool of evil and oppression as of virtue and liberation. The myth of progress is continually subject to catastrophic setbacks that modernity is incapable of comprehending on its own terms: Most of the explanations of contemporary catastrophe are derived from principles of interpretation which were responsible for modern man’s inability to anticipate the experiences which he now seeks to comprehend. A culture, rooted in historical optimism, naturally turns first of all to the concepts of “retrogression” and “reversion” to explain its present experience. Thus Nazism is interpreted as a “reversion to barbarism” or even as a “reversion to the cruelty of the Middle Ages.” We are assured that mankind has no right to expect an uninterrupted ascent toward happiness and perfection. Comfort is drawn from the figure of a “spiral” development. . . . This spiral version of the concept of progress is hardly more adequate than the simpler version: for both the failures and achievements of advanced civilizations are incommensurable with those of simpler societies. . . . Insofar as comparisons can be made it is idle to regard the tyrannies and anarchies which result from the breakdown of an advanced and highly integrated civilization as preferable to the social confusion of more primitive societies.38 The corruption which accompanies myths of progress and rationality are rooted in the failure to recognize our human limitations and seek a source beyond ourselves – to conceive of ourselves as creatures within the natural world, rather than as masters of all we survey. At the same time, as creatures, we possess a capacity for self-­transcendence rooted in our capacity for reflection.39 As a result, we are not simply subject to nature, but are capable of making history.40 Through the eyes of faith,

76  Scott R. Paeth we can develop these capacities in view of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Through Christ, we can perceive who as humans we are meant to be, and what as humans we are called upon to do. Yet in the absence of faith, Christ is a conundrum that not only cannot make sense of the human condition, but does not make sense in itself: “Nothing is more incredible than the answer to an unasked question.”41 In faith, however, we can participate in the vicissitudes of the historical struggle without arrogating to ourselves the authority to direct it. Rather than retreating into enclaves of communal purity, pursuing a “Benedict option” or striving to live as “resident aliens” within society, Niebuhr argues, “The struggle for justice is as profound a revelation of the possibilities and limits of historical existence as the quest for truth.”42 Here is where Niebuhr’s dialectical understanding of the relation of love to justice connects to these issues of faith and history, for while on the one hand “love is both the fulfillment and the negation of all achievements of justice in history” at the same time “there are . . . obligations to realize justice in indeterminate degrees; but none of the realizations can assure the serenity of perfect fulfillment.”43 As the approximation of love in the midst of our fallen condition, justice calls us to account for our obligation to a transcendent principle beyond ourselves. But our attainment of those principles is always inevitably partial and beset by contradictions. Thus “sanctification in realm of social relations demands recognition of the impossibility of perfect sanctification.”44 Faith permits us to persevere despite that impossibility precisely because we see that the ground of our faith is a source that goes beyond all historical possibilities, and promises a fulfillment that transcends that of which we are historically capable. This leads us from a faith in that which is historically possible to an ultimate faith that extends beyond history.

Faith beyond history Central to Niebuhr’s conception of faith is the recognition that the highest aspirations toward which we as humans strive cannot be realized within history. The greatest follies into which humans have fallen are rooted in the hubris which ignores this fact and attempts to attain fulfillment within the bounds of historical possibility. Thus there is an eschatological horizon against which every advance in human society must be measured. The Kingdom of God stands as a judgment against even our highest attainment. And Christian faith is rooted in the assurance that this Kingdom is not a mere illusion, but is a promise that will be fulfilled. The Kingdom of God as it has come in Christ means a disclosure of the meaning of history but not the full realization of that meaning. That is anticipated in the Kingdom which is to come, that is, in the culmination of history.45

Reinhold Niebuhr 77 The Second Coming of Christ serves as the symbol of God’s love triumphant against human self-assertion and pride. Yet it does not simply seek to abandon history as the venue of human struggle and attainment. Rather, the dialectical character of Christian faith is reflected in the duel character of the Second Coming as a refutation of both utopianism and otherworldliness: Against utopianism the Christian faith insists that the final consummation of history lies beyond the condition of the temporal process. Against other-worldliness it asserts that the consumption fulfills rather than negates, the historical process. There is no way of expressing this dialectical concept without running the danger of its dissolution. The dissolution has, in fact, taken place again and again in Christian history.46 In this respect, we are always subject to the temptation to run too quickly to the resolution of the tensions inherent within history. It is a failure of faith that seeks to either reduce the Kingdom to historical fulfillment or reject the historical struggles for justice and social progress to which Christians are called. The vindication of Christ and his triumphant return is therefore an expression of faith in the sufficiency of God’s sovereignty over the world and history, and in the final supremacy of love over all the forces of selflove which defy, for the moment, the inclusive harmony of all things under the will of God.47 Within the flux of history, we can only catch glimpses of its ultimate meaning and significance. The final meaning of history can only be given through its fulfillment in eternity. Only from that standpoint can it be understood in its totality.48 Faith beyond history is then the assurance that, despite the fragmentary and partial character of our temporal experience, there is an underlying framework of meaning to it as a whole. This faith is rooted directly in the Christian proclamation of Jesus Christ as the disclosure of God’s purposes in history – judging and redeeming us, and leading us to greater approximations of love within the bounds of our fallen condition, but also pointing us to a possibility beyond that fall. In Jesus Christ we see what it is to live faithfully within the tension between time and eternity, and within the context of both our finitude and freedom.

The virtue of faith Virtue for Niebuhr is a somewhat fraught term. Precisely because the human capacity for self-deception can lead us to view ourselves as more virtuous than we actually are, or to interpret our own vices as virtues, Niebuhr treads

78  Scott R. Paeth carefully when considering virtue as a human possibility. In fact, at times “virtue” in the sense of moral purity can be a positive detriment to “virtue” in the sense of acting responsibly in the world. Thus in The Irony of American History Niebuhr considers the paradoxical nature of innocence and responsibility with respect to the nature of our national virtue, writing: “The irony of our situation lies in the fact that we could not be virtuous (in the sense of practicing the virtues which are implicit in meeting our vast world responsibilities) if we were really as innocent as we pretend to be.”49 By deluding ourselves about our own innocence in the world, and our own virtue with respect to the purity of our own motivations in the world, we are actually enabled, as Niebuhr sees it, to act responsibly in ways that a more calculating and cynical nation might not be. But in order to fulfill the responsibility, we must become guilty of evils that run counter to our national self-conception as an innocent nation: The final height of irony is reached by the fact that the most powerful nation in the alliance of free peoples is the United States. For every illusion of a liberal culture has achieved a special emphasis in the United States, even while its power grew to phenomenal proportions.50 Thus the ironic situation in which we find ourselves revolves precisely around these competing conceptions of virtuous action: Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous.51 Thus Niebuhr saw virtue at the heart of the dilemma in which the United States found itself embroiled at the advent of the Cold War. This dilemma was not the kind of thing that could be resolved by the application of a more consistent definition of virtue, precisely because each side of the conflict had a legitimate claim to virtue. What’s more, it was not capable of being resolved by simply appointing virtuous leaders, since any leader, however virtuous, would need to choose between purity of soul and global responsibility. And here is where faith enters the picture for Niebuhr. Precisely because the irony of the situation cannot be resolved by reference to source within history, we are forced to look beyond history, to a resolution beyond our present circumstances, and toward a grace that overcomes our incapacity to resolve the paradoxes of our present situation, and yet in the context of modern life this possibility is excluded. Thus, he writes: A sane life requires that we have some clues to the mystery so that the realm of meaning is not simply reduced to the comprehensible processes

Reinhold Niebuhr 79 of nature. But these clues are ascertained by faith, which modern man has lost. So he hovers ambivalently between subjection to the “reason” which he can find in nature and the “reason” which he can impose upon nature. But neither form of reason is adequate for the comprehension of the illogical and contradictory patterns of the historic drama, and for anticipating the emergence of unpredictable virtues and vices. In either case, man as the spectator and manager of history imagines himself to be freer of the drama he beholds than he really is; and man as the creature of history is too simply reduced to the status of creature of nature, and all of his contacts to the ultimate are destroyed.52 Only faith in a coherence that makes sense of these contradictory patterns can give us the insight into mystery that we require for the sake of sanity. In the absence of that faith, we lack the capacity to understand ourselves, our history, or the responsibilities that we have inherited. Thus the virtue of faith is intimately tied with a realization of our own limitations as participants in the historical drama.

Conclusion: faith, hope, and love In the end, Niebuhr’s understanding of faith as a virtue is tied up with his conception of the necessity of the other two theological virtues, which, as he sees it, are ultimately unified. Faith is a precondition for freedom insofar as it allows us to cope with the anxieties that underlie the human condition. “Hope,” he states, “is a particular form of that faith. It deals with the future as a realm where infinite possibilities are realized and which must be a realm of terror if it is not under the providence of God.”53 Love, meanwhile, is also “a derivative of faith.”54 “In love spirit meets spirit in the depth of the inner-most essence of each” and thus “This ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ relationship is impossible without the presupposition of faith,” since the anxiety provoked by the lack of faith and the meaningless of a universe without God would prevent us from viewing others apart from our own ego-centricity, and thus as mere objects for our use.55 This insight underlies Niebuhr’s most profound statement about the unity of faith, hope, and love in the midst of the ambiguities of the human situation, and particularly the historical ambiguities of political responsibility: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.56

80  Scott R. Paeth

Notes 1 Richard R. Niebuhr, in H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ix. 2 Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1941), 69. 3 Ibid., 132–33. He uses a similar turn of phrase in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1943), 126. 4 Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism, 16. 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1956), 1. 7 Ibid., 2. 8 Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1941), 23. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 29. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 34. 15 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 115. 16 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Mystery and Meaning,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 237. 17 Ibid., 238. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scrivener’s Sons, 1964), 2.61. 22 As Fox notes, “Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety – the existential dread of the human being face to face with his own finitude and moral inadequacy – was the key addition to Niebuhr’s conceptional armor. In his eyes Kierkegaard was a better psychologist than Karen Horney or Sigmund Freud, both of whom attributed anxiety to prior causes, either social or sexual. For Kierkegaard anxiety was primordial, or the deep source from which flowed both human sin and human creativity.” 203. It should be added that it was not only Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety that Niebuhr embraced, but the conception of faith as well. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 23 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 24 Reinhold Nieubhr, “Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” in A Reinhold Niebuhr Reader, ed. Charles Brown (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 138. 25 Reinhold Niebuhr in Ursula Niebuhr, Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 380. 26 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 207. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 211–12. 29 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.63. 30 Ibid., 2.242. 31 Ibid.

Reinhold Niebuhr 81 32 Ibid., 2.243. 33 Ibid., 2.295. 34 Arthur Toynbee, A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols. VII–X (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 267. 35 Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 112. 36 Ibid., 112–13. 37 Ibid., 119. 38 Ibid., 9. 39 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.1. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 2.6. 42 Ibid., 2.244. 43 Ibid., 2.246. 44 Ibid., 2.247. 45 Ibid., 2.288. 46 Ibid., 2.291. 47 Ibid., 2.290. 48 Ibid., 2.301. 49 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 23. 50 Ibid., 4. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 Ibid., 88. 53 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1.271. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 1.271–72. 56 Niebuhr, Irony, 63.

5 Deceptive honesty Myth and virtue in Reinhold Niebuhr Daniel Malotky

Reinhold Niebuhr does not provide us with a theory of the moral virtues. He generally takes the virtues as a given element of the moral life but makes little effort to explain their place in it. In Niebuhr’s treatment of myth, however, we can discern a space for thinking about virtue that does not violate his pragmatic approach to ethics in general. Though he does not fill this space himself, his affirmation of myth represents a drive to the particular, an embrace of tradition, which is compatible with a renewed focus on virtue as a viable Christian approach to the good. He does not articulate a broad relationship between the mythic foundations of tradition and the shape of a virtuous Christian life, but he does describe a moral context in which the tradition can, and should, be used as a moral resource. Niebuhr leaves us with Christian mythology that should be “taken seriously but not literally”, myths that are easily misunderstood when we try to appropriate them uncritically or when we abandon them for a set of rational propositions ostensibly drawn from their storylines. We are to seek understanding, but with a modesty that acknowledges the enduring superiority of the mythic presentation. With a little digging, in fact, we will find that this superiority could best be described as residing in the narrative form of myth, a form that enables the embrace of the indefiniteness associated with the paradoxical – of mystery – though Niebuhr does little to make the connection to narrative explicit.1 Given this hermeneutical framework, moreover, we will see that the virtues represent a particularly apt way of talking about the Christian moral life. Not only does Niebuhr leave room for the virtues, a symmetry exists between Niebuhr’s approach to myth and the language of virtue that might provide a more constructive voice for his ethic. He asks us to live according to moral ideals without pretending that we are in a position to aim at them directly – the same modesty he imposes on our search for truth. Niebuhr describes a conflictual, fallen, moral universe, in which a mature approach to goodness might require our knowing participation in behavior that falls short of the good, but in which that behavior might still be characterized as virtuous. In one of the primary sources for understanding Niebuhr’s approach to myth, Niebuhr even provides an illustration, an example that demonstrates

Deceptive honesty 83 the particular way in which he is open to “virtue talk”. In “As Deceivers, Yet True”, he suggests that our embrace of myth requires honesty of the sort referred to by the apostle Paul.2 Though his resource, here, is not directly mythic, and he readily admits that he might be making more of Paul’s phrase than the apostle originally intended, his move represents a turn to a specific example of virtue in the scriptural tradition that would be in line with contemporary virtue theory. He holds up an example of the virtue needed for our grasp of, and sharing of, the stories that lie at the heart of the Christian faith.3 In typical Niebuhrian fashion, however, he troubles the water. His example is fraught with ambiguity, as is its application to our lives. He provides an example of virtue for a damaged world, suggesting that honesty might require that we “practice to deceive” through myth.

Hauerwas: critique of Niebuhr The most prominent American theologian since Reinhold Niebuhr has argued that this approach is, at best, to hold the Christian tradition and its foundational stories at arm’s length. In fact, Stanley Hauerwas claims that for Niebuhr, the mythical and the ethical fall away almost entirely in his quest to articulate Christian truths in a manner that is palatable for modern sensibilities. Niebuhr’s appropriation of Christianity’s scriptural sources as “myth” matches that of his liberal predecessors, according to Hauerwas. Niebuhr describes an approach to myth that assumes detachment from it, and an alienation from the substance of the tradition as a whole. This is not his intention, Hauerwas acknowledges.4 He nods to Niebuhr’s basic argument: because of the paradoxical nature of the basic truths of human existence, myth is the most adequate means of describing the human condition, the world, and humanity’s relationship to the Divine. Myth is able to present a “coherent” picture without “the abortive necessity of relating all things to each other in terms of immediate rational unity”.5 Myth is needed, because its description matches the non-rational (which is not to say “irrational”) character of human existence and our relation to the Divine. But Niebuhr’s support for the role of myth, Hauerwas claims, is undermined by his attempts to validate the embedded truths.6 Hauerwas’ argument seems to be as follows: Niebuhr may claim that myth is indispensable as an expression of the paradoxical, but in fact, he finds little use for it once the truths have been extracted. Further, the truths revealed about the paradoxes of human existence seem to be no different than those that can be discovered through careful introspection or a keen observation of history.7 In his quest to show that Christian truths resonate with our (contemporary) experience, Niebuhr strips biblical stories of their necessity as frames for properly understanding the world. Though Hauerwas agrees with Niebuhr’s notion that myths should be taken seriously, but not literally, he questions the extent to which this

84  Daniel Malotky balance can be maintained if myths are only understood as symbolic representations of universal truths.8 If one can grasp the truths independently, and the value of the myths is found only in their expression of these truths, what grounds does one have for Niebuhr’s seriousness? Indeed, what does any traditional representation, in thought or practice, have to offer that cannot be found elsewhere?9 Hauerwas claims that the problem finds an echo in Niebuhr’s ethic. He suggests that the law of love, which Niebuhr calls the “end term of any system of morals”,10 has a suspiciously liberal caste. It harbors little of the substance that Hauerwas associates with the virtues. Because Niebuhr establishes such narrow ground for the value of the substance of myth, he draws precious little moral substance from the narrative tradition to inform one’s understanding of love. For Niebuhr, the law of love is discovered in the interplay of freedom and finitude within the self. With a capacity for self-transcendence that is always rooted in nature and history, we are driven into the world of the other, socially as well as intellectually, where the other must be seen to possess a significance that cannot be reduced to a function of our self-realization.11 As a result, Hauerwas argues, the law of love seems to demand little more than humility and tolerance.12 It involves a respect for the individuality of others as this is expressed through the paradox of finitude and freedom that defines us all. These are virtues, of course, but they are procedural in nature. They may serve nicely as groundwork for life in a liberal society, encouraging us to deal with human differences, but they provide little guidance in defining the particularities of the good life, much less a shared understanding of the good life.13 Niebuhr’s discussions of the substantive moral ideals associated with the Christian tradition tend to take the form of arguments about why they cannot be followed perfectly. “As Deceivers, Yet True” would appear to be a case in point. The title does not refer to a simple rhetorical conceit. Following his reading of the apostle Paul, Niebuhr seems to claim that deception is required in our sharing of the truth in a finite and fallen world, but we will return to this idea later. Far from prescribing a particular way of life or a concrete set of moral commitments, Niebuhr’s ethic only “names a change in attitude”, according to Hauerwas, “such that we learn to accept that the way things are is the way things have to be”.14 Hauerwas points to Niebuhr’s tolerance for violence, even war, as the definitive example of his departure from anything that could be identified as a Christian ethos. We might conclude, with Hauerwas, that Niebuhr’s model of liberal detachment leaves little room for the development of moral character. How can one embrace the discipline required to develop a tradition’s virtues, not just talk about them, if one’s only apparent attitude toward the tradition is that of critique? If formation within a tradition requires some type of submission, Niebuhr would appear to describe an attitude toward myth that

Deceptive honesty 85 precludes the development of a substantive moral life defined by the virtues of that tradition.

An alternative reading Kevin Carnahan wisely asks us to acknowledge some inconsistency in Niebuhr’s work but suggests that a sympathetic interpretation is still possible. He identifies the root of the problem with a “modernist” strain in Niebuhr. Despite the fact that Niebuhr tries to define his own position in contrast with liberal predecessors, he sometimes appears to leave the individual in a position of essential alienation – from the world, the Divine, and the traditions that might bridge the gap – due to epistemic and linguistic barriers.15 Pre-scientific myths, reflecting a limited understanding of the natural world, inevitably present a falsified understanding of that world in order to point toward the Divine. But they only point, or one might say that they only serve to demonstrate our alienation through their falsifications. The problem is typified by Niebuhr’s use of terms like “primitive” to describe the Christian stories, as in “As Deceivers, Yet True”. The term moves their prescientific quality toward the center, calling to mind all of the problems that led liberal interpreters to distance themselves from their face value. Their primitive qualities stand as impediments to faith for those with access to modern science. One must, therefore, struggle to retrieve and display the valuable elements of Christian myths for a new era in spite of their fanciful trappings. The liberal aversion to the parochial leaves the individual alienated from herself, from others, from her traditions, and from God. Carnahan, however, argues that this only represents one strain of Niebuhr’s thought. He also displays an Augustinian/Kierkegaardian side. In this arguably dominant strain, the basic problem of human existence is not the stubbornness of insurmountable limitations, ironically (and incoherently) recognized from the standpoint of a universal observer. The basic problem is that we are tempted to believe that the position of the universal observer is attainable in the first place. At the other extreme, we are tempted to deny that meaningful reflection is possible at all. We are tempted to deny our limitations or succumb to them. The corruption of the human condition does not find its summation in the limitations that leave us feeling alienated. The corruption, and its potential resolution, lie in our response. Too often, that response evinces pride or despair. We must move past our sense of alienation toward involvement and relationship, to the embrace of particularity without denying the freedom presupposed in developing an awareness of our particularity in the first place. On one level, we see a liberal, dualist, side to Niebuhr – which ultimately tends to subordinate, or even deny, human particularity and all that goes with it – and on the other, we observe Niebuhr’s refutation of dualism

86  Daniel Malotky represented by his embrace of the paradoxical, which emphasizes both the homeless and the embedded character of humanity. Niebuhr’s embrace of myth as myth A heavy weight is thrown in favor of this more complex reading when we recognize that in “As Deceivers, Yet True”, he does not only warn us away from the “primitive” in myth.16 Interpreting a story literally is not the only error on his mind. He begins the piece with a broad analogy. Christians are obliged to falsify, as indicated in Niebuhr’s reading of Paul’s phrase, much like landscape artists create an illusion of depth or portrait artists capture much more than a moment in time. They do so, nevertheless, in the service of truth.17 The portrait will not be a simple replication of the subject’s appearance as they sit before the artist, but the differences may be revealing of the subject’s character, their history, or their emotional state. Hauerwas seems to suggest that for Niebuhr, the primitive garb of religious myths are the falsification and the primary barrier to myth’s acceptance, unless we can learn to appreciate their symbolic quality, but Niebuhr’s analogy suggests that the “deception” of myth runs deeper than whether it defies modern scientific explanation. Niebuhr examines the insuperable problems of taking the stories at face value – the creation, The Fall, the virgin birth, the death of Jesus, and his projected return. Doing so leads away from the truth. Avoiding this mistake presumably leaves the “deceptive” quality of the myth intact. For Niebuhr, we also stumble when we leave the story behind, in a typically liberal fashion, reaching for the universal with rational abstractions gleaned from the narrative field. We should not believe that the world was literally created by God in seven days, for instance, but a thoroughly rational account of an omnipotent creator God leads to occasionalism, in which every historical event is asserted to be the direct result of God’s will.18 The Fall, also, was not an historical event. Following Kierkegaard, Niebuhr calls it “the presupposition” of “any concrete human act”,19 but rational reflection on human evil tends to explain evil away, failing to account for its rebellious and stubborn quality by interpreting all wrongdoing as mistakes or the result of ignorance that can be avoided through education.20 External descriptions such as these, according to Niebuhr, are “always deterministic”21 because reason cannot account for the relation of the Divine to the world, nor can it account for human freedom, without precluding the possibility of meaningful human life it seeks to explain. Divine engagement and human freedom defy explication. Our attempt to explain the particularities of the world are bound to exclude freedom, for instance, since our understanding depends on our observation of causal relationships between phenomena.22 This cannot help but produce a deterministic picture, because once a sufficient cause has been established for a given effect, there is no conceptual room for human agency in any significant sense. There is only

Deceptive honesty 87 room for an increasingly complex set of causal factors to be included in the calculus.23 Occasionalism or rational analyses of human evil might “make sense”, but they undermine the possibility of meaningful human life by denying the possibility that we have significant choices in the first place. Again, he suggests that while “theories of substitutionary atonement which outrage the moral sense”,24 based on a simplistic reading of the texts, are the sort of primitive reading that we should rightly discard, such literalism is not the only problem. The modern world is not mistaken in rejecting such interpretations, but then it proceeds to reject the notion that atonement is needed in the first place, and falls into what might be an even worse error with overly optimistic assumptions about our capacity to solve our own problems.25 “Every mythical idea contains a primitive deception and a more ultimate one,” Niebuhr proposes, referring to these literalist and liberal interpretations.26 Both are reductive, and both are “errors” to be avoided,27 though the chapter is formed around the positive value of deception in order to display the truth. In one especially obvious example of this apparent conflict in his thought, Niebuhr identifies any attempts to deny the conflict that marks human history – with a single victory over evil, or through an escape to otherworldliness – as acts of oversimplification,28 but then he immediately argues that Christian truths “cannot be stated without deceptions”, and that “truths which seek to avoid the deceptions are immeasurably less profound”.29 We might lend some clarity to Niebuhr’s thinking on this point if we refer to the literalist and liberal approaches as errors, and not as deceptions, reserving the latter term for the positive quality of myth to display the paradoxical. “The truth that the Word was made flesh outrages all the cannons by which truth is normally judged. Yet it is the truth”.30 The story of Jesus illustrates this truth in a way that doctrinal reflection on the story cannot and literalist approaches miss. The doctrine of the two natures of Christ describes an absurdity – the entry of the eternal into time and the compatibility of the conditioned with the unconditioned in a single personality. It cannot be stated “without outraging every cannon of reason”.31 Literal readings of Jesus’s birth, on the other hand, lead to suggestions that Jesus was half-human and half-Divine, as though he had an equal number of human and Divine chromosomes. Both errors divorce themselves from the myth as myth. The literalist interpretation embraces the particularities of the story as history, as though the myth’s significance is completely identified with, and exhausted by, its factuality. It ignores the story’s reach toward the universal, the symbolism that points beyond our epistemological horizons. Liberal errors leave the particularities behind for rational abstractions. These also lose the sense of mystery, of the paradoxical, in the search for thoroughly integrated, consistent, explanations.

88  Daniel Malotky And so, Niebuhr returns us to myth. We should not reduce the stories to facts, on the one hand, or abstract theological statements, or the other. In connection with the saving work of Jesus, for instance, the various theories of the atonement espoused over the course of the church’s history are all problematic. Niebuhr claims, There is in fact no theory of the atonement which is quite as satisfying as the simple statements of the vicarious death of Christ in the Gospels. This may mean that faith is able to sense and appropriate an ultimate truth too deep for human reason.32 The central idea of the chapter is that myths employ deceptions positively by illustrating a world marked by human freedom and our relation to the Divine, truths that are paradoxical when stated in propositional form. Myth points beyond the history that it recounts, and it does not face the abortive imperative to make complete sense of everything. It can “carry” ideas that are paradoxically related. This, we might argue, is its deceptive quality, much like a three-dimensional effect in a two-dimensional drawing. We fall into error when we try to reduce the myth to history or discard the narrative in favor of supposedly rational propositions discovered there. We cannot avoid attempts to understand what the myth says, but we can avoid the problems associated with error if we always return to the myth from which our explanations arise. This epistemological modesty, however, does not only characterize our attempts to understand the contents of myth. For Niebuhr, it should be a feature of all our claims to knowledge. Although some of his genius lies in his ability to construct forceful, declarative arguments – insight conveyed with the voice of authority – he conspicuously steers away from arguments that would place their author outside of history. Although he does not ask us to abandon what we can know through reason or experience, his efforts are clearly intended to fall short of proof.33 Instead, Niebuhr relegates himself to pragmatic defenses of his position. Christian myth is not only important, it is necessary for a proper grasp of oneself, the world, and God.34 Relegating his own rational arguments to the role of a “negative apologetic”, for instance, he seeks only to expose the self-contradictions of rival positions.35 In fact, his negative apologetic, fully developed in the first volume of Nature and Destiny, should be interpreted as a direct expansion of his argument in “As Deceivers”, suggesting that any attempt to provide a consistent explanation of the world falls into absurdity if it fails to acknowledge its own limitations. Any explanation based on external causes, as we have seen him suggest, results in a denial of the human freedom that would make sense of our ability to articulate a meaningful explanation in the first place. On the other hand, any description of the world that incorporates freedom, Divine or human, as a causal factor, or that assigns such freedom to the

Deceptive honesty 89 author, cannot properly account for particular relationships between things. It can only trade in general terms that do not actually describe the specific realities that we face, or it violates its own terms by importing details for which it cannot readily account. Either way, it fails to acknowledge its own particularity, its own reality in a specific time and place. This is why Niebuhr concludes that rational analysis points to its own limitations, if pursued honestly.36 Those who seek to deny the paradoxical and the circumspect quality it lends to our arguments end up turning “sense into nonsense”.37 They betray themselves into absurdity by “relating all things to each other in terms of immediate rational unity”.38 Niebuhr does not mean for us to sever our ties with reason. He wants us to see its inherent boundaries. The paradoxical nature of the self and the paradoxical relationship of the Divine to the world are not markers of an unintelligible world, but signals that the intelligibility comes at a price. It underlines the inadequacy of discursive approaches to concrete thought and action. We can describe the interplay of freedom and finitude, of time and eternity, of Divine transcendence and immanence, in general terms, but the immediacy of human choice and action or of God’s relationship to the world ultimately defies rational analysis. Niebuhr is equally circumspect about experience as a foundation for knowledge. We must acknowledge that Niebuhr describes a common human experience, which he claims is both a personal, but also a general, revelation.39 This is to say that we all have it, but we experience it individually. In “As Deceivers”, he relegates this general revelation to our encounter with creation: or better, our experience of the world as a creation, the sense that the motive force and meaning of the world must lie, somehow, beyond it.40 This is more of an experience of what we lack, however, as anything we can know. To the extent that it is an experience of something, it echoes the argument from the negative apologetic. It is an experience of our ultimate finitude. To the extent that it is universal, it is too general. Either approach suggests that it has nothing substantive to say. Yet Niebuhr complicates this charge with the argument we have already seen him pursue, that is, along the lines of the requirement to account for the particularity of this world and ourselves in it but also the freedom of the Divine and ourselves as agents. We cannot properly describe God, the world, or ourselves by naming what occurs, by connecting the dots, no matter how sophisticated our connections become. A knowledge of God which depends only upon a study of the behavior of the world must inevitably be as flat as the knowledge of any person would be, which depended merely on the observation of the person’s behavior. The study of human behavior cannot give a full clue to the meaning of a personality, because there is a depth of freedom in every personality which can only communicate itself in its own “word.” That word may be related to an analysis of behavior and become the

90  Daniel Malotky principle of interpretation for the analysis. But it is not the consequence of the analysis. Without such a word the picture of any personality would be flat, as the interpretations of the divine which eliminates revelation are flat.41 A word, a self-disclosure from the agent (human or Divine) is required for insight into its true character because of its freedom. We can see myth, then, as this special revelation of the Divine, the Divine Word. In fact, he sometimes seems to suggest that the Word associated with Christianity might represent a special epistemological category, an “end run” around our limitations. In “As Deceivers”, for instance, he claims: The whole character of the Christian religion . . . asserts that God’s word is relevant to human life. It declares that an event in history can be of such a character as to reveal the character of history itself; that without such a revelation the character of history cannot be known. It is not possible to arrive at an understanding of the meaning of life and history without such a revelation.42 He echoes these thoughts when he writes about revelation a few years later, but it is worth noting that for Niebuhr, this special revelation is historical. It is public. It is rooted in characters occupying time and place, through a story that is shared. He stresses that the Christian stories of the Bible must be supported by general revelation, ordinary human experience, to be recognized in the first place. It might be argued that the content of a personal experience which can be defined only through the aid of a more historical revelation of the nature of the divine, which enters this experience, while this historical revelation can gain credence only if the personal experience is presupposed, is so involved in a logical circle as to become incredible. But the fact is that all human knowledge is so involved.43 Special revelation does not escape the vicissitudes of experience. It is a rooted and shared experience, elevated through mythological expression, through which faith recognizes the character of history as a whole. It reveals, but it depends on faith for this designation, a denotation that grows out of its resonance with the rest of our limited apprehensions of the world in which we live. Special revelation comes to us in the form of myth, but the truths of any myth do not knock us over the head and drag us by the hair back to their cave. They are not self-evident or unassailable. Once recognized, they give us a purchase on the rest of our experience, but the rest of our experience enables us to recognize them. Niebuhr seeks, not to escape the limitations of our experiential knowledge, but to emphasize them. His sense of the limits of our capacity to know

Deceptive honesty 91 is not entirely dissimilar to Hauerwas’ own position. Here is Hauerwas, explaining the importance of narrative in his early work, The Peaceable Kingdom: To know one’s self, one cannot but make claims about the kind of world in which selves are able to exist. Neither God, the world, nor the self are properly known as separate entities but are in a relation requiring concrete display. That display takes the form of a narrative in which we discover that the only way to “know” God, the world, or the self is through their history.44 Though we might balk at the notion of Niebuhr as a narrative theologian, one could argue that the key feature of Niebuhr’s myth must be its narrative form. Narrative does not face the need to define abstract limits for freedom or finitude, time and eternity, etc. It creates the appearance of freedom and limitation of characters in motion. It displays God’s involvement in, and transcendence of, history. These displays are a “deception” because, articulated as propositions, the ideas encountered are inconsistent. They are true because they give us a better grasp of our situation as a whole than either a myopic literalism or a consistent rationalism ever could. The characters within a story are not free, for instance, but surely one of the hallmarks of a good story is the extent to which it can execute the appearance of agency successfully. The characters’ actions must be grounded to be understandable, but they must not appear to be predetermined. Myth preserves the undefined nature of the paradoxical interplay between freedom and finitude, between transcendence and immanence, between eternity and time. Without this indefinite interplay, the dramatic impulse that moves the story forward, that imbues it with the potential to be meaningful, would drop out.45 A God that is conceived in complete identification with history, or who is completely separated from it, leaves no room for a story about the world that would be meaningful to the characters involved or to whom the story is told. Characters without freedom, in a world completely dominated by the Divine Will, for instance, would be a context with no meaningful choices through which to exercise their agency and responsibility. Completely free characters, on the other hand, would be unintelligible, having no ground on which their actions could be understood. Within an assumed context of meaning, the uncertain sorting out of the limitations that a person must or should accept, and what she can and should overcome, constitutes a given story as a narrative, as something more than a listing of a random series of events.46

The opening for virtue and the example of honest deception Whatever points of contact we might find between Niebuhr and theologians like Hauerwas on narrative, there are obvious ethical differences. Niebuhr does not leave us safely within the mythic boundaries of a narrative-formed

92  Daniel Malotky tradition. We are constantly stepping outside it, even as we seek to understand and embrace it, and so we cannot look for the shaping of our character by an insular narrative community. Niebuhr, at least, does not go there, and we cannot expect to find an untroubled foundation for virtue if we do. Niebuhr denies us the comforts of a relatively closed community whose horizon is defined by its mythological narrative base, but neither is he asking us to piece together the ragged shards of a tradition that has been shattered in an Enlightenment apocalypse, ala Alasdair MacIntyre. The central myths of the Christian tradition, for Niebuhr, remain as a touchstone of our theological reflections and a permanent reminder of the limits that mark those reflections. This centrality comes at the price of forfeiting complete rational consistency, but the paradoxical limits of human understanding are an unavoidable feature of any attempt to know our world as a whole, not just a quirk of the truths found in myth. The narrative form, however, enables myth to handle the paradox of freedom and finitude through which we experience our limits, but also through which we recognize God’s action in history as such, as revelatory. This is not a simple embrace of tradition, but it is an affirmative turn to the particularities of tradition nevertheless. Both as a function of his general emphasis on human finitude and his parallel centering of myth, Niebuhr points to the unavoidable nature of our rootedness, but also suggests that it is only through these particular roots that we might encounter the truth, that we might discover the good. It is here that Niebuhr leaves room for us to wield the language of virtue. He is anxious to warn us away from the tendency to reduce the biblical stories to simple morality tales, especially those about Jesus, but that need not be interpreted as a denial of the moral significance of the Bible. All of the usual tropes connected with virtue ethics might be affirmed here: the notion that biblical stories give shape to a community, the Church, that in turn give shape to individual Christians; that the biblical tradition provides a host of virtuous examples after which we might pattern ourselves, following the discipline we assume as a follower of Jesus Christ; that the specific virtues associated with the tradition develop, over time, a specific type of character. Given Niebuhr’s emphasis on our finitude and the importance of myth, he would agree that this is a reality we must accept. Though we might use different means of describing it, much of who we are is given to us. Our embrace is a matter of acceptance of what is. We do not claim this reality in a vacuum. And yet, at some point (or many points) in our lives we are asked to claim it, or reclaim it, for our own. With that claim comes critique, growth not only within, but beyond the tradition, potential changes to our moral discipline, or even rejection of moral examples that we can no longer associate with the good. The language about virtues, biblical or otherwise, provides both the grounding and the flexibility to handle this enduring tension in our efforts to learn the truth and achieve the good. And virtue theory itself occupies

Deceptive honesty 93 the same space as any other attempt to understand the world around us, whether our point of departure is traditional myth, reason, or experience. These attempts are limited, but unavoidable and necessary. What is required of us is not rejection, but some modesty in their use. If we approach virtue theory as a limited construct for understanding our moral lives, rather than as the wholly sufficient truth, we will find virtues within the Christian tradition to uphold as best we can, to which we might bend ourselves. This is, in fact, precisely what Niebuhr does in “As Deceivers”. Niebuhr looks to a reading of Paul as an example of what it means for a Christian to be honest. Niebuhr’s Paul demands an approach to the virtue of honesty which acknowledges that the truth, especially the truth about our relationship with God, is not a set of propositions that we can comprehend or convey simply. The truth must meet us where we are, and we must bring it to others where they are. Our approach must carry the weight of the paradoxical, and so we must employ “deceptive” means like narrative that can illustrate the truth without exhausting the sense of ultimate mystery to which it points.47 Hauerwas’ concern with Niebuhr’s ethic has to do with the extreme disjunction between the ideal and the real, a disjunction that Niebuhr frankly likes to highlight, and therefore has some merit. But seeking to understand our approach to the good through the virtues exhibited in the biblical stories, and the Christian tradition as a whole, can put some meat on the bones of Niebuhr’s law of love. His stark picture of moral failure, set in relief by the ideal of love, may have been appropriate to an age of unfettered moral optimism, but Niebuhr also shows himself to be willing to engage in constructive ethical reflection. We are left with the job, in an age of moral cynicism, of filling out this constructive effort. This also suggests that we approach our own efforts with some grace: forgiving the limitations we find in virtue theory, and our own tradition, and using what we can. This means that our actual behavior will vary depending on our circumstances, though still tied to a pursuit of the good. Contrary to the implications of Hauerwas’ charge that Niebuhr’s virtues – humility, tolerance, and we can add honesty – tend to be procedural and lacking substance, we should point out that all virtues, considered in themselves, have an open, unshaped quality. They gain their substance in the interplay of the various virtues that are brought to bear on particular situations. Depending on the state of our moral development and the situation in which we find ourselves, the virtue called for will express itself in different ways, ways that will not always fit an “objective” moral standard. Niebuhr’s understanding of myth and his approach to morality are joined in his discussion of honesty. Telling the truth “objectively” might not actually be very virtuous, if honesty requires a more nuanced account of the thing being described. With notions of the Aristotelian mean floating in the back of our head, we can argue that service to the truth – honesty – requires a balance between the avoidance of false reporting, on the one hand, and

94  Daniel Malotky tactless bluntness on the other. To understand what honesty requires one must also take into account one’s other moral obligations in the particular situation. Perhaps a leader should not lie, for example, but she might be required to withhold parts of the truth because of a duty to protect interested parties who she represents. Niebuhr also casts honesty – honesty about ultimate things – as a mean: between the flatness of reducing truth to a set of given facts and the ultimate absurdities of abstract propositions. One vice clings to the story. The other discards it. They are deceptive in the sense that they can only be maintained by fooling ourselves. They are deceptions into error, but they also generally exhaust our direct approaches to knowledge. Honesty, therefore, requires the use of “deceptive” modes of expression in order to convey truths that transcend the factual and defy consistent expression.48 Viewed in this way, the moral quandaries in which we often find ourselves embroiled look less like perversions of the moral ideal and more like the kind of dogged service to the good that Niebuhr actually advocated. In the midst of uncertainty, with many different moral considerations for which to account, we are called by Niebuhr to pursue the good anyway. We might get our hands dirty in the process. We might even sink knee-deep into the mud, but if we are acting in service to truth and goodness, we are to carry on. Of course, this is a recipe for our approach to the moral life as a whole, not just our approach to honesty, or even just to virtue. We should work to define our duty, to define the good, to define the virtuous life, to mine the wisdom of the ages found in the mythic sources of our tradition as best we can, acknowledging that our best will always be limited in some fashion. We should strive to live up to those standards as best we can, acknowledging the conflicted circumstances, some of which we have created ourselves, some of which are the product of the very tradition with which we align, that often frustrate our attempts to be fully good, to be in the right, and to develop a virtuous character. Like our epistemological limits, our moral limitations highlight the need for a way to take a hold of our lives in a way that is not dependent on our achievement of the moral ideal. Service to the good is not sustainable without a broader frame that helps us make sense of our continued service in spite of our limitations and failures. Niebuhr points to the Gospel message: a mythic story of Divine incarnation, death, and eventual triumphant return. It is a story of Divine love and forgiveness, asserting that the conflict and rebellion of this world are not final. Without this self-disclosure, this Word of Divine Grace recognized in faith, the moral task that Niebuhr sets before us would be too difficult to bear. The uncertainty, the apparent lack of progress or even backsliding, which are all-too-much a part of our experience, would crush us. The Word of God is a revelation of love, an assurance that the purpose and worth of our lives are founded on an unshakeable Divine embrace, not on order or justice. Ironically, this assurance frees us to bring some

Deceptive honesty 95 intelligible order to our lives and to seek justice in the world, not as a means to validate our life’s meaning, but as humble seekers of the true and the good. With this assurance we can face up to the depth of our limitations and not quail before the height of our responsibilities. It is with the Grace of God that we are freed to lead graceful lives ourselves.

Notes 1 When he deals with specifics of the argument, on the contrary, his discussion of this issue tends to muddy the water, as we will see. 2 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), xi. Since this essay began its life as a sermon, as did all of the essays in Beyond Tragedy, we might surmise that although Niebuhr does not engage virtue theory as a scholar, he was clearly willing to talk about specific Christian virtues as a pastor. If so, this only serves to underscore the point. He moves from traditional resource to a discussion of honesty in a way that contemporary virtue theorists should recognize, though they might not like his characterization of the virtue itself. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 109. 5 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1963), 16. 6 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 109. 7 Ibid., 127. 8 Ibid., 128. 9 Ibid., 130. 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 1:295. 11 When he claims, “The law of love is a requirement of human freedom,” however, we should understand “human freedom” to mean “freedom paradoxically tempered by finitude”. Clearly Niebuhr intends to suggest, in the final pages of the first volume of Nature and Destiny, that it is the irrevocable freedom and finitude of the self that leads us to the law of love. He also writes of the love being derived from faith and love of God. Though love of God, for Niebuhr, is the ultimate embrace of the Other, what Niebuhr seems to mean in these passages is not that you must be Christian to understand love, but that love of God must be assumed if our actual attempts at love are to be possible. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:295. 12 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 136. 13 I have argued elsewhere that the Law of Love is not as empty as Hauerwas claims, though Niebuhr does not always do a very good job of articulating this. See Daniel Malotky, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Groundwork for Social Responsibility,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 31:1 (Spring, 2003): 101–23. 14 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 131. 15 Kevin Carnahan, “Reading Reinhold Niebuhr Against Himself Again: On Theological Language and Divine Action,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 18:2 (April 2016): 6. 16 Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 11. 17 Ibid., 4–6. 18 Ibid., 10. 19 Ibid., 11.

96  Daniel Malotky 20 Ibid., 11–13. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 7–8. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 Ibid., 18. 25 Ibid. It is at least a more pressing error for an author who was constantly trying to demonstrate the relevance of the Christian faith. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Ibid., 18. See also page 11, 13. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Ibid., 21. 30 Ibid., 14. 31 Ibid. Niebuhr reads the doctrine of the Two Natures of Christ as a straightforward example of our attempts to rationalize what cannot be comprehended properly. There certainly has been much rationalizing about this idea in the history of the church, but taken on its own, the doctrine of the Two Natures could be understood in a way that is more sympathetic to Niebuhr’s cause. It is constructed in such a way that its challenge to reason and understanding is in the forefront. Like the doctrine of the Trinity, it is boldly paradoxical. The two doctrines stand as warnings against any claim to have understood God completely, against figuring out the meaning of Jesus’ life without acknowledging our basic shortcomings, without acknowledging the mystery before us. 32 Ibid., 18. 33 Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, eds. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1984), 508. 34 Ibid., 134. Thus, when Paul Ramsey suggests that Niebuhr’s law of love is a modified natural law ethic – that is, an attempt to define a universal moral law – Niebuhr acknowledges the ability to interpret his position in this way as a fault, though Ramsey only means to provide an explanation. Intriguingly, the recognition of the fault does not lead Niebuhr to abandon his position, suggesting that he took the weakness to lie in his own articulation, not in the position itself. Or perhaps we see a grudging acknowledgement that he represents an object lesson for his own argument: that we cannot avoid attempts to explain “the way the world really is” despite our limitations. 35 Much has been written about Niebuhr’s cavalier treatment of other authors, and a defense is not intended here, but I have argued elsewhere that we can better understand him if we bypass his interpretations of individual writers, giving the negative apologetic a schematic presentation. See Malotky, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox,” 101–23. 36 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Coherence and Incoherence,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. and intro. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 235. 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1963), 16. 38 Ibid. 39 Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 15. 40 A few years later, in Nature and Destiny, vol. 1, he expands on this notion considerably, though general revelation holds the same relationship of dependence to what he will call special, or historical, revelation as we are describing here. 41 Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 15. 42 Ibid., 14. 43 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1.64.

Deceptive honesty 97 44 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 26. 45 Thus, even stories that assume that the characters have a destiny determined by fate dance around, and away from, the notion that characters lack any freedom. That freedom might be ultimately marginal or ineffectual, as in Greek tragedy or Roman epic, but it must be an operative part of the story. Aeneas does not go straight to Italy. 46 Niebuhr, however, clearly could not use the term “narrative” at all, and certainly not with all of the connotations that have been attached to it by those like Hauerwas. For Niebuhr, human life might be like a story, but it is not actually a story. Narrative is art. It still represents a degree of abstraction from reality, not reality itself. 47 One can imagine other means of upholding the paradoxical. Poetry would be one obvious example, and perhaps the tradition itself, in all of its messy, interwoven, strands. 48 Note the contrast between the flexibility of this framework and the rigidness of Hauerwas’ call for Christians to be non-violent, which prescribes a behavior, not a virtue. Niebuhr’s flexibility on the use of force is a failure, according to Hauerwas, as we have seen, but the language of virtue enables us to understand Niebuhr’s flexibility as adherence to the good in a complicated world, not an abandonment of all moral parameters.

6 The paradoxes of virtue Agape in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr Mark Douglas

Love plays a central, complicated, pluriform, and shifting role in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works – and did so even before a renaissance in studies around virtue and virtue theory shaped attention to love as a virtue. While Niebuhr would have deep suspicions about the utility of virtue theory and the paeans to love-as-a-virtue that have arisen since that renaissance, there are, nevertheless, muted ways of thinking about love in his work that link it to virtue theory, albeit in qualified ways. Qualifiers in place, though, thinking about love as a virtue in Niebuhr’s thought has the potential to open up insights into that thought and, perhaps, even to agapic love, itself. Toward that end, I begin this chapter by clarifying how Niebuhr thought about love and how Niebuhrians, at least, are likely to think about virtue. Such spaceclearing achieved, I offer two interpretations of love-as-a-virtue in Niebuhr’s thought. In the first interpretation, love-as-a-virtue can serve a limited but nonetheless useful political purpose. With Niebuhr’s warnings about the limits of politics ringing in our ears, though, I also offer a second interpretation in which the paradoxes of divine-human relations can structure and stimulate meaningful and loving activity in a complex world.

The messiness of love We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is, according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment.1 The quote certainly sounds Niebuhrian. It is constituted by a clear-eyed realist attentive to the inevitable moral ambiguity of political actions, a quasi-stoic reliance on virtues in the face of finite possibilities, and a weakly framed pragmatic obligation to ends-oriented behavior. It is rhetorically aphoristic, fueled by sets of prima facie antitheses. It gives off an odor of worldly knowingness. And one can imagine it funding political visions as

The paradoxes of virtue 99 disparate as Burkean conservativism, internationalist liberalism, and Machiavellian self-absorption. But the quote is Morgenthau, not Niebuhr – and getting at why it isn’t (and cannot be) Niebuhr is the larger purpose of this chapter on love as a virtue in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. Toward that end, I need to tame the thicket of Niebuhr’s writings on love. Setting aside Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic and some occasional pieces, Niebuhr’s entrance into the world of letters (and love’s entrance into the world of Niebuhr’s thought) is 1932’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. Love’s entrance is brief but notable: It would be well to consider first another moral source of religion. . . . This is the religious emphasis upon love as the highest virtue. A rational ethic aims at justice, and a religious ethic makes love the ideal. . . . Love meets the needs of the neighbor, without carefully weighing and comparing his needs with those of the self.2 Within a few sentences, Niebuhr introduces love as both arising from a religious source and being oriented toward morality more generally; functioning as both a virtue and an ideal; and as being distinct from justice and difficult to distribute. The theological, philosophical, and grammatical snarl of those sentences would, perhaps, be more problematic were it not for the case that love plays only a minor role in the book, occupying fewer than a dozen pages scattered through the book’s 300. Love gets considerably more attention in 1935’s An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, where it sits at the center of Niebuhr’s arguments about the shape and scope of Christian ethics and where Niebuhr first describes it as an “impossible possibility,”3 a phrase that would encapsulate much of Niebuhr’s thoughts on love after 1935. In that book, love is both inviolable law and uncompromising ideal; it is both grounded in the “transcendent unity of essential reality”4 and expressed as human motive; it funds both benevolence and forgiveness. And, more obliquely, Niebuhr introduced terms that he would later connect much more closely to love; namely, harmony5 and self-sacrifice.6 Yet while love is at the center of Interpretation, it isn’t described there – nor can it be understood there – as a virtue. The metaphysical infrastructure that sustains theories of virtue (of which, more anon) isn’t available. Unsurprisingly, Niebuhr wrote most extensively, if maddeningly, on love in The Nature and Destiny of Man. In two volumes, love as agape is both the means by which the transcendent self-empties into human form, taking history upon itself7 and the human self-sacrifice that breaks the self’s overevaluation of itself in order to participate in the full harmony of life with life.8 These are two sides to the same love: kenosis and crucifixion. It draws humanity toward full and universal mutuality (and, one would assume, continues to fund benevolence, though NDM doesn’t give that term the attention offered in Interpretation) and judges humanity for its failures to

100  Mark Douglas live harmoniously. Agape variously completes, opposes, and negates justice9 while also seeming to operate in an entirely different sphere from justice. Given the tensions between love and justice, Niebuhr would seem to suggest that though love takes priority ontologically, justice may take precedence ethically: love is superior, but if someone has to make a moral decision in this world, it’s better to go with justice and feel at least a little guilty about it. One also finds love scattered throughout his occasional writings and other books – so much so that D. B. Robertson could compile an entire book of Niebuhr’s shorter writings and publish them in the Library of Theological Ethics under the title, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.10 In that book, one finds Niebuhr connecting love to justice, natural law, economics, national and international political events of the day, and pacifism. And through attention to such writings, the list of texts, ideas, paradoxes, confusions, blendings, and separations is only extended. In his essay, “Love and Principle in Christian Ethics,” William Frankena sought to clarify the role of love in a variety of authors’ positions. When he reached Reinhold Niebuhr, he all but threw up his hands: “As for Reinhold Niebuhr, he appears to me to suggest, in one place or another, almost every one of the positions I have described; whether this spells richness or confusion of mind I shall leave for others to judge.”11 Given not only the significance of love in his writings but the confusions and frustrations therein, Niebuhr’s interlocutors have always found ample fodder for their criticisms about how he thought about love. Beginning with Valerie Saiving in 1960, feminists have rightly challenged Niebuhr’s emphasis on self-sacrifice as the best human approximation of pure love.12 Emil Brunner argued that Niebuhr was better at criticism than construction because he lacked a theory of justice (and that Niebuhr stole Brunner’s ideas about love and justice).13 Similarly, Paul Tillich thought Niebuhr lacked an adequate explicit ontology and, therefore, had an inadequate implicit one through which to make sense of love.14 Paul Ramsey argued that Niebuhr failed to adequately distinguish between the subjective and material components of love and law, one cure for which would be to “de-adjectify” love.15 And Gene Outka criticized Niebuhr’s understanding of love on a number of fronts: Niebuhr asserts love’s pull more than he demonstrates it; his emphasis on self-sacrifice gives a blank check to the other; he’s too pessimistic about self-love; he doesn’t know how to distribute love among several parties, etc.16 Clearly, any essay about the love as a virtue in Niebuhr’s thought battles uphill against both Niebuhr’s multiplications and his critics’ assessments. One starting point, though, would be to note that neither Niebuhr nor his critics explored love within a virtue theory framework. Treating love as a virtue, after all, has the potential benefit of honoring the messiness of Niebuhr’s thicket of writings on love in at least two ways. First, treating love as a virtue helps us avoid getting caught up in attempts to lexically order,

The paradoxes of virtue 101 analytically clarify, or methodologically de-historicize those writings; as a virtue, love links to other virtues and is beholden to contextually discerned wisdom. And, second, treating love as a virtue suggests that we might gain such wisdom by treating Niebuhr as a model for how to learn about love through both his insights and his mistakes. Yet doing so mandates dealing with the anachronistic qualities of reading Niebuhr through contemporary attention to the virtues and virtue theory.

Niebuhrian suspicions about virtue theory As with any of the chapters in this volume, this chapter must note that the language of “virtue” and “virtue theory” was at a nadir within Protestant ethics at the time of Niebuhr’s writing. He didn’t think of love or any other of his dominant ideas (justice, humility, faith, etc.) as a virtue because no Protestants were doing so at the time; even Roman Catholics of the mid20th Century used such language less than either before or after his writing. It took the writings of scholars like Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas,17 mostly writing after Niebuhr’s death, to reinvigorate interest in virtue theory and virtue ethics as methodologically distinct from the deontological and teleological approaches that dominated the mid-20th Century. Moreover, even as virtue ethics gained vigor, it tended to draw from Aristotelian/Thomist origins and approaches. The idea that one could improve one’s self over time through the establishment of habits of thought and action, ordered by wisdom, motivated by teleologically oriented desires, and reinforced by communities of character would be deeply suspicious to Niebuhr. Capacities for improvement are constrained by the exigencies of history, self-improvement is usually an exercise in self-deception, habits are morally ambiguous, wisdom is undermined by the self’s orientation toward pride (or sensuality), desires are always disordered, and communities pursue their interests, not the good. Dominant contemporary strains of virtue theory in Christian thought tend toward sincerity rather than irony, progress rather than paradox, clarity rather than ambiguity, and communitarianism rather than liberalism. Niebuhr would, perhaps, be as allergic to such virtue theories as Hauerwas is to him. That said, there are forms of virtue thinking that can be distinguished from the dominant Aristotle/Thomas/MacIntyre/Hauerwas approach. Among them would be the broadly Lutheran version defended by Gilbert Meilaender, David Yeago, Robert Benne, Joel Biermann, and others,18 which maintains a degree of modesty about the capacities of human being to develop virtues in light of the unavoidable tension of being simul justus et peccator. Lutheran anthropology, after all, doesn’t treat saint and sinner as binary alternatives or ends of a spectrum upon which one might move so much as it treats all persons as being wholly saint and wholly sinner at the same time. Luther’s focus, therefore, isn’t on what human beings can

102  Mark Douglas do and/or change about themselves; it is about what human beings are. As Meilaender notes, What one is, one’s being, is determined by the divine verdict. That verdict admits of no gradations . . . there is no stress upon self-realization, much less self-mastery. Virtue is not in any sense one’s possession; it is simply a verdict of Another upon whom one must rely. Any stable characteristics which a self may display, any continuities within one’s character, are relatively unimportant.19 The distinction between law and gospel is paramount and the idea that law might ground or be an expression of gospel is, with rare exceptions, absent. Yet, as Meilaender also notes, “[t]here were moments when for Luther [simul justus et peccator] meant: partly saint/partly sinner – moments when he had to recognize that the unity of the virtues was a goal of life, a present reality only in hope.”20 On such a reading, people can change and the development of virtues is the means by which those changes occur. This second version of Lutheran anthropology aligns with a form of virtue ethics in which selves do not so much become different people as learn to see who they really are. Along the way, people learn to live into a gospel that bursts with positive content: human beings are freed into a new way of living and this version of Luther’s doctrinal anthropological claim drives practices. So long as Lutherans continue to prioritize justification by grace alone within the realm of soteriology, they can also find space for sanctification within the realm of ethics: speaking “grace” with a loud voice does not preclude one from whispering “works” when one needs to get something done. Seeing oneself as loved by Christ, “[t]his love expresses itself in deeds that follow spontaneously from faith and no longer from the compulsion of law. Such love is creative and dynamic.”21 All frameworks for thinking about virtue ethics contain three components: a metaphysical component (the sense of a proper end or telos), a psychological component (an internal motivation to pursue that end), and a sociological component (a community to clarify that end and promote it).22 This Lutheran form of virtue ethics contains all three: human beings’ proper end is to recognize themselves as justified purely by grace; they are motivated through grace to act in “creative and dynamic” ways; they shape communities (like the church) that help them recognize themselves and act in response. Along the way, this modest form of virtue ethics offers a way of accepting the paradoxes, ironies, and tragedies of human life and action without falling into either antinomianism or despair.23 Niebuhr’s upbringing in the German Evangelical Church and studies at Eden Theological Seminary (of the Evangelical and Reformed Church) would orient him toward such an approach and, although the ways he would think about paradox, irony, and tragedy (not to mention his theological anthropology) differed markedly from the Lutheranism described here, this modest form of virtue

The paradoxes of virtue 103 ethics is consonant with his thoughts about human behavior – and faith, hope, and love, particularly – and their work in the world.24 Having cleared some space with regard to Niebuhr’s understanding(s) of love and Niebuhrian suspicions about virtue theory, I turn now to the ­project of describing love as a virtue in Niebuhr’s ethics.

Willed blindness and the Red Queen’s vision of love as a virtue Reinhold Niebuhr was a theologian of willed blindness. Human beings, he argued, pursue rich spiritualties of interiority but avert their eyes from the sin they find inside themselves. They seek stability and meaning in history but refuse to see that history is too fragile to contain all the meaning they invest in it. They take up grand projects of social justice but wear blinders to keep from seeing the morally ambiguous qualities of the power needed to achieve it. They build edifices to faith, hope, and love without recognizing that they are building on foundations of sand. Only agape, he argued, can remove the scales from their eyes and only agape will draw them to spiritual fulfillment, abiding meaning, and the Kingdom of God. As noted above, love (or at least agape love, which is the focus of this chapter) is two-sided: from God’s side, it is the kenotic means through which the divine enters into history; from the human side, it is the self-sacrifice through which human beings break their over-attachment to self in order to live in harmony with others.25 A constrained reading of Niebuhr’s thoughts about love would note that from the divine side, agape at very least serves a role in maintaining personal and political relationships. Even as it judges the imperfections of those relationships by always insisting on a better way, its pull keeps the goods of mutual love from degenerating into those of justice, keeps the goods of justice from degenerating into modus vivendi relationships, keeps modus vivendi relationships from degenerating into maintaining a balance of power, and keeps the balance of power from degenerating into chaos and violence. On such a constrained reading, agape keeps things from getting worse even if it does very little to make things better. From the divine side, then, agape-as-kenosis doesn’t function as a virtue. It isn’t a kind of excellence, it isn’t something humans get better at, it doesn’t express itself in practices, and, obviously, it inheres in God, not human beings. On this constrained reading, the human side of agape (self-sacrifice) is at least marginally virtuous. Though the event-focused character of the way Niebuhr talked about self-sacrifice did little to commend it as something that one could get better at through practice, it was something at which one could (and should) practice. And at least to judge from the way Niebuhr thought about Jesus’ crucifixion, it is something that can be done excellently – though the question of whether he thought one could practice at it until one could do it like Jesus did is a different matter (short answer: one cannot).

104  Mark Douglas A turn to Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass may be helpful to make sense of this constrained reading. In that book, the Red Queen tells Alice, “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”26 Scholars of all sorts have picked up on these sentences: physicists use the idea of running to stay in the same place when they describe the limits of light speed in relativistic theory; evolutionary biologists use the phrase, “Red Queen Hypothesis” to offer one description of the way species evolve; and Isaac Asimov used it in his short story “The Red Queen’s Race” to describe the predestination paradox. Here, I would like to suggest that on my constrained reading of Niebuhr’s understanding of the virtue of love, agape-as-self-sacrifice, like agape-as-kenosis, serves as a Red Queen virtue: it fuels people’s moral running so they can at least stay in the same place rather than regress further into inordinate self-love.27 So described, agape-as-self-sacrifice can at least be the sort of virtue that would cohere with a more Lutheran form of virtue ethics. It never lets one escape one’s simul justus et peccator status but practicing at it does let one better discover and understand that status epistemologically and act in light of that understanding politically. It may not necessarily make us better people, but it does help us better diagnose our pathologies and respond to them appropriately.28 There is virtue in this because, paradoxically, there is also a potential for at least a kind of growth in this. Accurate diagnoses not only are preconditions for change; they shape the direction of those changes because accounting for (and even accepting) self-interest still leaves open more and less moral ways of engaging the world around us. Acting in light of one’s awareness of being fully simul justus et peccator is, then, its own kind of virtuous action that is made possible through the Red Queen virtue of love. After all, whatever else agape does for Niebuhr, it at least prevents anyone from being (or thinking they are) wholly justus or wholly peccator alone. Agape-as-self-sacrifice reveals both parameters and the limits of possibilities. It moderates, mediates, and constrains, and although it doesn’t sanctify, neither does it allow for desecration. To paraphrase another classic Niebuhrian aphorism,29 our limited capacity for justice reveals a world populated by human beings rather than gods and our limited capacity for injustice makes it fortunate that we are human beings and not gods. This Red Queen vision of agape-as-self-sacrifice also opens up possibilities for mutual love to function in politically meaningful ways, for although mutual love is less virtuous than agapic love for Niebuhr because it introduces self-interest into the mix, it also recognizes that self-interest can be harnessed toward benevolent if imperfect and temporary ends. Because we are all running to stand still, we needn’t knock fellow runners down in order to get ahead. Instead, we can, paradoxically, pursue self-interest through self-sacrificing actions, allowing us to at least stay in place.

The paradoxes of virtue 105 An illustration may be helpful here: the U.S. is currently as politically polarized as it has been in decades. Not only has the political middle all-but-disappeared, but the two sides look at each other with deep ­suspicion if not outright contempt. While partisanship might be viewed as a good thing in democratic systems (being a precondition for the types of vigorous debate and productive disagreements that sustain robust political engagement by citizens), the toxicity of the current political moment means that such debates and disagreements grow scarce, replaced by talking heads mouthing party lines and unhelpful truisms in public and citizens quoting bumper stickers and tweets in private. Not only politicians but their constituents now appeal to their base rather than trying to persuade those who do not agree with them because the rules of debate and the facts on the ground have, themselves, become contested. Increasingly, U.S. citizens lack either the desire or the imagination to think from other perspectives even as their willingness to demonize and demean others has grown. Yet in a so evenly divided society – one in which national elections are decided by just a few percentage points – it would be to both sides’ advantage to step away from denunciations and condemnations and, instead, practice a bit of political generosity toward the other side. Nobody needs to convince everyone on the other side to switch sides and nobody should think that the other side is monolithic in its position. Convince a few to join you and your own position becomes dominant – and such convincing begins with simple acts of political generosity and friendship: listen to the other; describe her position in a way that she would agree with; consistently remind yourself that he is more than his position. That is, self-interest, when thoughtfully pursued, can drive at least a limited concern for the other.30 Abraham Lincoln, himself no stranger to polarized societies, said as much. In a speech to a Presbyterian temperance society, he urged them to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol rather than condemning them, even if they felt that condemnation was legitimate: To have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation . . . and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature. . . . If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason, and when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.31 To be clear, the purpose of this illustration isn’t to advocate for an agapic form of political engagement in society; for Niebuhr, this would be driven by the concerns of justice more than those of love. Nor is it to suggest that willed blindness can be overcome with a bit of rational thought; Niebuhr would simply point out that it would be naïve to think that reason

106  Mark Douglas and charity are readily available for those so predisposed to will their own blindness. Instead, my purpose here is to complicate the distinction between self-interest and self-sacrifice and, therein, to suggest that even self-interest can be influenced by agape. Said differently, the illustration suggests that in some contexts, self-sacrifice – at least of the sort that is willing to reach out to others in ways that might not be reciprocated – can be driven by selfinterest rather than other-regard. That people can pursue their own good by pursuing the good of others is ironic. That people do not recognize that their own interests may be promoted when they pursue the good of others is tragic. That people, in pursuing their own interests, may discover how to attend to the interests of others is paradoxical. And that people can practice at strategic self-sacrifice such that their own flourishing is more likely is virtuous, albeit probably in a Red Queen way. Or such, at least, is a constrained attempt to treat love as a virtue in Niebuhr’s thought. Yet this approach is unlikely to prove satisfying to many Niebuhrians for reasons that are historical, methodological, and, perhaps, moral. So how might we arrive at a more robust (although still paradoxical) understanding of love as a virtue?

The subtle power of agape as a virtue The version of agape as a virtue described earlier drew a distinction between agape-as-kenosis and agape-as-self-sacrifice. The limits of that version are a product of that distinction: as long as self-sacrifice is the sole lens through which to make sense of love as a human virtue, the possibilities of flourishing arising from love are constrained by the very types of self-interest that Niebuhr found so endemic to human existence. Yet agape-as-kenosis and agape-as-self-sacrifice are not different loves; they are the same love expressed from different perspectives. And because they are the same love, there is room for love beyond practices of self-­ sacrifice and beyond being a Red Queen virtue. Even as agape always judges all other forms of love it still participates in them, both fulfilling and transcending them. This is most evident in the ways that Niebuhr blurs agape and mutual love even when distinguishing them. So, for instance, he writes that “[m]utual love is the harmony of life with life within terms of freedom; and sacrificial love is harmony of the soul with God beyond the limitations of sinful and finite history.”32 At first blush, that sentence maintains a distinction between mutual love and sacrificial love. But a semicolon is a softer separation than a period and, for Niebuhr, “the terms of freedom” are more expansive than “the limitations of sinful and finite history.” Freedom makes it possible for human beings to transcend history, to catch a glimpse of a destiny that sits beyond “sinful and finite history.” More importantly, both mutual love and sacrificial love are ordered toward harmony and harmony is a single thing

The paradoxes of virtue 107 that encompasses differences and particularities without destroying them. As Dan Morris wisely notes, The metaphor of harmony suggests that love achieves a unity in the face of difference, separation, and discordance . . . [and] particularity – including the creative and destructive possibilities inherent in human freedom – is not destroyed in the love relationship. But in love, particularities complement, support, and enrich each other.33 A more capacious understanding of love as a virtue in Niebuhr’s thought begins here. Harmony constitutes a historically achievable (if not universally or constantly achieved) telos towards which love aims. As mutual and sacrificial love blur into each other (especially as one gets closer to harmony), they ground a psychological force that spurs action: we may not want to behave sacrificially, but we do desire harmony and mutuality, even in our sinfulness. So, moreover, do communities since communities that emphasize the pursuit of harmony can, in their own faltering ways, promote processes through which “particularities complement, support, and enrich each other” – and do so because it is the community’s interest to do so. Harmony is an imperfect and unstable good and its pursuit, ironically, can lead to its collapse. But it doesn’t cease to be a good simply because it still participates in the ironies of history. Love exerts a pull in human life and communities’ interest in achieving harmony exerts a push. None of this is to suggest that harmony must be the highest good, that it is or ought to be always pursued by individuals who yearn for its benefits, or that communities always can or should emphasize it as a way of stabilizing themselves against the vagaries of history and enriching the common lives of their members in the face of individual selfishness and collective injustice. Niebuhr would be the first to push back on any interpretation of his work that ignored the human capacity for self-deception (and especially the human capacity to use a good like mutual love in order to cause harm) and any vision of history that treated progress as either inevitable or unambiguous. But no framework for thinking about virtue assumes that the metaphysical component is obvious, that the psychological component is above distortion, or that the sociological component derives from shared sensibilities. Virtue thinkers don’t suggest that the pursuit of virtue is easy; instead, they argue only that contextually attentive habits can lead to selfand societal-improvement when they are guided by wisdom and oriented toward the good. On this reading, agapic love, for Niebuhr, is neither easy nor obvious. It is, though, a virtue. One piece of evidence to support such a reading is Niebuhr’s own life. Were Niebuhr as thoroughgoing a cynic as conservative interpretations of his thought might suggest, his lifelong drive to make a difference in the world would be incoherent. Niebuhr was, after all, tireless in his work to make the world a more just place. And even though the means through

108  Mark Douglas which he would pursue justice might change (as might his understandings of justice), the drive remained. Any references to insecurity, desire for approval, or megalomania as the primary motivating forces in his life not only ignore the way others perceived him but the degree to which he was deeply introspective, mining his own patterns of behavior to help make sense of the way human beings in general behaved. Whether in his early dalliances with socialism, his continued work in ecumenism and interreligious understanding, his defenses of democracy, or his work with students at Union, Niebuhr’s life displays a desire for harmony and, therein, the priority of love. Yet Niebuhr’s own life is not the only piece of evidence available. This reading of love as a virtue also helps make methodological sense of how he related love to justice. As noted above, love and justice are complexly related to each other in Niebuhr’s thought. How can agape complete, oppose, and negate justice while also seeming to exist in a sphere different from justice? In part, the answer to that question is that Niebuhr’s understanding of justice changed over time. Another part of the answer is that Niebuhr refused to treat justice as an absolute good: justice is the working out of provisional solutions to competing claims. And yet a third part of the answer to that question is that justice at least partially mirrors love: “All systems, rules and laws governing social relations are on the one hand instruments of mutuality and community; and they contain on the other hand mere approximations of, and positive contradictions to, the ideal of brotherhood.”34 Niebuhr treats justice as contingent and changing but neither random nor arbitrary. Instead, justice is found in the tensions between goods like equality, liberty, and order. Too much of any one of those can inhibit the other two; too little of any of them inhibits social stability and well-being. And those goods are, themselves, oriented toward love.35 As much as Niebuhr’s writings were dominated by the concerns of justice, his concerns about justice reveal the “Christian” part of his Christian realism because agape never leaves the scenes in which justice is being worked out even if it seemingly lacks a speaking role in those scenes. So, for instance, his criticisms of Roman Catholic natural law (misplaced as they may be) still reveal something important about the way love stays on stage: “The real situation is that ‘original justice’ in the sense of a mythical ‘perfection before the fall’ is never completely lost”36 and the third “Biblical source of a Christian social ethic [is the] passion for justice as an expression of the love commandment.”37 Love’s “pull” on justice was, for Niebuhr, constant. As noted above, Gene Outka criticized Niebuhr for asserting agape’s pull more than demonstrating it: Niebuhr posits the pull without really explaining how we can be aware of that pull. That failing in Niebuhr’s work is real, and there are multiple possible reasons for it. One reason is constitutional: even at his most systematic, Niebuhr never thought of himself as a systematician and his corpus is full of the kinds of lacunae that pervade the work of anyone more interested in relevance and context than continuity and coherence. Another reason is methodological: Niebuhr worked his thought into a

The paradoxes of virtue 109 corner by drawing the history/eternity dialectic in the way he did. Treating them as opposed to each other (and, aside from the Christ event, treating God as existing on the “eternity” side of that dialectic), Niebuhr had to put divine love on the same side of the divide as God. As a result, he could not demonstrate love’s pull because demonstrable things exist in history – which is exactly where God and divine love are not. More importantly in this regard, Niebuhr missed a key insight that scholars like Immanuel Levinas would highlight: eternity, if it is truly eternal, does not start where history ends because eternity, as eternal, does not have a starting point. Instead, eternity encompasses history, including but expanding beyond it.38 That is, Niebuhr misidentified the actual dialectic at work in history/eternity when he treated them as opposed rather than the latter as encompassing the former. Ironically, in this instance, Niebuhr was insufficiently attentive to the paradoxical. Yet these two explanations for Niebuhr asserting rather than demonstrating the pull of agape are not entirely satisfying; they risk treating correlates as causes. A third reason for this failing is theological and has to do with the way Niebuhr thought about Christology. As Paul R. Kolbet points out, Niebuhr doesn’t offer clarity on how to hold realism and hope together because “he never fully succeeded in creating an alternative theological framework that could supply positive theological substance without betraying his realist analysis.”39 That framework, Kolbet argues, should be grounded in a far richer Christology than Niebuhr develops: an Augustinian Christology. While Niebuhr’s modernist interpretive lenses help him see the value of an Augustinian understanding of power and its ambiguities, those same lenses inhibit his ability to see the value of an Augustinian Christology in which God can, mysteriously, be both intimately close to and majestically distant from human beings.40 Niebuhr used categories like “myth” and “symbol” to make sense of Christology and that approach, Kolbet argues, is simply insufficient to produce an interesting and meaningful Christology. The question is not whether the crucifixion reverberates through all of history; both Augustine and Niebuhr thought it did. But for Augustine, the crucifixion’s reverberations carry a kind of agency with them: the crucifixion (and resurrection) continues to do things. For Niebuhr, on the other hand, the crucifixion reverberates as a symbol; it is a model, not a force. As a result, Niebuhr’s intentional severing of classical Christology from politics in his appropriation of Augustine’s realism threatens not only to undermine his efforts to preserve the ethical quality of politics but also his grounds for hope [because Niebuhr’s modern emphasis on myth and symbol] . . . does not provide a strong enough basis for his moral vision, especially in its inadequate vocabulary of material transformation.41 For Kolbet, Niebuhr, the liberal modern critic of liberalism and modernity, could have done with a bit less liberalism and modernism in his Christology.

110  Mark Douglas Why emphasize this third reason for Niebuhr’s failure to demonstrate the pull of agape? Because it achieves several goods pertinent to the argument here. Diagnostically, it not only helps make sense of that failure but grounds its correction in resources that Niebuhr already drew from. The correction need not introduce that which is foreign to his project. Rhetorically, it highlights an irony in the thought of a man for whom ironies have special import. The language with which to assess the failure is organically related to the language of assessment that Niebuhr used. And, morally, it invites attention to processes by which a Niebuhrian might demonstrate agape’s pull – and does so in ways that are both consistent with Niebuhr’s Christian form of realism42 and also fitting for a virtue ethic that is attentive to paradox. Said differently, this third reason for Niebuhr’s failure to demonstrate the pull of agape carries the means of compensating for that failure within itself. If there is space in Niebuhr’s thought to imagine becoming closer to God by practicing the virtue of love toward others (and therein discovering that the God who is love is already closer to us than we are to ourselves), then we need not resign ourselves to choosing between either accepting Niebuhr’s failure to demonstrate the pull of love or rejecting the insights that come with Niebuhr’s impossible possibility. As Kolbet argues, a full-bodied and realistic Augustinian Christology can remind us that “[a]mid the constraints of history, love expands our social intelligence, refines the methods and modes of warfare, and makes the conflict more just and ultimately more effective. Love is a political virtue.”43 Niebuhr should concur. All of which returns us to the non-Niebuhrian qualities of the Morgenthau quote that began this chapter. For Morgenthau, political justice is hermetically sealed, admitting neither to the judgments nor the pull of love. It is a realism constrained within history and funding stoicism rather than hope. It may allow for political wisdom but, absent political love, it remains fundamentally amoral. It is no wonder that Niebuhr would ultimately argue against Morgenthau, writing that, “I do not think we will sacrifice any value in the ‘realist’ approach to the political order . . . if we define the moral ambiguity of the political realm in terms which do not rob it of moral content.”44 At least in Niebuhr’s thought, for Christian realism to be Christian, agape – a political virtue (which is to say, a virtue) – never leaves the scene, expressing itself not only as judge, goad, and goal but through the ambiguities of practices even as they are driven by deep if conflicted longings and promoted by hopeful if immoral communities.

Notes 1 Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 203. Paul R. Kolbet quotes the same passage in “Rethinking the Christological Foundations of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism,” Modern Theology, 26:3 (July 2010): 439.

The paradoxes of virtue 111 2 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 57. 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 117. 4 Ibid., 213. 5 Ibid., 105, 214. 6 Ibid., 216. 7 “The perfect love of the life of Christ ends on the Cross, after having existed in history. It is therefore supra-historical, not in the sense of setting up a nonhistorical eternity as the goal of human life; but in the sense that the love which it embodies is the point where history culminates and ends.” Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 1:164. 8 “Sacrificial love (agape) completes the incompleteness of mutual love (eros), for the latter is always arrested by reason of the fact that it seeks to relate life to live from the standpoint of the self and for the sake of the self’s own happiness.” Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:82. 9 “Love is thus the end term of any system of morals. It is the moral requirement in which all schemes of justice are fulfilled and negated. They are fulfilled because the obligation of life to life is more fully met in love than is possible in any scheme of equity and justice. They are negated because love makes an end of the nicely calculated less and more of structures of justice. It does not carefully arbitrate between the needs of the self and the other, since it meets the needs of the other without concern for the self.” Niebuhr, Nature and ­Destiny, 1:295. 10 D. B. Robertson, ed., Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr in The Library of Theological Ethics. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992). 11 William K. Frankena, “Love and Principle in Christian Ethics,” in Faith and Philosophy: Philosophical Studies in Religion and Ethics, ed. Alvin Plantinga (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 220. 12 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–12. Reprinted in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 25–42. For a widerranging discussion of feminist criticisms of Niebuhr, see Mark Douglas and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, eds., Roundtable Discussion, “Valerie Saiving and Reinhold Niebuhr, 50 Years Later,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (Spring 2012): 75–133. 13 Emil Brunner, “Some Remarks on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Work as a Christian Thinker,” trans. Robert W. Bretall, in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1961), 28–33. 14 Paul Tillich, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Doctrine of Knowledge,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, 36–43. 15 Paul Ramsey, Nine Modern Moralists (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 111–47. 16 Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). 17 See, e.g., Elizabeth Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

112  Mark Douglas 18 See, e.g., Gilbert Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); David Yeago, “Gnosticism, Antinomianism, and Reformation Theology: Reflections on the Costs of Construal,” Pro Ecclesia, 2:1 (Winter 1993): 37–49; Robert Benne, Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the Christian Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). I would note, here, that Niebuhr maintained a complicated relationship with both the Lutheran and Reformed traditions that shaped the ecclesial contexts in which he grew up. 19 Meilaender, Theory, 107. It is worth noting that taken to its extreme, such an approach not only undermines virtue ethics, but any form of ethics. 20 Ibid., 108. 21 Robert Benne, “Lutheran Ethics: Perennial Themes and Contemporary Challenges,” in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, ed. Karen L. Bloomquist and John R. Stumme (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 14. 22 These three components are at least implicitly discussed in MacIntyre, After Virtue, especially chapters 14–16. 23 On this modest interpretation of virtue ethics, a virtue ethic doesn’t need a theory so much as an anthropology. That is, one need not buy into the methodological infrastructure of virtue theory – such infrastructure being rather fulsomely assessed and damned in Charles Mathewes’ essay in this volume – in order to accept the ideas that people can act with intention toward some larger end, that they can be internally motivated toward such action, that such actions take place within the context of a larger community that guides them, and that actions shape their actors. Niebuhr certainly believes those things to be the case (even if such actions are regularly misdirected). The follow-up question – which was also his question – is, “What ends are worth pursuing and how must actors change in order to recognize and then pursue them?” 24 In his chapter in this volume, Robin W. Lovin makes a strong argument for the centrality of the theological virtues in Niebuhr’s thought. I do not disagree with their centrality. I am, though, less persuaded that Niebuhr thought of faith, hope, and love as theological virtues in the traditional Roman Catholic sense than Lovin is. For Niebuhr, faith, hope, and love warrant attention because they are efficacious in making sense of his Christian Realist schema, not because they are infused virtues capable of being distinguished from natural, cardinal, or other sets of virtues. That is, Niebuhr isn’t bowing toward Catholicism when he pens those classic sentences in Irony so much as he is offering what he thinks of as an experientially derived set of conclusions about the way things really are. One bit of evidence for this is the concluding sentence in the series that Lovin leaves out: “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” Not only does the sentence offer an implicit challenge to virtue theory (and, one would think, Roman Catholic understandings of the virtues), but it draws in a virtue (forgiveness) that isn’t typically included in lists of virtues when they’re divided by categories a la Roman Catholic moral theology – and does so in a way that suggests love, as a virtue, not only acts different than even the other theological virtues but is, itself, able to be reshaped in light of the limits of the virtues. As I read the section in Nature and Destiny, vol. I on the theological virtues, the point is neither to defend nor align his thought with Roman Catholic moral theology but to use one small bit of that theology toward his larger purpose. Were the case otherwise, one would expect to see exposition on the theological virtues in Roman Catholic moral theology show up more often and more centrally in Niebuhr’s corpus.

The paradoxes of virtue 113 25 Recognize, here, that because love is one thing, these two sides are necessarily linked, even if not subjectively experienced in the same way by human beings. 26 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 32, PDF form, https://birrell.org/andrew/alice/lGlass.pdf. Accessed January 1, 2018. 27 It is worth noting here that self-love, in itself, isn’t bad for Niebuhr; the problem with it is that human beings practice it inordinately as a response to their willed blindness about how to understand themselves: “Love is the law of [the self’s] being. But in practice it is always betrayed into self-love. It comprehends the world and human relations from itself as the centre. It cannot, by willing to do so, strengthen the will to do good.” Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:108. 28 One strength of the Red Queen quality of agape-as-virtue is revealed in the way it helps make sense of the Niebuhrian claim that self-sacrifice inhibits human tendencies toward pride. Much of Niebuhr’s more theological writings – and especially Nature and Destiny, vol. 1 – have to do with properly locating human beings between Creator and other creatures. For Niebuhr, this liminal location inevitably induces anxiety which human beings (at least individually) respond to by pridefully trying to be more Creator-like and, therein, stepping out of their proper location. That is, Niebuhr used the idea of agape-as-selfsacrifice as a way to keep people in their proper place. While feminists and others have appropriately chastised Niebuhr for the patriarchal assumptions behind his preoccupation with pride, it’s nevertheless the case that pride is, for many people, a force that dislocates them from their proper places in the world – as, for that matter, does self-abnegation. And once we recognize that self-abnegation and pride are not opposites (one can be proud of one’s selfabnegation or feel undue shame at one’s pride), we can begin to see the wisdom of seeing agape-­as-self-sacrifice without either claiming that it is the whole of wisdom or treating self-sacrifice as unambiguously good. Self-sacrifice is one way we stay in place; it’s a kind of ego-control. My thanks to John Senior for highlighting this point to me. 29 The aphorism is, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” It appears in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), xi. 30 The capacity for self-interest to help motivate concern for the other is something like what Dan Morris understands the virtue of mutual love to be in this anthology. 31 Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Conor Friedersdorf, “Why Can’t the Left Win?” The Atlantic Monthly (May 2017), www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/ why-cant-the-left-win/522012/. Accessed May 5. 32 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:78. 33 Daniel A. Morris, Virtue and Irony in American Democracy: Revisiting Dewey and Niebuhr (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 97. 34 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:248. 35 So, e.g., “The principle of ‘equality’ is a relevant criterion of criticism for the social hierarchy, and the principle of ‘liberty’ serves the same purpose for the community’s unity. But neither principle could be wholly or absolutely applied without destroying the community.” Reinhold Niebuhr, “Liberty and Equality,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Political Philosophy and Its Application to Our Age as Expressed in His Writings, ed. Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 176. 36 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Christian Faith and Natural Law,” in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1957), 50.

114  Mark Douglas 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Problem of a Protestant Social Ethic,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 15:1 (November 1959): 11. 38 See, e.g., Immanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1991). 39 Kolbet, “Rethinking Christological Foundations,” 441. 40 See, e.g. Charles T. Mathewes, “Augustinian Anthropology: Interior intimo meo,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 27:2 (1999): 195–221. 41 Kolbet, “Rethinking Christological Foundations,” 442. Whether Kolbet’s vision of Augustinian Christology is, itself, robust enough, given that it is intended to be a basis for “moral vision” rather than moral action, is another question (and one that this essay will not take up). 42 See Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) on the importance of the adjective in shaping the content of the noun. 43 Kolbet, “Rethinking Christological Foundations,” 549. 44 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Response of Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice for Our Time, ed. H. R. Landon (Greenwich, CT: Seabury Press, 1962), 122. Quoted in Kolbet, “Rethinking Christological Foundations,” 439.

7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality Daniel A. Morris

The obstacles that have historically challenged democracy in America – or, better yet, the obstacles that America has put in its own path toward democracy – are not going away. As I write this, in the fall of 2017, white supremacists throughout the United States have become emboldened in the expression and promotion of their values. In August, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in response to the city’s decision to remove monuments to the Confederacy. The spirit of their “Unite the Right” rally was distilled in their panicked chant: “You will not replace us.” The rally resulted in three deaths and around 40 injuries. We continue to exclude people from democratic life on the basis of sex and gender, as well. In October, The New York Times revealed that the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had an extensive history of sexual harassment, which he had covered up in part through monetary settlements with his victims beginning in 1990.1 The report demonstrated that Weinstein, like so many other perpetrators of sexual harassment and violence, could cover up his behavior because of his power and because of women’s fears about speaking up and demanding justice. The “Unite the Right” rally and Weinstein’s open secret of sexual assault point to two particularly stubborn anti-democratic tendencies in American history. As Ta-Nehisi Coates counsels his son, The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government for the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.2 These words, of course, apply just as much to sexual oppression as they do to racial oppression, and just as much to Donald Trump’s America as they do to Lincoln’s. Reinhold Niebuhr had much to say about democracy in America, and so it is fitting to turn to his work in search of answers to these enduring problems facing the people’s pursuit of self-governance. Niebuhr implied that the virtue of mutuality was a necessary quality of character in democratic society. If we, the people, are to govern ourselves effectively, we must possess the

116  Daniel A. Morris virtue of mutuality. As long as American society continues to struggle in its approximation of people rule, Niebuhr’s work on democracy and his reflections on the virtue of mutuality will be relevant. And yet, turning to Niebuhr for guidance on the challenges to democracy and on the virtue of mutuality is a problematic move, because Niebuhr’s work has been criticized for participating in the very forms of marginalization and oppression that exclude people from self-governance. Niebuhr has been critiqued by feminist writers and writers who take up race as a critical category in Christian ethics. They see him as a Christian thinker whose work excludes marginalized perspectives and perpetuates oppression on the basis of race, sex, and gender. These critiques are important, and studies of Niebuhr’s work need to take them into consideration. Engaging these critics of Niebuhr productively can lead to more clear and full understandings of Niebuhr, the virtue of mutuality, and the ethics of democracy. In this chapter I will sketch Niebuhr’s vision of mutuality, consider it in light of an argument shared by feminist, Latinx, and black scholars, and argue that a reconstructed Niebuhrian account of mutuality can be reconciled with this critique.3 First, I will locate Niebuhr’s treatment of mutual love in relation to agape and sin. Mutual love falls short of pure agape in that pure agape demands complete altruism while mutual love is concerned with establishing reciprocal relationships that maintain equality. Due to sin, pure agape is impossible, thus mutual love (tempered by pure agape) takes central stage within historical action. While Niebuhr does not speak explicitly of a virtue of mutuality, against this background it is worthwhile to think about his work on mutual love in terms of virtue. Here we can locate mutuality as an other regarding disposition which yet remains interested in issues of parity and equality. Second, I will consider Niebuhr’s feminist, black, and Latinx critics, who argued convincingly that his treatment of love ignores the kind of self-love necessary to ground human dignity in a fight for liberation. These critics find Niebuhr’s treatment of agape as self-sacrifice to be harmful to those whose self-image is already under attack by oppressive forces in the world. Third, I will conclude by connecting the Niebuhrian concept of mutuality to democracy in a way that is informed by his critics. As suggested in my earlier treatment of mutuality, Niebuhr does have resources for talking about a concern for the self in the midst of a search for more equal relationships. But, especially given his emphasis on the derivative nature of mutuality in relation to self-sacrificial love, is there a way to bring out the centrality of this virtue in Niebuhr’s thought more clearly in order to address the political concerns of Niebuhr’s critics? I start with the premise that Niebuhr is centrally concerned with politics, and specifically democratic politics. Democracy as he conceives of it crucially depends upon the citizen having the virtue of mutuality. Thus, in practice, even more than in theory, mutuality should be treated as a key Niebuhrian virtue. The upshot of this is that we can see that while Niebuhr does give a kind of priority to self-sacrificial love, it ought not to be read as impinging upon the ability to value and stand up for oneself in the context of the push

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 117 and pull of historical political struggle. In the context of historical politics, the virtue of mutuality becomes centrally important, and this virtue requires attention to equality of the distribution of goods in the world.

Mutuality as a Niebuhrian virtue Niebuhr didn’t say much explicitly about mutuality. He did, however, reserve some meaningful space in his writing for the topic of “mutual love.” On the basis of those reflections, it is possible to reconstruct a Niebuhrian account of mutuality as a virtue. Such a reconstruction demonstrates that this quality of character is immensely important in Niebuhr’s vision of civic life, and that there is great potential for productive, democratic engagement between Niebuhr and his black, Latinx, and feminist critics. Throughout his writing, Niebuhr offers remarks about mutual love that are concise and potent. Unfortunately, they are also cryptic and confusing. In The Nature and Destiny of Man, he uses it synonymously with eros.4 On the other hand, in Faith and History, he refers to mutual love as philia.5 And yet, in The Self and the Dramas of History, he claims that mutual love transcends the cool calculations of reciprocity of Aristotle’s concept of philia.6 What is mutual love, according to Niebuhr? Can we salvage a coherent picture of this concept, and from it a picture of the virtue of mutuality in a Niebuhrian key? I think so. Consider this statement on mutual love, which Niebuhr offers in The Nature and Destiny of Man: The same Cross which symbolizes the love of God and reveals the divine perfection to be not incompatible with a suffering involvement in historical tragedy, also indicates that the perfection of man is not attainable in history. Sacrificial love transcends history. . . . It is an act in history; but it cannot justify itself in history. From the standpoint of history mutual love is the highest good. Only in mutual love, in which the concern of one person for the interests of another prompts and elicits a reciprocal affection, are the social demands of historical existence satisfied.7 This brief but cryptic statement shows several important features on Niebuhr’s thoughts on mutual love. Unpacking these different elements will shed light on a Niebuhrian conception of mutuality and its relationship to democracy. Specifically, I want to highlight three features of this passage. First, his reflections on love in general take place within a Christian theological framework in which agape is the highest moral norm. When he refers to “sacrificial love” in this passage, he is referring to the Christian ideal of agape. Niebuhr defines this and other forms of love as “harmony” throughout his writing.8 Although harmony is the term he uses most consistently to define love, other, more conventional terms, such as benevolence and other regard, are implied in a Niebuhrian definition of love as well.9 Agape, for

118  Daniel A. Morris Niebuhr, is distilled and most clearly visible in God’s movements of incarnation and crucifixion. God’s “revelation in Christ” and “more particularly in his Cross” show human beings that love, at its purest and most perfect, is self-sacrificial.10 The self-sacrifice of agape is, like God’s self-humbling in the incarnation and crucifixion, complete and seeks no return. In this way, agape strikes human beings as reckless and heedless. It shocks the prudent conscience and defies reason.11 Human beings can know what agape is and know that it is the highest moral ideal available to us, Niebuhr thinks, through both experience12 and biblical faith.13 Through such sources, human beings know that self-sacrificial love, which recklessly pours itself out without conditions or expectation of return, is the highest moral norm available to us. This picture of agape, which Niebuhr sketches in greater detail throughout his theological ethics, is implicit in the quotation above from Nature and Destiny of Man. Second, this agape is not possible in human history because of sin. There is no more central and determinative category in Niebuhr’s Christian ethics than sin. For Niebuhr, sin is the inevitable result of the finitude and freedom that comprise human nature. We are inherently finite beings, given that we are mortal and that we are products of our cultures, histories, languages, and so forth.14 And yet, we are also free beings, given that we are capable of extending beyond our finitude in certain ways. We can extend beyond our limits through self-awareness,15 self-transcendence,16 the ability to choose,17 and what he calls “the religious inclination.”18 Our freedom allows us to notice the fact that we are finite and respond to that fact. Our finite engagement of our freedom, according to Niebuhr, leads to anxiety. In anxiety, the difficulty of understanding and dealing with our finitude inevitably leads us to deny either our finitude or our freedom.19 When we deny our freedom, we revel anxiously in our finitude, seek refuge in temporal things, and neglect the fact that we are free beings, capable of glimpsing and approximating the divine. This denial of our freedom is what Niebuhr calls “sensuality.”20 When we deny our finitude, we engage in acts, thoughts, and feelings of selfaggrandizement. We claim some kind (or kinds) of superiority for ourselves against God and our neighbors. This is the sin of pride. Although Niebuhr discusses both sensuality and pride, he is far more occupied with the sin of pride. His concern with pride so outweighs his discussions of sensuality that he sometimes suggests or implies that the sin of denying one’s finitude is universal, and that therefore all human beings must aspire to more self-sacrifice (agape). This universalistic over-emphasis on pride and blanket prescription of agape are two of the most basic features of Niebuhr’s thought that provoke feminist, black, and Latinx critique, and I will return to these issues below. For now, though, we must note that human beings’ inevitable (but technically not necessary) inclination to sin (usually understood as prideful denial of finitude) is the major reason why “the perfection of man is not attainable in history,” as the quotation above indicates. Other reasons, such as the difficulty of establishing just societies, the necessity of compromise

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 119 to promote justice, and the importance of tragic decisions to restrain evil, prevent human perfectibility, as well. In other words, we cannot live lives of agape prior to the eschaton because of sin. Third, Niebuhr develops his idea of mutual love against the backdrops of his ideas of agape and sin (and also justice, but I will revisit that part of the conversation below). Mutual love approximates agape but it is not as morally exemplary as agape. Niebuhr believes that it falls short of agape in terms of the fullness of self-sacrifice it includes. People who possess mutual love do not sacrifice of themselves as completely as agapic lovers do. Nor does mutual love meet the moral standard of agape and in terms of its expectation of a response in kind from the beloved. The agapic lover pours out benevolence without considering whether or not the neighbor will respond in kind. Guided by mutual love, though, the lover does seek some rough equality of response in love over time.21 These two features of mutual love – being less than completely self-sacrificial and being interested in some kind of reciprocal response – make mutual love morally inferior to agape in Niebuhr’s eyes. Nevertheless, he still believes that mutual love is a morally praiseworthy form of seeking harmony between human beings through benevolence and other-regard, even if it falls short of agape. Indeed, the ways in which mutual love falls short of agape make it possible for human beings to achieve this form of love prior to the eschaton, whereas agape remains an “impossible possibility.”22 For Niebuhr, it is technically possible that we could love with agape, given our freedom, but it is inevitable that we will fall short of agape because of sin. It is not inevitable that we will fall short of mutual love, though. Mutual love is achievable under the conditions of sin. Niebuhr thinks it is a worthy moral goal because it approximates agape even if it ultimately fails to meet the divine standard of love. These features of mutual love are implied in the quotation above from Nature and Destiny of Man. As I have argued elsewhere, it is a legitimate interpretation of Niebuhr, I think, to read him through the lens of virtue ethics and to imagine mutual love as a virtue.23 By virtue, I mean a quality of character that inclines its possessor toward the good. Although Niebuhr did not participate in the virtue ethics renaissance that the work of G.E.M. Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre initiated (partly because he died prior to the publication of texts such as After Virtue), one can reasonably look to his thought for answers to the basic questions of virtue ethics. His writing frequently offers responses to questions such as: what qualities of character should we possess? Is it possible to possess these qualities of character? Why or why not? His answers to these questions place him on the terrain of virtue ethics, broadly construed. He also uses the term virtue frequently in his writing, even if that use is relatively superficial. Furthermore, I think it is a mistake to assume that only Aristotelian and Thomist paradigms can legitimately take up questions of virtue. Such an assumption unnecessarily limits conversations about human nature, moral character, public life, and related categories.24 Thus,

120  Daniel A. Morris I consider mutual love a good quality of character within a Niebuhrian theological framework. I suggest as a working definition of this virtue the following: mutual love is the quality of character that inclines its possessor to seek harmony between people by way of benevolence and other regard that does not engage in complete self-sacrifice and is interested in, but not predicated upon, rough equality of response over time. This definition allows us to understand mutual love in a Niebuhrian key, and it also allows us to move from mutual love to the virtue of mutuality. The virtue of “mutual love” specifies what is exchanged between moral agents: benevolence and other regard. It also specifies how they are exchanged: with interest in rough equality over time. The virtue of mutuality retains the “how” of mutual love but is not confined to the “what.” While mutual love must, by definition, be a quality of character specific to harmony, benevolence, and other regard, mutuality is a quality of character that could be about any kind of exchange, as long as there is rough equality over time of what is exchanged between people. The mutual lover pays attention to equality of love. The moral agent who possesses mutuality pays attention to equality in all exchanges, including but not limited to love. The move from mutual love to mutuality is also justified by the fact that Niebuhr frequently used the word “mutuality” to describe motivation and conduct exhibiting a concern for rough equality over time. He uses it to describe social realities and moral dispositions, writing, “There are no political strategies for extending the realms of mutuality in the human community which remain immune to the egoistic corruption of imperialism.”25 His writing on economic inequality offers good examples, too. “Mutuality” is the word he often uses to characterize the goal of greater economic equality in a world of capitalist excess.26 “Democratic socialism” is a promising avenue to achieve “mutuality,” according to Niebuhr.27 He also argues for the preservation of “democratic mutuality” in the context of seeking greater equality between economic classes.28 Therefore, I offer this working definition: mutuality is the virtue that inclines its possessor to value and to seek rough equality over time in all human exchanges, although such equality is not a condition of an act of giving. What, then, does a Niebuhrian account of the life of mutuality look like? What thoughts, feelings, and actions does a moral agent guided by mutuality exhibit? (I choose thought, feeling, and action because I take mutuality to be a quality of character with both intellectual and moral dimensions, using the distinction that Aristotle makes about virtue.) Most obviously, the moral agent who possesses mutuality is inclined to think in ways that focus on equality, noticing and becoming concerned when relationships and exchanges are imbalanced, and identifying which party in an imbalanced relationship has given too much and which has taken too much. He or she has corresponding emotions in response to these thoughts about concrete situations of equality and its absence. Guided by mutuality, he or she feels joy in response to equal exchanges and sorrow, anger, and motivation to

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 121 work in response to imbalanced exchanges. Mutuality also leads moral agents to act in ways that are consistent with these thoughts and feelings, especially in response to inequality. The moral agent who possesses mutuality will undertake concrete actions to rectify inequality, such as speaking up to bring such inequality to the attention of those involved, legislators, media, police officers, social workers, and any other relevant party. Mutuality will lead moral agents to listen to and grieve with those on the short end of an unequal relationship, speak difficult truths to those who have taken too much, purchase wisely, protest, write letters, vote, march, and so forth. Mutuality is quintessentially Niebuhrian as it attends to the influence of structural power on relationships of inequality. Niebuhr’s concerns about the ways that social power amplifies sin will inform mutuality by leading the moral agent to think about, respond emotionally to, and act to restrain the role of structural power in imbalanced relationships. Niebuhr’s emphasis on the need for moral agents to understand their own participation in sin will also color the life of mutuality. A moral agent who has cultivated this virtue will think, feel, and act in ways that genuinely entertain the possibility that the moral agent in question has been guilty of taking too much in a particular relationship over time. Mutuality will also interact with other virtues such as honesty (which helps to name inequality as such, especially when doing so is disadvantageous), courage (which is required to speak truth to those guilty of exploiting imbalance), solidarity (which leads one to share the burdens of those suffering from inequality), humility (which reminds us that we may be guilty, that mutuality will never eradicate sin, and that we may even enact other kinds of sin while exhibiting mutuality), and others. More could be said about the specific workings of mutuality in a Niebuhrian framework, but this brief sketch must suffice for now.

Critiques of Niebuhr Niebuhr’s accounts of agape and sin were not met with unqualified acceptance from all readers. Feminist, Latinx, and black writers in particular have taken issue with Niebuhr’s approaches to these concepts. Because I have used Niebuhr’s ideas about love and sin to formulate a basic idea of mutuality, and because black, Latinx, and feminist experiences are directly relevant to any conversation about equality, we should pause to consider these important critiques. Women’s voices and African American voices have changed the conversation in Christian ethics and political engagement. Although they have often pointed to shortcomings in Niebuhr’s work, it is possible, I think, to make a Niebuhrian picture of mutuality responsive to their concerns and to make the conversation relevant to democracy, which offers political relief for situations of protracted inequality. Valerie Saiving’s 1960 essay, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” sparked an important discussion about Niebuhr’s work (and about trends in Christian theology and ethics more broadly). Saiving took issue with

122  Daniel A. Morris Niebuhr’s work, and with Western theology in general, arguing that they did not resonate with women’s experiences. She wrote, Contemporary theological doctrines of love have been constructed primarily upon the basis of masculine experience and thus view the human situation from the male standpoint. Consequently, these doctrines do not provide an adequate interpretation of the situation of women – nor, for that matter, of men, especially in view of certain fundamental changes now taking place in our society.29 According to Saiving, women generally have different experiences than men, given physical differences relating to the capacity for child bearing, and given social and cultural conditioning relating to those physical differences. Not only has Western theology reflected typically male experiences relating to male, rather than female, physiology and cultural conditioning surrounding child bearing; it has also generally ignored women’s experiences. For Saiving, women’s role in childbearing typically creates social and cultural roles and expectations in which women are required to live constantly for other people, such as fathers, husbands, and children. Women are consistently called to manage and support the lives of all the people around them, but rarely to focus on their own aspirations and goals. They must, as Saiving put it, “perform cheerfully the thousand-and-one routine tasks – the woman’s work which is never done – which someone must do if life is to go on.”30 Writers like Niebuhr have failed to notice these basic differences between men and women, and have proceeded as though their theological reflections are universally descriptive and applicable. But, for Saiving, the differences in biology, socialization, and cultural expectations between men and women shaped Niebuhr’s theological ideas in concrete ways. This influence rendered his doctrines of sin and agape less than universally descriptive and applicable. His “identification of sin with pride, will-to-power, exploitation, self-assertiveness” and “conception of redemption as restoring to man what he fundamentally lacks (namely, sacrificial love)” are clearly and “profoundly responsive and relevant to the concrete facts of modern man’s existence.”31 The problem, though, is that theology and ethics have been neither responsive nor relevant to women’s experiences. The pressures to constantly live for other people and rarely prioritize the self, for example, make Niebuhr’s emphasis on sin as pride discordant with women’s experiences. Women are generally not guilty of excessive self-love, Saiving thought. If anything, it’s the opposite. The “specifically feminine forms of sin,” she argued, have a quality which can never be encompassed by such terms as ‘pride’ or ‘will-to-power.’ They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self-definition; tolerance at the

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 123 expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossipy sociability, and mistrust of reason – in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.32 And if a Niebuhrian conception of sin fails to reflect women’s experiences, so too does his prescription of self-sacrificial love ring hollow for people who are constantly sacrificing so that others can grow, develop, and pursue their own personal goals and forms of fulfillment. Saiving asked if theologians and ethicists like Niebuhr might reflect for a moment on the social expectations surrounding women and incorporate that reflection into a concept of sin. Such reflection might lead writers like Niebuhr to support and encourage the woman who desires to be both a woman and an individual in her own right; a separate person some part of whose mind and feelings are inviolable, some part of whose time belongs strictly to herself, in whose house there is, to use Virginia Woolf’s marvelous image, “a room of one’s own.” Yet theology, to the extent that it has defined the human condition on the basis of masculine experience, continues to speak of such desires as sin or the temptation to sin.33 Niebuhr’s ideas of agape and sin fail to understand women’s experiences, and this failure perpetuates imbalanced social expectations. Telling people who constantly live for others and never for themselves, who feel pressure to sacrifice their own personal goals so others can attain theirs, and who are relegated to private instead of public roles in society that they are guilty of too much self-love is not only tone-deaf; it is also complicit in the basic problem. Telling such people that the proper moral response is to sacrifice more not only ignores their experience; it also effectively counsels them against self-assertion, which entrenches positions of subservience. Saiving’s line of critique opens the possibility that Niebuhr’s work ignores women’s voices and, in so doing, contributes to their marginalization and oppression. Saiving’s essay changed the way that we read Niebuhr. It initiated a conversation in Christian ethics that continues to engage her original themes and arguments 50 years later.34 The reception of Saiving’s claims has been mixed, of course. Judith Plaskow represents a group of scholars who have expanded on Saiving’s thesis.35 Many have defended Niebuhr’s ideas, and some have even done so in the service of feminist goals. Jodie L. Lyon, for example, argues that Niebuhr’s description of sin accurately describes women’s tendencies, but women and men exhibit different symptoms of a common disease.36 Rebekah Miles believes that Niebuhr’s reflection on the structural nature of sin resonates with feminist concerns about patriarchy. Indeed, a hermeneutic of suspicion about the power dynamics and interests hidden in human communities and human moral claims is an essential aspect of most liberation theologies. Moreover, feminist criticisms of

124  Daniel A. Morris Christian theology and Christian church history assume this hermeneutic of suspicion. This political realism is a benefit to feminist theology.37 On the other hand, many other readers argued that Saiving’s work was not liberative enough. After summarizing Saiving, Jacquelyn Grant asks in White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus “whether particularity as identified by feminists is sufficiently particular, or whether white women succeeded or failed in creating an inclusive women’s experience by incorporating the experiences of black women and other Third World women.”38 Miguel De La Torre and Thelathia “Nikki” Young make similar arguments about the inclusivity of Saiving’s essay. For De La Torre, her work renders Hispanic people “invisible.”39 For Young, her use of experience is “limited” and “queering the use of experience” can help address this shortcoming.40 Judging from feminist, black, Latinx, and genderqueer critiques, Niebuhr’s lack of attention to other experiences and voices in his theological/ethical writing shows a deficit of mutuality. He apparently failed to cultivate and possess the virtue that he thought was the highest moral possibility within the constraints of sin and prior to the eschaton.41 If Saiving and those who build on her work are right, Niebuhr failed to follow his own advice about mutuality and needed to listen more closely to other, more marginalized and oppressed voices. While the conversation that Saiving sparked continues, I want to focus specifically on her remarks about self-love and bring them into conversation with the Niebuhrian portrait of mutuality I developed earlier. For Saiving, it is simply wrong to suggest, as Niebuhr’s work often did, that self-love is always a sin and that all people are guilty of it. As women face social pressure to conform to certain roles and character traits, they frequently cultivate deficient, rather than excessive love of self. Thus, not only is it wrong to accuse women of too much self-love; it is also wrong to prescribe more self-sacrifice. Feminist scholarship maintains that Niebuhr makes both of these errors, by universalizing his theories of sin and love and by ignoring women’s experiences. The same arguments about Niebuhr’s concepts of agape and sin have been made from scholarship asking questions about race, as well. For example, De La Torre – who critiques Saiving for excluding Hispanic voices – reiterates Saiving’s basic points about self-love and marginalized people.42 Just as Saiving believes that women are socialized toward deficiency in self-love, so too does De La Torre believe Hispanic people frequently internalize social messages of inferiority in a culture steeped in white supremacy. James Cone and other scholars of African American Christianity make similar arguments about the socialization of black Americans. Cone writes that when a white supremacist society tells black people for centuries that they are “nonpersons” and uses “every conceivable method to destroy black humanity,” the appropriate response for black Christianity is “the power to love oneself precisely because one is black.”43 Whether or not her original argument was inclusive enough (and I think there is

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 125 merit to the argument that it was not), Saiving’s points about the contextdependency of Christian ethical treatments of agape and sin are applicable to other conversations, such as race. In light of the argument Saiving, De La Torre, and Cone all share about deficiencies in self-love among marginalized and oppressed populations, I propose that we revisit a Niebuhrian virtue of mutuality for the sake of democratic renewal and a more nuanced, contextspecific ethical account of self-love.

Mutuality and democracy Mutuality is vitally important, from the perspective of Niebuhrian political theology, for the success of democracy. Rule by the people requires moral agents who possess the quality of character that inclines its possessor to value and to seek rough equality over time in all human exchanges. This is because, for Niebuhr, the central goal of all politics is justice. And democracy and mutuality, together, are particularly well-suited to help us achieve justice. Concerned as he was about sin, Niebuhr framed politics and justice primarily as responses to sin. Excessive self-love leads us to behavior that exhibits contempt of God and disregard for neighbor. Our sinful actions in relation to our neighbors are the cause of injustice. We prioritize our own self-serving needs and desires over and against those of our neighbors. And we also pursue these needs and desires at our neighbors’ expense. Every time sin leads us to seek our own good (or what we mistakenly imagine is our own good), we inevitably act against the interests of some neighbor. Niebuhr characterizes the social reality in which people motivated by anxiety and excessive self-love dominate and oppress each other as “injustice.”44 His understanding of the nature and function of politics echoes Augustine’s work in imaging politics as a response to this reality. “The very essence of politics,” Niebuhr writes, “is the achievement of justice through equilibria of power.”45 Justice, in Niebuhr’s work, is both the virtue that inclines people to “render unto each their due,”46 and also the social reality in which groups of people have their interests and claims balanced with the competing interests and claims of other groups. Politics is an important way to approximate justice in a world of sin. We need politics to restrain sin and achieve (or approximate) justice. But we should not make the mistake of thinking politics can do more or better than justice. Niebuhr believes, for instance, that politics cannot eradicate sin or embody the kingdom of God on earth. Politics may be necessary to balance the negative effects of sin, but it is also dangerous because it inevitably delivers power into the hands of some sinful person and/or group. Based on this cautious Augustinian understanding of politics, democracy is preferable as a regime type because it distributes power in the most diffuse way possible, by giving it to the people.47 The distribution of power to the broadest possible population offers the greatest possibility, according to Niebuhr, that the negative

126  Daniel A. Morris effects of sin will be mitigated. But because these effects will always remain, his praise for democracy is tempered. He defines it as a “method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems,”48 and characterizes its institutions as “bulwarks against injustice.”49 Democracy may be the best way of approximating justice in a sinful world, but Niebuhr wants his readers to remember that it will never eradicate sin completely from human life. Mutual love and mutuality play an important role in Niebuhr’s conception of democracy. As I showed in the preceding pages, Niebuhr believes that agape is the purest and most perfect form of love, because of the completeness of self-sacrifice, the lack of self-regard, and the lack of conditions that comprise it. For Niebuhr, mutual love approximates but is morally inferior to agape, because mutual love is not as completely self-sacrificing as agape and because mutual love includes a relatively small degree of selfregard. Justice has a position in this hierarchy, as well. It is a virtue that, like mutual love, can approximate agape. However, for Niebuhr, it is morally inferior to both agape and mutual love, because it is not as self-sacrificial as either and includes more self-regard than both. These virtues relate to each other in complicated and paradoxical ways. As Niebuhr frequently says, “love fulfills and negates justice.”50 Part of what it means for love to fulfill justice is that, under the influence of sin, the intentionality of mutual love slides, or lapses, or “degenerates”51 into actions and consequences that look more like justice. Niebuhr believes that, at our best, we may be motivated by some virtue like mutual love. But under the persistent influence of self-love, this motivation will manifest itself in actions and consequences constitutive of justice. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr writes that “[a]ny justice which is only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice.”52 And in Faith and History he reiterates the point: “Perhaps justice degenerates into mere order without justice if the pull of love is not upon it.”53 Because democratic life is oriented toward the social reality of justice and requires moral agents who value justice, those moral agents must possess and exhibit the virtue of mutual love for people rule to flourish. And because mutual love is the virtue that seeks rough equality in the exchange of harmony, benevolence, and other-regard, the virtue of mutuality, which seeks rough equality in the exchange of all goods, including but not limited to love, would meet the needs of leavening and achieving justice in a democratic society as well. In short, Niebuhr’s political theory and vision of love and justice conceive of mutuality as a democratic virtue. The fact that Niebuhrian political theology imagines mutuality as a necessary democratic virtue has important ramifications for the conversation between Niebuhr and his black, Latinx, and feminist critics. First of all, if it is true that mutuality plays this leavening role in the pursuit of justice, then Niebuhr cannot be as categorically opposed to self-love as he sometimes suggests. For example, he writes in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics that “self-love is never justified.”54 This is the kind of comment that makes writers such as Saiving and De La Torre believe that Niebuhr did

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 127 not attempt to understand the experiences of people who are not men and/ or not white. Self-love is often justifiable for some people, given the social conditioning to which they are subject. And yet, Saiving and other critics might be pleased to note that this general rejection of self-love does not cohere with the more nuanced political theory and schema of love and justice I sketched earlier. If mutuality is necessary for the success of democracy, then some kind of self-love must be justified, because mutuality includes a significant degree of self-regard. If Niebuhr’s ethic is to cohere on questions of love, justice, and the political restraint of sin, his position on self-love must be more moderate than it appears at times. The blanket rejections of self-love do not and cannot fit. Second, the importance of mutuality for democratic life has implications for political conduct that are responsive to the arguments made by Niebuhr’s black, feminist, and Latinx critics. The virtue of mutuality leads people to value and to seek rough equality in exchanges over time. As a democratic virtue, mutuality will guide us to notice and resolve imbalanced relationships in civic life. For example, if we possess mutuality, we will all notice and be troubled by the fact that women earn lower wages for comparable work than men, generally speaking. We will also notice and be troubled by the fact that women have generally been under-represented in the ranks of our elected officials. The virtue of mutuality will lead moral agents to recognize these realities as problems and take steps to address them. In practice, this means that men will need to make certain sacrifices with regard to wages and political power. On the other hand, women will be justified in conduct that reflects self-love. They will be justified in giving voice to experiences of marginalization and oppression. They will be justified in claiming power in economic and political life. They will be justified in competing successfully for economic or political power against men. The same points can be made about the imbalanced exchanges that black Americans and Latinx people face. Guided by the virtue of mutuality, Americans will notice and be troubled by racial inequality. We will condemn the practices of mass incarceration, which bring the weight of drug law down disproportionately on young black and Latino men despite similar rates of offense across races. We will reject the practices of resegregation, which allow white people to restructure school districts and abandon black people and the failing schools they attend. We will also denounce starvation wages for anyone, including Latinx immigrants, whose work allows entire industries to function. And we will resist political policy that targets Latinx people by threatening to tear families apart through deportation without recognizing the essential contribution such families often make to our economy. In each of these cases, mutuality will notice that we have many imbalanced relationships in this society. Women, black Americans, and Latinx people are, in many ways, on the short end of economic, political, and social exchanges, giving and being taken from much more than they are receiving. Not only does mutuality notice this reality; it also seeks to make these relationships more equal.

128  Daniel A. Morris As mutuality seeks social, political, economic, and other forms of equality, it shapes conduct differently for different people, due to the contextspecificity of the virtue. With regard to the forms of inequality to which women are subject, mutuality will lead men and women to behave differently. In general, men will listen more than speak, and women will be free to speak as much as needed to share their experiences of inequality. Women will claim for themselves various forms of justice from people who have wronged them, and men will facilitate those quests for justice. Women will claim social, economic, and political power for themselves, and men will help them pursue and achieve it, even if it means sacrificing some of their own power in order to restore balance to an imbalanced collective relationship. The same dynamics will generally hold for black and Latinx Americans in their relationships with white people. In each case, mutuality will lead members of the dominant group to act in ways that are deferential, yielding, supportive, and self-sacrificial. But mutuality will lead members of the marginalized and oppressed group to act in ways that are assertive, self-empowering, and even accusatory. These asymmetrical forms of conduct mirror imbalanced relationships in American society. They fit well into the framework of a Niebuhrian political theology, as each in its own way seeks to restrain sin, approximate justice, and distribute power to the widest possible collection of people. The asymmetrical conduct inspired by mutuality is consistent with a Niebuhrian view of mutual love’s location between agape and justice as a virtue that has moderate levels of self-sacrifice and self-interest. But as we develop mutuality as a democratic virtue, it is important to clarify two points. First, one’s social location will determine how much self-sacrifice and self-interest are required by mutuality, and these levels will vary across differences of race, sex, and gender. Mutuality and closer approximations of democracy require women, African Americans, and Latinx people to engage in less self-sacrifice and assert themselves more. They require men and white people, on the other hand, to engage in more self-sacrifice and assert themselves less. Second, mutuality permits a considerable degree of self-interest, assertion, and empowerment in response to imbalanced relationships. In other words, it contains a significant measure of self-love. But such self-love is not necessarily morally wrong, judged from a Niebuhrian perspective, in the light of deep and enduring forms of inequality that mutuality seek to address. Acknowledging this point makes Niebuhr’s thought on agape, justice, and democracy more coherent than it sometimes seems. His emphasis on the perfection of total self-sacrifice and the absolute impermissibility of self-love in Christian ethics do not cohere well with his other statements on the need to restrain sin, the relationship between agape and justice, the ethics of democracy, and so on. We can maintain that the cross is an important symbol for Christian theology and ethics while also recognizing that it is not necessary for all people at all times to take the burdens of the cross upon themselves. Or, said differently, mutuality will lead us to recognize that some people are already suffering much

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 129 more than (and indeed because of) others. And both of these points – about the context-specificity of mutuality’s conduct, and about the moral permissibility of self-love in some cases – show how a Niebuhrian ethic can respond productively to the feminist, black, and Latinx critics I explored earlier and still remain distinctively Niebuhrian. Niebuhr’s reflections on mutual love and mutuality were not organized or developed systematically. But what he said about these qualities of character, especially in the broader context of his reflections on agape, justice, sin, and democracy, have strong potential to help us address the anti-democratic crises that continue to plague American society. Whether or not he exhibited the virtue of mutuality in his own work, Niebuhr has advice for us about this virtue. If we really want to restrain sin, pursue justice, and distribute power to the people, we must possess the virtue of mutuality. And if we are truly troubled by white supremacy’s return to the open public sphere and the apparent intractability of rape culture, mutuality will lead all of us to ask ourselves whether we have taken or given too much in the relevant social relationships, and adjust our behavior accordingly.

Notes 1 Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” The New York Times, October 5, 2017, sec. U.S., www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations. html. Accessed August 27, 2019. 2 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 6. 3 In this chapter I use the terms “feminist,” “Latinx,” and “black” to describe a group of writers who share a common argument against Niebuhr. When I use the term “feminist,” I mean a writer who is attentive to women’s experiences and seeks justice for women. When I use the term “Latinx,” I mean a writer who is attentive to the voices of Latin American people of any gender expression, and who seeks justice for such people. When I use the term “black,” I mean a writer who is attentive to African American voices and seeks justice for black Americans. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only important features of the Christian ethical scholarship of women, Latinx people, or black people. 4 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), 2.82. 5 Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 178. 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 31. 7 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.68–69. 8 Ibid., 1.16; Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 214, 219. 9 Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 199; Daniel A. Morris, “ ‘The Pull of Love’: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology,” Political Theology, 17:1 (January 2, 2016): 73–90. 10 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.68–76. 11 Ibid., 2.70–90; Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, chap. 2.

130  Daniel A. Morris 12 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1.127; An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 104–9. 13 Niebuhr, Faith and History, 126; The Self and the Dramas of History, 240. 14 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 27–29; Niebuhr, Faith and History, 16–18. 15 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 1–3. 16 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–4. 17 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 16. 18 Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History, 61. 19 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 42; Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 182. 20 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 228–40. 21 Ibid., 2: 82. 22 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, chap. 7. 23 Morris, “ ‘The Pull of Love’ ”; Daniel A. Morris, Virtue and Irony in American Democracy: Revisiting Dewey and Niebuhr (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015); “Reason and Emotion in the Ethics of Self-Restraint,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 42:3 (September 1, 2014): 495–515. 24 See also Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 130. 25 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.89. 26 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 192–96. 27 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D.B. Robertson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957), 69. 28 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 150. 29 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1979), 27. 30 Ibid., 38. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid., 37. 33 Ibid., 39. 34 See, for example, Mark Douglas and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, eds., “Roundtable: Fifty Years of Reflection on Valerie Saiving’s ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (2012): 75–133. 35 Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980). 36 Jodie L. Lyon, “Pride and the Symptoms of Sin,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (2012): 96–102. 37 Rebekah L. Miles, The Bonds of Freedom: Feminist Theology and Christian Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 67. 38 Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 14. 39 Miguel A. De La Torre, “Mad Men, Competitive Women, and Invisible Hispanics,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (2012): 121–26. 40 Thelathia “Nikki” Young, “Queering ‘The Human Situation’,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (2012): 127.

Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality 131 1 See Christopher Dowdy’s essay on contrition in this book. 4 42 Miguel A. De La Torre, Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 16. 43 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 23–27. 44 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1.192. 45 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 189. 46 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 138. 47 See for example Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2.262ff. 48 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 118. 49 Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 99. 50 Niebuhr, Faith and History, 151; The Self and the Dramas of History, 234; Nature and Destiny, 1.295, 2.246. 51 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 28. 52 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 258. 53 Niebuhr, Faith and History, 185. 54 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 53.

8 The humble place of humility in Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics Jodie L. Lyon

I remember vividly the day that I sat in Sunday School, my arms folded in protest across my chest, waiting for the visiting seminary professor to finish his lesson so that I could tell him where he had gone wrong. I was a 19-year-old college freshman, and everyone knows that teenagers know far more about biblical hermeneutics than middle-aged Ph.D.s. There was no possible way, after all, that I could be wrong about something that I believed fiercely and that everyone I knew also believed fiercely. Christianity just didn’t work like that. Other individual Christians, and of course entire denominations, might be wrong on a particular issue, but I always had it correct. So I didn’t listen to his explanation of how the text warranted his theological conclusion. I simply bided my time, waiting for an opening to set the record straight, which I did at first opportunity – with shockingly no success in convincing the heretic! Years later I would look back on that incident with shame, wondering why I had been too full of pride to pay attention to the teachings of someone with more wisdom and more experience than me. Why hadn’t I been more humble? As a university religion professor, I tell some form of that story every semester as I seek to encourage my college students to learn from my mistakes. If anything will impede their progress in the classroom, it is the pride of thinking that there is nothing they need to learn and nowhere they need to be challenged. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to Reinhold Niebuhr, even as a feminist, for much of Niebuhr’s writing is a diatribe against the perils of pride. In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr goes to great lengths to catalogue the varieties of this ubiquitous sin that plagues humanity.1 Along with forms of pride rooted in a desire for power and control, Niebuhr describes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual pride that I battle every day in the classroom. Threatening pieces of information are met in theology courses with hostility or indifference as the will attempts to protect its self-interest by shoring up its defenses against perceived threats. Cognitive dissonance must be avoided at all costs. I am a Niebuhrian because I teach, and because I have often, regrettably, refused to be taught. What is surprising in Niebuhr is that he speaks relatively little about the virtue of humility even as he rails repeatedly against the vice of pride. I did

The humble place of humility 133 not think this was odd until recently, as my initial encounters with Reinhold Niebuhr were through the lens of his feminist critics, and their questions have guided my own for nearly two decades. As a seminary student in the early 2000s, I first wrestled with the question posed by Valerie Saiving: Is pride the paradigmatic sin of all humans or did Niebuhr androcentrically misdiagnose the human problem?2 While I recognized the pride in my own life, I also shared Saiving’s feminist concerns. Later I began to struggle with Barbara Andolsen’s question: Is self-sacrificial love the solution to human sinfulness, or is Niebuhr’s antidote for pride harmful to women who are already practicing it to their detriment?3 For years I have pondered these same feminist questions, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with the women who have come before me. But more recently I have found myself asking a more fundamental question of Niebuhr: If pride is the essence of human sin, why is humility not the chief human virtue? Ask 100 people to name the opposite of pride and the overwhelming answer you will get is humility, not agape love. The vice of thinking too highly of oneself is normally contrasted in human affairs with the virtue of having the appropriate view of oneself. Perhaps it is because Niebuhr focused so much on pride that he is often identified with an emphasis on humility. In 1974 Robert McAfee Brown wrote a biographical sketch of the theologian subtitled “A Study of Humanity and Humility.”4 Just a few years ago, Christopher Beem produced a comparative study of Niebuhr’s insights with contemporary scientific claims titled Democratic Humility.5 Yet Niebuhrian ethics place self-sacrificial love, not humility, in the seat of honor. To contrast pride with love seems doubly strange, given that love has its own natural opposite in hatred. Why does Niebuhr then choose to describe the possibilities of human vice and virtue in terms that most people would not think of as opposing character traits? If pride is the most basic of human errors, shouldn’t there be more focus in Niebuhr on humility? A quick word search on some of Niebuhr’s most important texts confirms that Niebuhr speaks very little about the virtue of humility while talking about pride and love quite often. It’s not that Niebuhr completely ignores humility; it’s just that he doesn’t talk about it much comparatively speaking. In his two-volume theological magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr uses the word “pride” 273 times, but only uses the words “humble” or “humility” 29 times. Of those 29 occurrences, six are found in quotations of other writers rather than in Niebuhr’s own words, and three of those are found within a single quotation from Pascal. Six of Niebuhr’s references to humility are located within footnotes rather than within the main body of the text. Further, three of the 29 instances of humility are in reference to the thought of one of the Protestant Reformers rather than springing from Niebuhr’s own thought. And finally, yet another of the precious few references to humility is taken up by Niebuhr concluding that the Reformers were not, in fact, very humble in reality even if they did occasionally talk about humility. The statistics aren’t much better in other works

134  Jodie L. Lyon of Niebuhr. For example, “humility” shows up in Moral Man, Immoral Society a measly four times. Quite clearly Niebuhr loves to talk about pride, but he doesn’t have much to say about humility. Love is, however, a frequent topic of conversation; the word appears 395 times over the course of Nature and Destiny’s two volumes. This does not mean that humility is an unimportant virtue for Reinhold Niebuhr. Humility is a crucial virtue, but it is not a central virtue. It is a virtue that must always be carefully located in relation to other, more principal virtues. In the first part of this chapter, I will examine Niebuhr’s understanding of humility and its relation to his theological anthropology. In the second part, I will explore the reasons why Niebuhr chooses to decentralize humility in favor of other virtues and the way in which Niebuhr sees humility as a catalyst for moral growth toward the higher virtues.

Defining humility When Niebuhr writes on humility he insists that it ought to be a natural outcome of the Christian faith. If one understands Christian doctrine, and lives a life according to the teachings of Christianity, humility should follow. True religion, Niebuhr claims, brings about humility.6 Human self-­confidence is contrasted in Nature and Destiny with Gospel humility, suggesting that humility is the expected outcome of a life centered on the teachings of Christ.7 The revelation of God in Jesus Christ ought to instill humility in the soul, for it puts human knowledge, power, and righteousness into proper perspective. But what does this humility look like, and how is it related to Niebuhr’s theological vision? Before exploring why Niebuhr bypasses humility to identify love as the defining virtue of the Christian life, let us first look at how Niebuhr defines humility when he does speak of it. Humility in Niebuhr is connected to the three basic points of his theological anthropology: to be a human being is to be 1) a finite creature, 2) made in the image of God, 3) who sins inevitably but not necessarily. To understand Niebuhr’s take on humility, we must examine these three constituent parts of human existence in turn. First, human beings are creatures, and to be humble in Niebuhr’s understanding is to have a proper understanding of our own accompanying limitations. Humility is a recognition of the division between the Creator and the created, an apprehension of the fact that humans are not divine but exist as a part of God’s created order. We are finite not infinite, limited rather than limitless. In this way we share commonalities with the animal kingdom. As a part of nature, we possess the restraints that come from having mortal, embodied lives within time. Our knowledge is always only partial, bounded by our genetic capabilities and our historical circumstances. Our bodies are fragile and depend upon continual access to sustenance for survival; yet even under ideal conditions our lifespans are short. Every human life moves toward death, and Niebuhr breaks with the Augustinian tradition

The humble place of humility 135 to understand death theologically as a fact of creatureliness rather than as a problem of sin. Death is simply finitude writ large. Humility is the recognition – and acceptance – of these facts of creaturely existence. To be humble is to comprehend one’s proper place in the universe, to resign oneself to the fact that a human is a creature of God and not God. Humility is knowing one is not the center of the universe and living one’s life in accordance with that knowledge. Yet understanding one’s proper place in the cosmic order must also include the apprehension that humans are in some sense set apart from their creaturely neighbors. We may be like animals in our restrictions but we are also distinctly different from them, for humans reflect their Creator in a way that the remainder of the created order does not. To be humble is not to put oneself on the same level as a cow. To be humble is not to hold too low of a view of oneself, but to have a proper perspective on the human situation. Biblically, the uniqueness of humankind is expressed in the doctrine of the imago Dei, which is the second of Niebuhr’s three anthropological emphases. To be human is to be created in a reflection of the very image of God. Human beings image not only the earthly realm through our finitude but also the heavenly realm through our freedom. We may be embodied creatures, but our bodies do not completely define or contain us; we have the freedom to step outside of ourselves through our capacity for self-transcendence. We alone in the created order have the ability to stand back from ourselves and to see the larger picture, to ponder our place in the universe, and to creatively imagine the future. This ability for self-transcendence gives us the ability to empathize, for we can conceive of what it would be like to be in another body, in another time, or in another circumstance. Our self-transcending capability is important for Niebuhr’s understanding of the virtue of humility, because to be humble is a human possibility only through our participation in the imago Dei. It is through the freedom that comes from being spirit alongside nature that we are enabled, and in fact obligated, to be virtuous. Presumably an antelope does not have the ability to be humble nor is humility demanded of it. The antelope, so far as we know, lacks the two things requisite for moral acts that the freedom of self-transcendence grants to humans: the ability to assess one’s situation and the ability to accept or reject it. First, with freedom comes the ability to step back from ourselves, survey the universe, and recognize our proper place in it. The freedom of spirit enables us to be humble because it gives the recognition of the vast gulf that separates us from God. It points us to the knowledge that we are creation not Creator. But second, and more importantly, the freedom of self-transcendence enables the choice of complying with this knowledge or rejecting it. The human freedom of transcendence that echoes the prerogative of our Creator gives us the capacity for both great acts of virtue and terrible acts of vice, making us into moral beings and distinguishing us once again from our animal neighbors. We have the

136  Jodie L. Lyon capacity to pridefully claim for ourselves a higher status than is warranted by the circumstances, something an antelope could never fathom. And unlike the antelope, humans do attempt to overstep their God-given boundaries. Human beings are sinners, and it is this third piece of Niebuhr’s anthropological sketch of human nature that receives the most attention in Niebuhr’s writing. Inevitably, yet not necessarily, all human beings sin by a prideful rejection of our proper sphere. We know our limitations but feel trapped by them because we can see other possibilities, leading to an existential anxiety that ought to reconcile itself in faith in God but inevitably attempts to resolve its angst by a denial of human finitude. This move is not necessary. It is conceivable that we could agree to live within our proper bounds, accepting our role and giving God the proper place of sovereignty in our lives. Yet we do not, and thus we become sinners, succumbing to the temptation of a prideful rejection of our appointed status. This internal sin of pride breeds the external sin of injustice, for when one engages in the selfidolatry of making oneself the center of existence, self-centeredness eventually leads to a will-to-power that violates the Creator’s law of love. It is here that humility truly comes into play in Niebuhr’s ethics. When Niebuhr speaks of humility, he is more often than not referencing a humbleness that accompanies the repentance of sin. Given that human beings inevitably overstep the boundaries of creaturely existence in prideful acts of will-to-power, we are not humble beings, and thus, Niebuhr’s emphasis is not on an original acceptance of the created order. Instead of accepting our limitations, we transgress them in a prideful attempt to claim the place of the Divine and to subordinate others to ourselves. The humility that should naturally accompany being human is non-existent given our sinful state. While theoretically human beings can attain the original humility to which we are called, in actuality we will not attain it; thus the only semblance of humility that human beings do attain is a secondary humility that follows our prideful refusal to initially embrace a humble state. Christian humility arises when sinful human beings, confronted with the sovereignty and mercy of God evidenced in the cross, repent of the pride that is endemic to human existence and attempt to reorient their lives in faith toward God. Humility for Niebuhr involves confessing one’s sin before God and being truly sorrowful for the ways in which one has engaged in acts of injustice and domination due to prideful self-curvature. Given the roundabout manner in which Christian humility arises, humility is a kind of “ironic virtue” within Niebuhr’s thought. It is ironic in the sense that when Niebuhr speaks of humility, he is usually speaking of a virtue that is only necessary given that we do not possess other virtues that we ought to have. We ought to be loving and just, but we consistently exhibit hatred and injustice. Humility is a virtue we must aspire to possess only in light of our failure to be virtuous. It is the virtue the virtueless must seek after. We ought to possess humility because we have been prideful, but it is only in light of being prideful that we end up having humility. To sum up

The humble place of humility 137 the irony of Niebuhr’s teaching on humility: we must be humble because we have not been humble, and we could not be humble in this sense had we been humble to begin with. Not surprisingly this ironic and complicated virtue does not come easily. In order to possess the humility born of human sinfulness, Niebuhr explains that we must be willing to judge ourselves by divine standards and accept the extent to which we have fallen short. True humility is difficult to arrive at because we may be, comparatively speaking, virtuous persons. If the standard for virtue lies in another person or another group, we may judge ourselves against the moral failings of another and deem ourselves superior. Sometimes this judgment is fair, and sometimes not. C. S. Lewis observes that while most of us judge ourselves morally superior to particular persons in our peer group, our friends would likely disagree with our moral ranking.8 Niebuhr likewise teaches that the human heart is capable of great forms of deception in order to maintain its prideful pretentions, so it is easy to judge oneself better than one truly is. It is also easy to choose a basis of comparison whereby one would come out ahead. Judged on some particular, trivial criterion I may indeed be morally superior to my neighbor even if they are on the whole more virtuous. Further, I may choose a low bar of comparison and think I am more righteous than I truly am. Judged against Mussolini I appear to be a saint, but that is hardly a high standard of comparison. And it may even be the case that someone is, judged against the majority of the human race, highly virtuous. Yet the human capacity for self-transcendence means that we must look for our standards outside ourselves and even outside our own species. We are made in the image of God, and made to image God. Thus our moral measuring stick lies beyond the earthly realm. Our spiritual natures compel us to compare ourselves to the ultimate standard of self-giving love revealed in Christ, and when we do, we recognize that we fall far short of the goal. Humility follows the recognition of our short-comings along with a sorrow for them. Niebuhr does not offer much hope that such an achievement will actually come to fruition within history. Many of the references in Niebuhr’s work to humility are warnings that much of what masquerades as humility is really pride in disguise. Humility, as we know it, is often false or insincere. In “The Confession of a Tired Radical,” Niebuhr complains of the insincerity of liberal Christians who confess their sins not because they are actually sorry for them, but because they want to make public show of their own virtue by naming sins from which they believe they have been freed: Suppose I am a Nordic, a Nordic Protestant. I meet with a group of liberal people including Jews, Negroes, Catholics, and what not. I make a public confession of the bigotries and prejudices of my crowd. I ask the minority groups who suffer from the sins of my group to be generous and forgive our sins. That seems to stamp me as a humble and contrite person. But of course my very confession is supposed to impress my

138  Jodie L. Lyon hearers with the fact that I do not really belong to my group, that I am superior to it. I would be greatly chagrined if anyone took my confession at its face value. For pride dictates my humble confession.9 Niebuhr’s concerns are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s. For example, it is far too easy for a white, liberal Christian today to “confess” the sins of racism, sexism, homophobia, or xenophobia for the sake of scoring political points amongst their peers rather than from a place of true repentance. The purported confession is not a contrite admission of sin or guilt, but what we would label “virtue-signalling.”10 We are naming sins not in order to express our guilt but to signal our righteousness. The confessor does not really believe that they are personally at fault for any of the sins they confess; they merely want to demonstrate their “wokeness” and thus their membership in a particular political group. What sounds like a humble confession may be anything but. Even humility that begins in a sincere place can end up proving false. Niebuhr warns that the humility of contrition can easily morph into an insidious form of pride: “Even the recognition in the sight of God that [a person] is a sinner can be used as a vehicle of that very sin.”11 The Reformers are a prime example for Niebuhr of the way in which pride disguises itself as humility. Recognizing the profound problem of human sinfulness, they nevertheless managed to show little humility through their intolerance to theological opponents. In a strange twist, their insistence that human reason was not to be trusted since truth resided in Scripture alone resulted in a prideful insistence that they were the sole possessors of theological truth given that it was their own (biased) interpretations of Scripture that were considered proper exegesis.12 As Niebuhr’s Christian realism insists, pride must always be taken into account in every human situation, even in situations in which Christians decry a reliance on human reason and moral judgment in favor of a return to the certainty of the biblical text. Pride is an indomitable foe, and true humility is rare.

De-centering humility Niebuhr’s distrust of claims to true humility might explain in some sense why he speaks so little of it, but it doesn’t explain why he refuses to consider it as the center of the moral life. Once again, we return to the initial question: given that pride is the preeminent human sin, why is humility – its logical opposite – not viewed as the foremost human virtue? I see three related reasons, which I shall examine in turn. First, humility is a human, rather than a divine virtue. Second, humility on its own is static and uncreative. And finally, it is meant to be a catalytic virtue, one that is intended to lead to something grander and higher. While none of these points are explicit in Niebuhr, I believe they faithfully represent his underlying thought.

The humble place of humility 139 First, humility is human virtue rather than a divine one and thus does not warrant ultimate status. To be humble in the Niebuhrian sense is to recognize that 1) I am not God and 2) I am a sinner. By definition humility thus distinguishes itself from other virtues, such as love, justice, mercy, or wisdom. While these latter virtues are reflections of God within humanity, humility is a virtue that emphasizes God as set apart from humanity. To be just or merciful is to imitate God in God’s relationship to human creatures. To be humble is to demonstrate that one recognizes the vast gulf that separates God from human creatures. Whereas most virtue involves imitating God, humility is precisely the refusal to imitate our Maker because to do so in some ways would be disingenuous and dangerous. Job is an example of humility, but Niebuhr notes that for the biblical figure his humility begins when God’s whirlwind monologue forces him to grapple with his own smallness compared to God’s greatness.13 Humility comes by witnessing the gap between ourselves and the perfection of God revealed in Christ, whereas love is achieved by striving to be more like God. Humility is thus not a divine virtue. To be humble, as Niebuhr defines it, is to recognize and accept one’s limitations; it is to refuse to claim more power, or knowledge, or virtue than one actually possesses. God in Godself need not, and perhaps cannot, have humility in this sense, for God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. How could a maximally virtuous, knowledgeable, and powerful being claim too much virtue, knowledge, or power? For Niebuhr humility involves recognition and acceptance of something God intrinsically does not possess – limitations and frailty. Of course, Christianity teaches that God takes on human frailty in Jesus Christ, and as such, God becomes humble and humility becomes a divine virtue as God embodies it in Christ. Yet for Niebuhr, given the human propensity to sin it is the humbleness of contrition that is most often emphasized, something that neither God in Godself nor God in Jesus Christ can model, given that God does not sin. Love, by contrast, is a virtue grounded in the very being of God. God is biblically defined as love. God is love, we are told in I John 4; we are never told God is humility. And as a guide for ethical action, the two greatest commandments revolve around love, not humility. Humility is a limited virtue by definition. It is the correct apprehension of one’s place in the divine order and following the obtainment this knowledge, it entails acting in ways consistent with one’s proper place. As sinful humans, we can probably always deepen or increase our humility. I know I need to be more humble than I am, and even if I reach a new level of humility next week, I will still not be completely humble. There will be room to grow. And yet, there is an absolute limit to humility, for my place in the divine order is set. Given my sin, I will likely never reach a complete acceptance of my place this side of eternity, for my pride will always interfere. But there is a theoretical limit, if not a practical limit. Humility, as the acceptance of limitation, inherently contains limitation. Love, on the other hand, is an infinite virtue.

140  Jodie L. Lyon As God is infinite and God is love, love has no limits. It can always reach deeper and express itself in new forms. Love is endless possibility. Second, a humility unaccompanied by other virtues can be mundane and uninspired. I recently had an experience that made me realize that as much as I thought I valued humility as a virtue, I also thought it was quite boring and potentially dangerous. I was asked to give a presentation critiquing the theology of author and New York Times columnist David Brooks from a Niebuhrian perspective. Because I am far more interested in his work on moral development than on his political commentary, I decided to focus my evaluation on his most recent two books, monographs which offer advice for personal and societal character development. I began to read The Road to Character with great anticipation, hoping to be motivated by story after story of moral exemplars and their journeys to virtue. But the book fell flat for me. Despite my agreement with Brooks that we live in a narcissistic culture in need of an ego-check, I could not get past his emphasis on humility as the ideal human virtue and the solution to our societal self-obsession. The United States would be better served, Brooks argued, with a return to the earlier moral ecology that reigned pre-1960, a time when there was “stronger social sanction against (as they would have put it) blowing your own trumpet, getting above yourself, being too big for your britches.”14 The emphasis on humility in school, church, and home produced men and women who were loyal, restrained, and self-disciplined. That sounded nice, but Brooks admitted that while the 1950s produced more humble U.S. citizens, it also produced more racism, sexism, and antisemitism. Further, “It was also a more boring culture, with bland food and homogenous living arrangements” in addition to being “an emotionally cold culture.”15 No matter how I tried, I could not get excited about the remainder of the book because I could not get past Brooks’ admission that humility can be boring, cold, mundane, and downright unjust. If the choice is between the pride of today or the sexism and bland cuisine of yesterday, I’ll gladly choose today with all its accompanying pride. The potential boringness of humility is a concern for Niebuhr as well. Creativity is an essential part of being human, for it is the joining point between nature and spirit.16 When Niebuhr describes the imago Dei, the quality that sets human beings apart from the rest of the created order, he does so in terms of an ability to transcend nature. For this reason it is appropriate to speak of self-transcendence as the Niebuhrian definition of what it means to be made in the image of God. And yet, I think Niebuhr sees the image of God as being more than the mere capacity for stepping outside of oneself. Self-transcendence is dynamic; it opens up avenues for exploration and asks us to follow them. To be human, and not simply animal, in Niebuhrian anthropology is to be creative. Spirit joins with nature to transform nature. Human beings are like animals in that we require physical necessities like shelter and food, but we are more than animals in that we transform shelter into a home and food into cuisine. We take the raw materials

The humble place of humility 141 that nature provides and, for better or worse, virtue or vice, instill them with greater meaning. In the hands of humans the simple chronology of time is transformed into history, and the physical act of sex is transformed into the spiritual act of making love. To fail to participate in the creative act of ­spirit-transforming-nature is to be less than human in Niebuhrian ­anthropology. Thus what we often think of as humility might easily lead to the stymieing of creativity and movement, something Niebuhr refuses to recognize as true humility. Boring food and static culture is not what ­Niebuhr envisions for humans created in God’s image. Niebuhr also worries about the dangers of a too obsessive humility, or perhaps a humility that is not balanced by the responsibilities of freedom. To truly understand one’s own limitations can easily lead to a false levelling of all intellectual and ethical distinctions which results in the failure to act. To be humble involves the acknowledgement that my perspective is limited, that I do not have all the answers, that my best understanding of the world is flawed. It similarly includes the recognition that all of my actions are tainted by self-interest, even when my motivations seem most virtuous. But the problem with such a humble self-assessment is that it may lead to paralysis or hopelessness. Niebuhr warns that we must be careful lest our emphasis on humility “may empty the political struggle of seriousness by persuading men that all their causes are equally true or equally false.”17 If every political position is flawed, why bother? If any action that I undertake is sinful, shouldn’t I simply refrain from doing anything? If all moral positions are tainted, does it really matter which one I adopt? As an ethicist, Niebuhr worries that humility taken to the extreme fails to enact justice, and as a theologian, he worries that humility taken to the extreme reverts to pride. For example, as a white person in a progressive, social-justice oriented Christian congregation it is important for me to humbly recognize the ways that any social activism I undertake involves mixed motives at best. Whatever course of action I pursue will also be imperfect. If I am to help the immigrant community in my hometown achieve justice, I need to be continually aware of the ways that my own self-interest and ignorance hinders me from truly partnering with them in the fight for equal rights. And yet, an all-consuming focus on the sinful taint of all my actions can quickly turn the focus back entirely on myself, and morph from humility to pride. It can easily lead me to distance myself from the problem at hand, leaving unjust systems intact. This can help explain what often seems most puzzling in Niebuhrian hamartiology – that Niebuhr describes the sin of sensuality as an extension of the more basic sin of pride – given that his descriptions of sensuality seem nothing like pride. But for Niebuhr the refusal to take on the responsibilities of freedom, and the creative work that it entails, is ultimately a sign of a prideful self-obsession. It is a self-defeating form of pride that instead of leading to grandiose acts of self-assertion ends in jaded refusals to engage in the world beyond oneself. Sensuality is a form of pride that has moved beyond the self-deception of will-to-power and is fully aware of the ridiculousness of

142  Jodie L. Lyon claims to virtue, but has become so disillusioned with the ubiquitousness of self-interest that it refuses to engage life meaningfully.18 Niebuhr may not be quite consistent enough in his descriptions of sensuality to warrant a direct connection between the self-assertion of pride and the self-loathing of sensuality, but he certainly hints at this link on more than one occasion. To make humility the chief virtue would be theologically suspect given it lacks the creativity and possibility that Niebuhr associates with spirit and because it fails to reflect our Creator. This doesn’t mean that humility is an unimportant virtue in Niebuhrian ethics. Humility is meant to be a moral precursor to the higher virtues; it is, in Niebuhr’s thought, the prerequisite for wisdom, justice, and love. It is extremely important, indispensable even, in Niebuhr’s ethics, but as an appetizer, not a main course. Humility knows its place amongst the virtues. It does not aspire to be the moral center, for it cannot bear the weight of an entire ethical system. Rather, it functions as a catalyst toward a moral life which reflects the nature of God. Humility is necessary because it is the breaking down of pride, the fundamental human sin and barrier to the achievement of ethical action and the instilling of the higher virtues. Niebuhr explicitly connects the virtue of humility to the attainment of wisdom, mercy, justice, and love, but he also implicitly relates it to faith and hope. The final paragraph of Volume II of Nature and Destiny associates humility with eschatological understanding, for “wisdom about our destiny is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power.”19 It is this wisdom about the end of history that enables Christians to abandon false hope in human endeavors yet remain committed to the pursuit of justice, all the while having faith in the ability of God to fulfill the meaning of history. As pride is a barrier to the faith in God rather than human striving, humility is necessary for true wisdom, hope, and faith. In Love and Justice, Niebuhr connects humility to mercy, tolerance, justice, and finally, to love. A humility “which recognizes the partial and fragmentary character of all human wisdom and the interested character of all human striving” is necessary in order to produce the tolerance that unifies societies.20 Without humility, we will judge others more harshly than ourselves and be unwilling to allow for differences of opinion and lifestyle. Niebuhr further connects humility to justice. In order to create a just society, those of us with privilege must set aside our pride in order to recognize the imbalance of power and resources even as this knowledge challenges our self-interest. Pride justifies privilege, but humility accepts the claims of others upon us and motivates us to strive for justice. The further recognition that all of our attempts at creating justice fall short of the ultimate standard pushes us toward a greater justice, as we contritely admit that we can always do better. As we become more and more aware of our own failings, even in our best attempts to act ethically, our humility leads to mercy and forgiveness of others. It is this willingness to see our own faults that thus enables us to love, for “only those who have learned the grace of humility

The humble place of humility 143 can be loving, for in a conflict love requires forgiveness and forgiveness is possible only to those who know themselves to be sinners.”21 As important as humbleness is in the Christian life, I believe Niebuhr was correct to shift the focus quickly toward the higher virtues. Humility is a moral means rather than a moral goal. Humility opens up pathways of virtue; it clears away the obstacles that stand in the way of moral progression and propels us down deeper avenues of morality. When I failed to listen to the seasoned seminary professor in that Sunday School classroom, what I ultimately lost was the opportunity to grow in wisdom through a new understanding of Scripture that might have made an impact on the way that I lived my life and treated others. I wish I had been more humble, so that I might have been wiser and more ethical. And today, when I implore my students to set aside their biases for the sake of learning, my goal is to make them more humble for the sake of their attainment of other, greater virtues.

Notes 1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 1: 186–203. 2 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation,” Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960): 100–12. 3 Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics,” Journal of Religious ­Ethics 9 (Spring 1981): 69–83. 4 Robert McAfee Brown, “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Study in Humanity and Humility,” Journal of Religion, 54:4 (October 1974): 325–31. 5 Christopher Beem, Democratic Humility (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967), 37. 7 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:166. 8 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 1940), 52. 9 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 120. 10 “Virtue-signalling” is a phrase popularized by James Bartholomew. See Bartholomew, “The Awful Rise of ‘Virtue-Signalling’,” The Spectator, April 18, 2015, www.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/hating-the-daily-mail-is-a-substitute-for-doinggood/. Accessed August 13, 2019. 11 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 227. 12 Ibid., 2: 231. 13 Ibid., 1: 168. 14 David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2016), 5. 15 Ibid. 16 See Kevin Carnahan’s chapter in this volume. 17 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 61. 18 See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1: 240. 19 Ibid., 2: 321. 20 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 61. See also Niebuhr’s chapter on “Democratic Toleration,” in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Tradition Defense (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 21 Ibid., 44.

9 Choosing sorrow Niebuhr, contrition, and white catastrophe Christopher Dowdy

In this chapter I clarify and extend the concept of contrition within Reinhold Niebuhr’s thinking. We can, I contend, read Niebuhr’s understanding of contrition as a continual, self-critical disposition that is grounded in communal liturgical practices – that is, as a virtue. This virtue is useful. The insufficiency of Niebuhr’s own contrition on the issue of racial justice is born from his failure to fully integrate his life with the lives of oppressed Black communities. This failure is instructive. I start the discussion by placing contrition into the familiar virtue framework of excess and lack. Sifting through what Mark Jordan has called “scenes of ethical instruction,” I do not dive into Niebuhr’s corpus just to extract a series of claims to organize or dismiss.1 Instead I aim to imagine what his arguments entail for concrete, embodied practices of guided confrontation with one’s own wrongdoing. This puts Niebuhr’s occasional writings squarely in focus; this focus on the practice of contrition implicit in his sermons, prayers, and occasional writings constitutes the clarification I am after. The focus on the embodied interplay of call and response in contrition also licenses me to draw in other figures and resources that share similar rhetorical or liturgical space in order to refine the practice of contrition. That’s where the extension I am proposing will come in. The fact that much of Niebuhr’s workaday writing was in this context of urging people to form judgments, that much of it was in religious periodicals or in homiletic settings, gives us many examples of more or less successful, more or less incisive moments of confrontation and guidance. In some places we will find a repentance that leads to godliness; in others, destruction. This framing suggests that there is a mean, a balance to be discovered, when it comes to the dynamics of admonishment and formation that compel contrition. But what kind of mean would be prized by someone as skeptical of stable moral achievement as Niebuhr? Contrition here is not imagined as prophylactic. It mends, or is ingredient to the work of mending. In this way, it essentializes: we will always discover new ways of doing good, and thus in new ways we have left catastrophe in our wake. Niebuhr, especially in his prayers and sermons concerned with guiding people to good discernment, actualizes the routines of Christian worship to establish a reliable way

Choosing sorrow 145 of confronting our many stark failures of virtue. Niebuhr’s gradualism on racial justice is a glaring error, in this light, even as his own principle of selfdeception predicts it. Niebuhr’s relative bodily safety and general distance from radical Black social movements conferred an equanimity in the struggle for racial justice. In its place I consider here what might emerge as urgent if contrition chooses to open itself to the demands of a more thoroughgoing solidarity.

Excess or lack? Bethel and Harlem Niebuhr’s ascendancy as a national figure during the Cold War was in part due to his moderating voice in an age that threatened annihilation, urging humility and caution in international affairs. The theological anthropology underlying his insight and utility as a commenter on a morally inflected realism, however, elevates pride as the defining moral struggle. This framing can end up commending us to more of an attitude than a praxis, discouraging bold action for justice while putting a thin patina of virtue on otherwise muscular and self-interested collective action – or, perhaps worse, recasting the powerful’s theft of agency from vulnerable populations as nobility on the part of the dispossessed.2 When it comes to racial justice, it is critical to see this excess and lack in tandem, as they issue towards different objects: an excessive sensitivity to the potential overstepping of bounds when it comes to white society, but a profound lack of understanding of the suffering of the Black communities that make society possible. Excessive contrition is not at work here, in the second case, lack of humility is. The cut of conscience is not anywhere near deep enough. For example, after taking a position at Union Seminary, Niebuhr was asked to write a letter to the council of the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, his first and only pastorate, regarding the congregation’s failure to admit two African-American people to membership. As James Cone recounts in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Niebuhr’s letter acknowledges the shamefulness of the church’s defense of an all-white membership and suggests a different result would be preferable. However, he still admonishes his successor for “unpedagogical methods” in pressing for inclusion. The letter’s judgment against the pastor’s choice of means, emphasis, or rhetoric – it’s not entirely clear where Niebuhr is locating the unpedagogical methods – contributed to the pastor’s eventual dismissal.3 For Cone, Niebuhr’s lack of incisive engagement on behalf of justice here is an indication of the great gulf of understanding between Niebuhr and the lived experience of Black people, confirmed by his avoidance of and gradualism on racial justice throughout his pastorate and his ensuing academic career. In his reputation-making first book, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Niebuhr’s journal of his years in ministry, Niebuhr recounts

146  Christopher Dowdy no significant controversy in his congregation in his thirteen years of service, despite his belief in the oppositional nature of the Gospel. Why, Cone rightly asks, was it left to his successor to grapple with the moral demand of integration? As his career advanced, Niebuhr wrote with great frequency in Christianity and Crisis and other general audience publications, sometimes commenting on race. His reflection on the state of the Civil Rights Movement in April of 1956 is indicative of his approach. He recognizes the moral significance of the demands being made but quotes William Faulkner approvingly as cautioning against rapid integration, gesturing to the supposed anxiety of white society as a legitimate reason to consider alternative plans to integrating certain institutions. This is, keep in mind, fully two years after Brown v. Board. It is worth quoting the passage at some length because this way of weighing the demand of justice with a clear eye towards the calculations required for stability is characteristic of his mature thought: [Their bus boycott] must appeal to sensitive men everywhere as another assertion of the dignity of man. But this does not mean we can have no sympathy for anxious parents who are opposed to unsegregated schools. The cultural differences between the two races are still great enough to warrant a certain amount of disquiet on the part of the parents. One may hope that the Negro children will one day have the same advantages all our children have. But there must be a measure of sympathy for those who are afraid of the immediate effects of present educational plans. It might help if we all realized that, in all our judgments about each other across racial lines, we do not judge with pure hearts and reason. Our judgments, however honest, are corrupted by the sin of group pride.4 So, on the one hand, equal access to accommodation repeals a certain imposition of social contempt that is absolutely overdue and correctly thought of as right and urgent. On the other hand, integrated schooling makes white families uncomfortable, so that is one area where caution should be exercised. The freight that “cultural differences” carries in this passage is, it must be said, sinister. Characterizing problematic racial pride on both sides as the besetting problem that keeps progress from being made on these issues is a bland, inaccurate historical explanation of what drives the pace of change and what problems make negotiations break down in the process of confronting white supremacy. Of course it is reasonable to introduce social fragility and the swamp of anxiety, recrimination, and bitterness into a pragmatic evaluation of public policy. But whose anxiety counts the most? Whose instability makes matters urgent? Niebuhr’s formulation here, in the terms of his own moral calculus, constitutes an underestimation of the instability, shame, frustration, and urgency experienced by the Black communities that Niebuhr is considering. No wonder. Niebuhr is speaking to Black

Choosing sorrow 147 pain and Black aspiration, and for that reason just does not know what he is talking about. As Cone notes, Niebuhr wrote four books foregrounding moral analysis of U.S. history and made no sustained treatment of slavery or Jim Crow; he cites no prominent Black intellectuals in his scholarly writing. Niebuhr wrote, read, and sat on enough commissions to know he was immersed in a ruinous social sin, but was not possessed by a sense of urgency about it. I will inject a little intellectual autobiography here because we, again, are dealing not just with syllogisms, but with relations to exemplars and to the habits of mind they commend. I first read about the letter to Bethel in a seminar with Robin W. Lovin, when Cone’s Cross and the Lynching Tree was in draft. Cone had sent Lovin the section on Niebuhr for feedback. I had already ended a dalliance with Christian pacifism by the time I read Niebuhr’s Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, years earlier. Niebuhr’s prose flooded my senses with recognition – at his theological concerns, yes, but also his sensibility: a provincial man, an immigrant who experienced academic culture as orthogonal to his own, hungry to say something that mattered, worried about whether he belonged in the room at all. That led me to Lovin, to more Niebuhr, and of course to more critical readings. Seeing the contradictions of his gradualism in racial justice, I still managed to justify my use of Niebuhr for an incipient dissertation on forgiveness and historical injustice by incorporating, as much as I knew how, Traci West’s critique of Niebuhr in Disruptive Christian Ethics. West’s analysis pushed me to develop a Niebuhr-inspired realism in light of concrete examples of hopeful political solidarity and radical change – i.e., to the organizing work of Black women, anti-colonial movements, and other struggles for justice.5 But reading Cone’s analysis of Niebuhr’s handling of the segregation controversy at Bethel left me with that sick, embarrassed feeling that my trust was misbegotten. Because Niebuhr’s theological anthropology proposes profound self-deception, I felt I could incorporate his political gradualism on race as a failure of judgment. But that letter is a real challenge, as it exposes how little Niebuhr was willing or able to use his power to deal with white supremacy at all, even at the congregational level. On the ground, the prophetic, tough edge of Christian realism becomes more like wistfulness than transformative critique. If that is just bad judgment, what else in his account of faculties for making good judgments really is worth reading? So it seems that, with Niebuhr, we are in the company of an exemplar who in his best work critiquing society did not consider with sufficient urgency the suffering on which his society depended. He did not sufficiently take into account the pluriformity and ingenuity of the resilience of dispossessed people. He took advantage instead of the generic whiteness he could adopt as an assimilated German, an identity which rests on the destructive plunder of Black life and its cognates. As Cone puts it in his final assessment, Niebuhr had “eyes to see” the wrongs of segregation and the brutalities of

148  Christopher Dowdy Black American life, but not the “heart to feel” its urgency.6 Cone contrasts Niebuhr’s relative poverty of a heart to feel with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sensitive engagement with the Black Church and Black seminarians in his brief time at Union. Who, by comparison, are the Black friends Niebuhr calls to mind when trying to clarify his thinking? Where are the Black congregations he frequented, whose worship he could call to mind from memory? Contrition is, in Niebuhr’s work and for our purposes, the articulate act of remorsefully identifying one’s responsibility for the damage done to others. Such an act both depends on a heart to feel and makes that heart to feel a possibility. This circular nature is in part what makes it a habit constitutive of formation for moral perception. Niebuhr’s vaunted seriousness, his willingness to preserve the dialectical tension among possibilities necessary for political judgments: these attract many of us; they attracted even Martin Luther King, Jr. But in the case of racial justice they fail to lead Niebuhr to the right judgment. He would not or could not generate the internal turbulence needed to apprehend the reality as a matter of urgent repentance, collective and individual. In the homiletic mode in which Niebuhr wrote and spoke, in which he acted as a model to seminarians who would also write and speak homiletically, a complete exercise of prophetic declamation against white supremacy was unavailable to him. Niebuhr’s picture of contrition is promising but, as we can see from his misapprehension about racial justice, underdeveloped. The question to answer, then, if we want to shake Niebuhr and have good exemplary thinking about virtue fall out, is whether and how the pragmatic insights about human limitation that Cone found useful in Niebuhr can be made compatible with a more effective practice of contrition – one that foregrounds empathy and solidarity across the intersections of exploitation and pain. In the next section I argue that within Niebuhr’s thought we can identify interlocking notions of contexts, goods, and practices that – if we squint a little – qualify Niebuhr’s Christian Realism as a mode of virtue thinking.

The pilgrimage of life After 1952, as Niebuhr grew older and experienced debilitating complications from a series of strokes, his scholarly productivity declined. He turned more often to historical analysis and reduced his polemical writing. His preaching did continue, but at a less furious pace. Ursula Niebuhr, Reinhold’s wife and frequent collaborator, collected and edited a number of post-stroke sermons and prayers, and in the posthumous collection Justice and Mercy shapes them into an ecumenical liturgical form.7 There is in fact reason to believe that Ursula’s contribution to the post-1952 corpus constitutes not just serious editing, as prior to the stroke, but actual coauthorship. That Ursula’s latter career collaboration with Reinhold informs this collection is not just a matter of historical trivia, but a key indication

Choosing sorrow 149 of the constructive synthesis Reinhold and Ursula strived to create between his self-consciously “low” Lutheran Protestantism, focused on preaching, and her own “high” Episcopalian Church Protestantism, focused on liturgy, space, and practice; linking these propositional and performative visions of Christian formation is a recurrent theme in the Niebuhr corpus.8 It is also indicative of the sober emotional resonance Niebuhr thought relevant to moral insight: cool consideration of the serious issues of the day was necessary for judgment, and he had little tolerance for indulgent personal devotion or showiness. Thanks to their collaborative background and Ursula’s musical ear for Reinhold’s thematic concerns, in these sermons we often hear Niebuhr assessing the ways creative love, responsibility, and judgment unfold in different contexts. Throughout Niebuhr’s prayers and sermons, overlapping ways of being in community – families, fellow laborers, nations, members of a race, members of a sex – become sites of confession and intercession for justice.9 Time and again in his prayers and sermons, Niebuhr imagines webs of dependence linking complex groups in families, work, sex, race, nation, and globe. He repeatedly calls our variations in work and social location “our several tasks” or “our many vocations.”10 It is at these various cultural sites that Niebuhr repeatedly does the work of the preacher in his sermons, suggesting the consequences of calculated love in one form or another, and it is also at these sites where he enacts the drama of repentance and forgiveness in his prayers. Goods necessary for human flourishing are produced by characteristic practices in the contexts where we exercise responsibility; these practices are part of a virtuous circle with the dispositions to act rightly in unpredictable circumstances – these are implicit but crucial dimensions of Niebuhr’s thought. Linking goods, practices, and dispositions in this loosely interdependent matrix does not necessarily make Niebuhr a virtue theorist. And Niebuhr himself was quite skeptical of any approach that gave one the assurance of a road-map to create a stable disposition. Still, whether Niebuhr would affirm the framing or not, focusing on the goods our several tasks are aiming to produce illuminates his thinking, especially as it relates to the increasingly Augustinian approach to his theology as his work progressed. I want to thus suggest here that in aligning contexts, goods, practices, and dispositions, and seeing contrition in that light, we can begin to discern what sort of revision might be possible to cultivate a realism with a heart to feel. Contexts and goods Christian worship is the backdrop against which Niebuhr’s distinctive theological anthropology and eschatological interpretation of history coheres, and in which Niebuhr’s sermons, articles, and polemical writings can be understood. For Niebuhr it is incumbent on the preacher to argue for particular judgments in various “contexts of responsibility,” like families, work,

150  Christopher Dowdy and politics.11 This understanding of a kind of worldly cohort stands behind his imaginative descriptions of judgment, repentance, and pilgrimage: O God, in whose sight no man living is justified, pity our vanities and deceptions, our consequent cruelties and false judgments. Grant us the grace of self-knowledge, that we may not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. Knowing our frailty, [may we], in compassion, join our fellows in the awesome pilgrimage of life.12 In his arguments as in these prayers, Niebuhr is concerned with exploring how creaturely dependence makes neighborliness concrete and unavoidable.13 Responsibility is his way of inscribing mutual dependence as more than a sociological fact, but as an entailment of love’s presence in history.14 For both Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, mutual dependence implies a moral charge licensed by the fleshly reality of the Incarnation and given shape by the life and ministry of Jesus. There are risks to this view. As with Bonhoeffer’s understanding of “mandates,” Emil Brunner’s understanding of the “orders of preservation,” Abraham Kuyper’s account of sphere sovereignty, and even Michael Walzer’s account of spheres of justice, sometimes the contexts in question appear rather too stable and given, as if they are necessary realities and not themselves provisional artifacts of human mutuality, neediness, and power. Certainly this is the case, for example, when Niebuhr turns his attention to relationships among men and women.15 Belief in the static and necessary shape of cultural contexts at any given moment is certainly not a very sound thing to assent to, from a theological perspective or from any other. There is much about the possibilities of new realities disclosed by effort and grace that Niebuhr did not grasp or envision. In part, I will say, he owes his oversights to the fact that he envisioned his core task as a preacherly one: what seems like a high estimation of stability in the orders of creation may be mistaking the provisionality of that preaching task for a final pronouncement. As a preacher, Niebuhr thought it was his job to render judgment in the world as it is at the moment – or rather, to render judgment when a sermon is to be given. However imaginative an interpreter of responsibility any of us may be, mistaken assumptions are an unavoidable consequence of making judgments while also being particular, attached persons. The task of the Christian Church, in preaching, prayer, and sacrament, is to shape people within the drama of mutual dependence and sacrificial love, and not from somewhere outside of it. This does not excuse his failures of judgment so much as it cautions all of us engaged in the same work today. To sum up: any reasonably distinct context of human striving has goods unique to it, which the striving in that context aims to produce. Among these are familiar goods like stability and order, but I will follow Robin W. Lovin and others in arguing that opportunities for justice and peace, hope and freedom, should also be important from a realist perspective, even

Choosing sorrow 151 important to politics. Errors on the side of stability make progressives nervous about the potential of realists to contribute to liberation movements, and in many cases rightly so. Still, the contribution of Christian realism, as Niebuhr understood it, was distinct from the power and interest realism of great power politics in the Cold War. It was a resolute commitment to take all factors into account, including the creative possibilities of love and the pluriform expressions of wickedness that beset human beings in all their plans and projects. That is, political goods don’t include cultivating moral excellence in every citizen, but rather aim for conditions that restrain the calumny and wreckage our worst desires and blunted reason inflict on each other. These forms of restraint can still involve aspects of trust, hope, sympathy, and norms, however, as many critics of force and power realism, including Niebuhr himself, pointed out.16 This is not to excuse Niebuhr or any of us for failing to apprehend more goods in the common life than prosperity and order. From the perspective of the Church, it is the vocation especially of preachers and teachers to think circumspectly and creatively. This is because of the many different, overlapping contexts people find themselves in when the word of God confronts them. It is by recognizing and embracing the tensions of our embodied, historical cooperation with one another that Niebuhr thinks judgment in response to God can be accomplished.17 Responsibility entails judgment. But how dare we venture to judge, when our failure to judge rightly is so close at hand? Niebuhr thought the “symbols” of Christian faith – e­ specially “the Cross” and “Last Judgment” – vital correctives to chronically selfinterested human judgments across any given context. These symbols, however, depend more on lived liturgical and narrative contexts – churches, most especially – than Niebuhr thought to make explicit.18 This acknowledgment that discipleship needs emplotment, an orientation beyond just preaching, actually helps us to take Niebuhr’s dialectical thinking and develop a perspective on the trouble that always attends political life.19 With his emphasis on dialectical thinking and resolution outside history, Niebuhr fails to consistently connect goods or virtues with agents and their formation. On this note, Eric Gregory makes a compelling case that Niebuhr misunderstands Augustine’s account of love, and subsequently misses out on the civic virtues and moral psychology that should be a robust part of a good Augustinian program of citizenship.20 Starting and ending with sin impoverishes these wider insights. People’s shared attachments, on this other Augustinian account, can furnish goods that are worth cultivation by Christians. Niebuhr’s characterization of love usually does tend quickly to valorize self-abnegation. Significantly, however, Niebuhr also points up our inescapable dependence on others and the dependence of others on us as salient, good, and necessary for human flourishing.21 That is, the central sociological fact of our connectedness is illuminated morally by aspects of faith – such as the teaching of Scripture, the worshipping life of the Church,

152  Christopher Dowdy the idea of vocation, and the Incarnation, though it is Dietrich Bonhoeffer who says so more explicitly.22 Expanding Niebuhr’s insight here means highlighting the significance of goods-producing contexts and the role of practices and dispositions in sustaining those contexts. Practices and dispositions In Niebuhr’s later work, he grapples with both a deeper reading of the Christian tradition and the emerging horrors of World War II, developing the ideas that crystallize into the two volumes of Nature and Destiny. In these works and the writings that surround them, he increasingly emphasizes contrition as the proper reaction of sinful people to the disclosure of God – a sort of mean between denial and despair. Niebuhr elaborates on the themes of contrition, forgiveness, and meaningful action in history in two collections of “sermonic essays”: Beyond Tragedy (1937), which precedes his Gifford lectures and the war, and Discerning the Signs of the Times (1946), published in the aftermath.23 In Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr is unconvinced that collective life can instantiate a meaningful version of contrition. This is just two years after the publication of An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, in which Niebuhr characterized forgiveness as an “impossible possibility,” loosely inspirational to the concepts that inform individual consciences on matters of justice. As he gives more attention to the fundamental role of contrition and forgiveness in developing his theology of history, however, contrition becomes something more than a nod to the tragic reality of political compromise. In Signs of the Times – published after both the Holocaust and Hiroshima – and other subsequent writings, contrition comes to entail liturgical imagination, specificity, and self-examination in concrete exercises of corporate worship as well as judgments that issue in new courses of action in a number of contexts. Here, for example, Niebuhr begins with reference to the affective impact of genuine, prayerful contemplation, citing the sensations of humility as a basis for considering the proper treatment of defeated enemies in war: The only moments in which the self-righteousness is broken are moments of genuine prayer. Yet something of that broken spirit and contrite heart can be carried into the contests of life . . . the condemnation of even the wicked foe is made in “fear and trembling” because we know that even that judgment stands under a more ultimate one. . . . This religious humility is also the final source of a truer comprehension of the whole human enterprise.24 The paradigmatic moment in which contrition is realized is not just in thoughtful, potentially private study of Scripture, as it seems to be in Nature and Destiny Vol. I. It is in the detailed prayer of Christian worship, and that itself is a recursive experience of rescue. “Life is a perpetual Lent and

Choosing sorrow 153 Easter,” Niebuhr says. “It has to be perpetual because we are always falling into new forms of self-centeredness.”25 Indeed, Niebuhr considers Christian worship as critically formative to a penitent imagination across contexts, which we know from his writings and exhortations to ministers both in Christianity and Crisis and in the sermons collected in Justice and Mercy.26 Consider how Niebuhr reasons through thresholds for affirming forbearance or granting absolution. One of Niebuhr’s recurring themes in these prayers and sermons is how lowrange grievances in contexts of intimacy and trust can be dismissed by a perceptive sense of humor. “All forgiveness really comes down, particularly in the family, to mutual forbearance, perhaps best expressed in a certain sense of humor.”27 Given the right sorts of background trust and grievance not too grave, formal steps of repentance are unnecessary; they are folded into the package of ongoing interactions. At the other end of the spectrum of gravity and intimacy, Niebuhr considers the possibility of love of enemy instantiated in the life of nations.28 With the Cold War in mind, Niebuhr argues that the threat of guilt from nuclear catastrophe might inspire the recognition of common sinfulness that has brought that threat to the world. This sort of common acknowledgement of culpability might lead towards limited realization of “brotherhood” among nations to turn them back from the brink – practically speaking, perhaps treaties, release from hostile activities, or symbolic gestures of peace. In the first instance, mutual forbearance obtains because of background trust in intimate contexts; on the other, realization of shared guilt forecloses courses of action potentially destructive of political context itself together with its goods, its practices. Each of these principles actually could be relevant in the other circumstance, if backgrounds of trust and gravity of offense could be analogously mapped; it is not the divide in private and public that is relevant here, but the trajectory of the moral past and character of the respective goods as they redound on the resilience of the context in question. Contrition is retrospective; concomitantly, humility frames ongoing action in light of the interested and provisional aspects of human judgment – even confession itself. The expression of contrition is a natural consequence of the soul’s selfdiscovery in the sight of God. In worship we become conscious of our violation of the law and the will of God. . . . Human sin expresses itself in every area of human existence, in secret thought as well as overt deeds, in family life and in the relation of the family toward society. The whole range of human sinfulness cannot be touched in each prayer. It is important therefore to deal with a particular area of human wrongdoing from time to time and search the heart in regard to it.29 This process is, as Niebuhr says, perpetual. Worshippers are thus properly oriented not just through their belief, but through their habits, called

154  Christopher Dowdy continually to relate their experience in worship to living contexts of prudential decisions. Divine forgiveness issues in costly grace from the Cross, and routinely transfigures the moral imagination of participants in worship through the twin strands of poetry and proclamation.30 Divine forgiveness also issues in a re-evaluation of human relationships. God’s extension of mercy is an invitation to transformation through repentance, and every subsequent human exchange and transformation is conditioned by the routine confrontation with God.31 But the analogy does not unfold as if realizing divine forgiveness is a simple possibility for human beings. Forgiveness among human beings before the final judgment is necessarily a matter of calculating the possibilities of love in history, and that means judging the adequacy of human responses in light of the necessities of the relevant contexts. For example, in 1956, Niebuhr defied Billy Graham to incorporate rejection of race hatred into his revivalism.32 To his credit, then, Niebuhr is publicly calling on white people to disavow the benefits of racial hierarchy and to push for visible signs of social change, clearly foregrounding responsibility for concrete contrition in the hands of powerful people. In some respects unlike the white clergy Martin Luther King, Jr., addresses in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Niebuhr is doing more than simply asking Black people to wait for the sake of social harmony. But there is a tension here. Elsewhere, nearly contemporaneously, he suggests that mutual forbearance would mitigate some of the cultural damage being done to the struggle in the South by the impatient commentary of condescending Northerners. Perhaps the first thing we should learn from the gospel is the sense of our common involvement of the sins of racial loyalty and prejudice. It is not a Southern sin, but a general human shortcoming. Such humility will keep Northern liberals from self-righteous judgments, which, in the present instance, will only aggravate the crisis.33 Now, Niebuhr seems to assume he has a god’s eye view here above the parties to this conflict, which we can read as one of the many ways whiteness asserts itself – assuming the authority of the universal and deploring racial hatred instead of white racism is a time-tested bit of racecraft. Thus, while he does speak out against prejudice in ways that are specifically costly to white supremacy, Niebuhr does preserve and defend some of the mechanisms through which white supremacy tends to defend itself. In the ’50s and ’60s he did rail against Graham and others, citing the reality of racial degradation as a subject worthy of continual repentance within the U.S. Church. And there are the strategic counsels that Niebuhr offers – Niebuhr himself had argued as early as Moral Man (1932) that there is no place for an uncalculating forgiveness in the struggle for the legal recognition of the full humanity of African-Americans.34 There are too many concessions still to be won from a recalcitrant white majority, and the temptation to give up this struggle as hopeless, he imagines, must be overwhelming – a reality

Choosing sorrow 155 which would lead to justifying obeisance in the name of survival, or, more likely, rejection of sentimental Christian notions and a disastrous campaign of revolutionary violence.35 For these reasons Niebuhr does counsel gradualism in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. He thinks that he is finding a mean between white reactionaries and Black radical progressives. What Niebuhr is wrong about is not whether the full humanity of AfricanAmericans should be affirmed and enshrined in law; on this point he agrees and is firm. Niebuhr was wrong about the pace at which it would be possible to execute historical change, and wrong about the stakes of getting the change done. Niebuhr expressly was afraid of what internal disruption might do to a nation capable of unleashing nuclear annihilation; what he is not afraid for – what he could not be afraid for – is his own safety in huge swaths of territory in his own country, as basically every African-American had to be. Niebuhr never had the need to own a Green Book. Niebuhr and his brother could ascend to the most culturally powerful institutions in the country – and if Helmut were too German a name, then the elision to H.R. would be sufficient. But for many Black bodies, passing is not an option. He thus saw one existential threat to political democracy and not the other because his body was not a Black body. I am not interested in rehabilitating Niebuhr on race.36 What is interesting for those of us trying to construct a meaningful virtue framework in which to engage racial justice are the practices that can cultivate the right sensibility to guide power’s use, which we are constrained to deploy and organize for if we are to cultivate goods across contexts of human striving. How are we to imagine a more racially just, penitent imagination, capable of informing better prudential judgments? What this calls for is not just more empathy, as some are fond of doing, but a principled attention to the cultivation of a responsibility to act to repair in response of the awareness of our own blameworthiness; a disposition to deliberative sorrow capable of informing rich and ongoing practice of contrition. It is to welcoming the right kind of turbulence into our dispositions that I now turn. This is the disposition that Niebuhr wished to inculcate through his own preaching and prayers. This is the disposition that Niebuhr wanted to embody in his activism. This is the disposition that he failed to adequately develop in the face of racial injustice. What then needs to be added to Niebuhr’s approach to get us to where he wanted to go?

A mean Dispositions – call and response I work at Paul Quinn College, one of the oldest HBCU’s west of the Mississippi. The AME started the school in the basement of an Austin church in 1872, moving to Waco shortly afterward. In 1990 it moved to Dallas. When Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, affecting some of our Harris County

156  Christopher Dowdy students, I was asked, as happens occasionally, to lead prayer in our weekly chapel. As I began, I heard the two ministers on either side of the platform begin to rumble with their typical affirmations – “My, my, my,” and “Yes,” respectively. Even though it was my fourth fall with the college, this ebb and flow of call and response was still so foreign to how I was acculturated to experience prayer that I paused and looked up, assuming I had said something wrong, or that re-direction was needed. Cone and Niebuhr concur that Christian worship is a locus of certain kinds of cross-context affective formation. Niebuhr misses, however, the richer collective tones of Christian worship in part because he is practiced only in white spaces: his world is all call, and very little response. The many sermons he preaches in his career after Bethel are mostly within the context of the university chapel. He valorizes the contemplative and negatively aestheticizes the boisterous and cacophonous. Cone, by contrast, without reservation embraces a range of bodily and intellectual engagements with the substance of Christian worship and moral formation more generally. Moreover, he approvingly cites Bonhoeffer’s posture towards Black churches and the Black experience at large. In Cone’s compact retelling, Bonhoeffer’s sojourn in the United States was transformative in part because it put him into immersive experiences that relate Black religious life’s capacity to emplot the memory of pain and joy in the collective struggle for freedom.37 Cone’s larger project is not an explication of Bonhoeffer’s thought, but to point out the distinctive, constructive theological work done for generations in Black churches, which is of a piece with the affective experience of worship. These institutions serve as sites of concentrated practical wisdom with the capacity, indeed the commitment, to see Jesus as a lynched Black person. As Cone has done since his earliest work, in Cross and the Lynching Tree he re-imagines this and other elements of Black culture and theology, implicit and explicit, in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others. Worship as a nexus of present-day vindication and apocalyptic hope centers Black joy in Black worship and song; there is testimony to pain and its transformations in the Negro spirituals as in the whole range of Black literatures – from W.E.B. Dubois and Ida B. Wells. And there is, of course, plenty of preaching, soaked in biblical imagery and themes. In addition to the prolonged engagement with these sources that Cone finds admirable in Bonhoeffer, he also points to the concrete embodiment of Black experience in the seminarians that Bonhoeffer befriended. In all these engagements – Black worship, Black literatures, and Black friends – Cone finds Niebuhr wanting, missing these key elements of potential moral formation. How, instead, might the archetypical, relational aspects of formation entailed by the call and response of Black Church life speak a different sort of judgment into existence? Attend to the circle of critics For about a month off and on in the fall of 2017 I was working with one of my colleagues at the college on a speech she had been invited to give. It was

Choosing sorrow 157 a local TED event, a proving ground, networking opportunity, and revenue stream for my old alma mater across town, all at once. She had been invited to share, and in response had proposed a talk on imposter syndrome from the lens of a feminist, queer woman of color. We at the college had recruited out of her work as a community organizer, a woman only a few years out of college now serving in the President’s Office as a Special Assistant. As is her custom, she had asked lots of friends and colleagues for input on the brief talk. I, as is my custom, was full of ideas. She wanted to talk about her mother, whom she had barely known but long resented, and how the dislocating traumas of her early life marked her even though she had much success to point to. We riffed back and forth about the feeling of having a panic attack; about where the paralysis starts, our own reasons for anxieties or disappointments, how they are wrapped into the larger issues of our identity and belonging. A set of documents her grandmother had kept, which explained her history in foster care and neglect at the hands of her mother who grappled with addiction, formed a central piece of her story. Reading it the first time as a teenager, in anger; reading it again, as an adult, with something like shame. Among other things, I suggested bringing in the concept of the self in the circle of critics, from Michael Walzer’s work. Walzer argues that we have no core, singular self, pressing back against the world from within; rather, we all hold within us small collections of voices and personalities, more or less complete characters, who take part in internal disagreements about what we should value, do, and become. My argument was that, unlike me, a person largely free to determine the sorts of internal interlocutors that I enjoy and believe, to survive she has had to form an understanding, at least strategically, of the voices of white supremacy. When she gave her talk I slid into the back of the auditorium and listened. I will return to the speech in a moment. Before I conclude with that exemplary performance and consider how she confronted the realities of white supremacy in her own thinking, however, I want to consider how we discover alternatives to Niebuhr’s bland and ahistorical explanations of inequality or resistance to change in matters of race. It begins, in one respect, with widening one’s circle of friends. Get better friends I began at PQC at the end of the summer Ferguson erupted into protest and military confrontation. When Alton Sterling, Jordan Edwards, and any number of Black people in the past three years were killed by public servants, my response has been to go to work and walk around. I sit across the desk from younger colleagues, who are numb and angry. I listen to a former trustee, rueful, unwilling to get into specifics. I check in with student-facing offices to see how students are coping; how those colleagues are coping, which was very well in front of the students and terrified for their own children in private. I try not to pry, if prying is unwelcome, trying to not make anything the occasion for my own personal growth.

158  Christopher Dowdy The people I know at work are my friends – work friends, but friends nonetheless, because we have chosen a cause together, have thrown ourselves into it together; we together share common objects of love, in terms of the communities we serve and students we believe in. It is an imperfect sharing and it is still a workplace. But it bears the marks of what Diana Fritz Cates argues is Aristotelian friendship: a unity of interests among equals which delivers us, almost by accident, into one another’s feelings.38 There is a prosthetic dimension to this sort of feeling together – a mother who feels the pain in her own leg when a child skins her knee is inhabiting her own concomitant pain but not watching her own skin break.39 A movement from ignorance, to knowing how another would react, to feeling something very much like the anger or fear a specific friend would feel in the same moment: this is how our judgment of wrongdoing develops, in our becoming characters in one another’s scenes, as friendships unfold. This requires both our deliberative, voluntary engagement with others not like us, and a deeper level of trust that plunges us into the new spaces they choose to take us. By what was said and unsaid they helped me understand the texture of what had happened, how it impacted their own families, what it meant for their children, and our students. When police killed Philando Castile, I remember, we moved parts of the Summer Bridge schedule around; our college president called in to talk to the students on speakerphone, his booming voice broken with static and emotion, bouncing around the library. We met by the center of campus to pray. We needed to plan to make sure students felt heard and safe, routinely. I was not integral to those plans; I had no crucial role to play. But I was part of the scene, as a bystander. In this capacity I could build a deeper understanding of the lived texture of this anguish, understanding at the same time my own entanglement with the hedge of protection that extends from my phenotype and my habits in a ring around my family, which does not extend to theirs. As a bystander, a guest in this scene I did not just comprehend the facts of what was happening when Black men and women were killed in public, I was attending to the shape and scale of someone else’s kind of fear, and in the prosthetic manner of compassion, feeling it myself. I reminded myself, listening, that understanding the shape of wrongdoing is the origin of moral theology itself – grounded, as is the Summa, in centuries worth of the manuals, those attempts to better administer the sacrament of penance. Grasping something new about the internal world of someone quite different from us is one thing; doing this honestly in the context of asymmetrical power and threat is another. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison places her literary corpus in the same nexus of thematic concerns as slave narratives. These autobiographies, she suggests, contain both a condemnation of slavery and a testimony to the author’s trustworthiness. This performance requires a restrained retelling, leading the narrators to excise accounts of their interior lives with a rhetorical wave of the hand: “Proceedings too terrible to relate,” they say. By deepening the texture of the affective

Choosing sorrow 159 imagination of the historical world of Black women and men, by increasing the store of imaginative facts of the Black past, Morrison aims not just to enrich, but to enable a collective memory. How she does this, Katherine McCittrick argues in her book Demonic Grounds, is in large part through a reimagination of place, from “Frederick Douglass’s childhood cabin” to “the hell of the Middle Passage.” Morrison, that is to say, creates the inner life of her characters in part through the production of geographical signs. As Morrison has said recently, her work populates the emotional landscapes of ordinary Black people, explicating the everyday violence and tenderness by which people make their lives away from the white gaze. Crucially, it is not the bare fact of naming suffering that enables the return of subjectivity, the empowerment of dispossessed people. It is the sort of stories these spaces enable us to tell – the sort of “us” that is created by our acts of collective memory. Little wonder, then, that the trouble at No. 124 in Beloved is ghostly. Some of us need to be haunted. Invitation In Niebuhr, contrition is an articulate sorrow about the particulars of one’s entanglement in sin, the “periodic catastrophes” we find ourselves in. Niebuhr considers the proper cultivation of contrition a central feature of Christian worship. Yet, Reinhold Niebuhr too often sided with white moderates in counseling gradualist approaches to lynching, segregation, and other aspects of white racism’s social violence. In this he was attempting to avoid extremes, to find the most humane balance amidst terrible choices. He was also quite plainly and culpably wrong. James Cone’s analysis of Niebuhr’s moral failure – and, by proxy, the moral failure of white American Protestantism – makes a distinction between Niebuhr’s “eyes to see” white racism and his “heart to feel” its urgency. That is, Niebuhr knew what was happening to Black people, but he was unwilling or unable to grasp the depths of the cruelty that made his life possible. Essentially affirming Niebuhr’s contribution to a theological analysis of power, Cone argues that Niebuhr nonetheless lacked personal, intellectual, or institutional capacity to confront white racism’s catastrophic impact on Black people. He had no sense of it. This lack of emotional literacy renders an otherwise useful framework for political judgment – a tool for humanely navigating extremes – incapable of judging well. How to reckon with this? How to re-shape our capacity for attention? In the end my colleague went quite beyond my advice about Walzer and anxiety. She swept her arms around the stage and showed us pictures of her grandmother, her father; the serviceman who, unknown to him, had a baby girl somewhere in the foster system in San Francisco, and the grandmother who picked up everything and moved from Texas to California to enjoin the struggle to bring her home when she found out. “These are my heroes,” she said. But this is not a hard luck story, where someone overcomes humble

160  Christopher Dowdy beginnings to be great. This is a story about how someone changed their perception of their own beginnings. She recounted the phases of yearning, denial, and anger towards her mother, and traced the way her growing understanding of the headwinds the older woman faced affected her feelings towards her. Her mother, the survivor of abuse; her mother, the survivor; her mother, in a world that made no promises to Black women it intended to keep, except promises to wound. While she generated educational and leadership accomplishments to fill a void of approval left by her mother’s absence, a concomitant awareness of the complexity of her mother’s situation was also dawning. As she grew older, she learned more about the legacy trauma leaves and the way the justice system works, and she began to see. “I saw me,” she said. In the rhythmic close to her talk, she said this: To my grandmother: I see you. You are enough. To [my partner]: I see you. You are enough. To my father: I see you. To my mother: I am here.40 Implicit in the last moment is a question marked by a difference from the celebrations of acceptance: Do you see me? Can you find me? Where are you? The gap has not been closed between mother and daughter. No saccharine offer of absolution or prevenient forgiveness here. But in tracing the transformation of her understanding of her mother, she had drawn us into the fabric of a debate inside of her about how to regard the catastrophes her mother endured, the catastrophes she inflicted. Restoring the details of her mother’s story, the contours of her own trauma and pain in light of the systemic realities she came to know as an adult: these exercises of imagination and solidarity shifted to apportionment of blame and anger to other, systemic sources. If we have listened as a friend would listen, we have seen her gather evidence, sift and analyze make connections, and then reach over to silence the voice inside the circle of critics that speaks with white authority about how to construe blame for Black women. It allowed certain shames to melt away, and at last began to put the occasion for repentance not just on her mother, but on other entities altogether. As she finished the capacity crowd rose to its feet, and cheered.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Mark Jordan, “Missing Scenes: Forgotten Forms of Teaching Need to Be Restored to the Writing of Christian Ethics,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 3:3–4 (Summer–Autumn 2010), https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/ summerautumn2010/missing-scenes. Accessed August 28, 2019. 2 The seminal article here is Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion, 40:2 (April 1960): 100–12. Judith Plaskow’s dissertation critiquing Reinhold Niebuhr on a similar note has

Choosing sorrow 161 necessitated an apologia from every Niebuhr partisan since. Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1989). A recent, important contribution to this discussion in a focus issue of Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion places Saiving in context as well. See especially Rebekah Miles, “Valerie Saiving Reconsidered” and Mark Douglas and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, “Revisiting Valerie Saiving’s Challenge to Reinhold Niebuhr Honoring Fifty Years of Reflection on ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’: Introduction and Overview,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28:1 (April 1, 2012): 79–86 and 75–78 respectively. 3 James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 41. 4 “What Resources Can the Christian Church Offer to Meet Crisis in Race Relations?” in Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957), 153. 5 Outside Niebuhr’s window in Harlem, Traci West points out that Black women were organizing in ways that made his recommendations and analysis either redundant or shallow; my aim in my own work has been to point to Niebuhr’s gradual appreciation of the possibilities of political organization, and to focus constructive political thinking on how this potential has been realized and anticipated in liberation movements and struggles for justice. Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). 6 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 41. 62–64 for how Niebuhr can be updated. 7 Rebekah Miles cites Niebuhr himself from the inscription of his Man’s Nature and His Communities (1965): “I will not elaborate an already too intimate, autobiographical detail of a happy marriage except to say that this volume is published under my name, and the joint authorship is not acknowledged except in this confession. I will leave the reader to judge whether male arrogance or complete mutuality is the cause of this solution.” Miles makes a strong case that Ursula ought to be regarded as Niebuhr’s co-author for many of the works after 1952. Rebekah Miles, “Uncredited: Was Ursula Niebuhr Reinhold’s Coauthor?” The Christian Century, January 19, 2012, www.christiancentury.org/­ article/2012-01/uncredited. Accessed August 28, 2019. 8 Niebuhr in fact grew up as a member of the German Evangelical Church of America, a product of the merger of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany. 9 See especially Niebuhr’s rationale for particularity in intercessory prayers for “all sorts and conditions of men,” Reinhold Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, ed. Ursula Niebuhr (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 3, 25. 10 Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, 13, 41. 11 Robin W. Lovin, Christian Realism and the New Realities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105–14. 12 This is from a prayer following the close of the 1962 Palm Sunday Sermon at Harvard University. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Son of Man Must Suffer,” in Justice and Mercy, 95. 13 Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, passim, but see especially 47–48. 14 The logic goes something like this: uncalculated love is the only tonic that can really address our fundamental anxiety, which arises from the transcendence and limitation within each of us, in Niebuhr’s theological anthropology; but love must be responsible if it is in history, and responsibility must be calculating. Hence justice, as calculated love, is relevant across contexts as well.

162  Christopher Dowdy 5 See note 2 above. 1 16 Niebuhr is in fact distinguishing Christian realism from crypto-realpolitik versions of realism in essays like “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 123, 140–41. For an excellent, recent look at realism and its shortcomings, see History and Neorealism, ed. Ernest R. May, Richard Rosecrance, and Zara Steiner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 17 Lovin, New Realities, 28–37. 18 This is why Niebuhr’s theology often seems to his post-liberal critics and others like a recommendation of an attitude instead of participation in a community. But the whole thrust of his mature work is incomprehensible without the recursive experience of worship and prayer to illuminate it, and much less without acknowledging his constant desire to discover God at work in the ambiguities of history. Not incidentally, I think this is in part why Cornel West’s ability to hope in spite of his relentless declamation of abuse in American democracy is so incomprehensible to Jeffrey Stout. West does not share his entire context with his democratic fellows, and neither does Niebuhr. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 57–59. 19 Niebuhr himself began to see this as he matured, in part leaving behind a deeply rooted anti-Catholicism, as he indicates in both Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 242; “A View from the Sidelines,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 250–58. Significantly, in “Sidelines,” he relates this move from intellection and symbol to performance, mystery, and embodiment to his own experience of disability arising from a series of strokes in 1951. 20 Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); on Niebuhr’s tendency to reduce Augustine to his account of sin, 80–83. On Niebuhr’s understanding of love and justice with relation to Paul Ramsey and Augustine, see 180–83. Gregory thinks that Niebuhr’s understanding of love reduces it to unconditioned, “angelic” idealism, and there is a good deal of truth in the assessment. However, as I will argue, it is the tension among loves which necessitates the calculations of justice in history. 21 There is an echo here of what MacIntyre does in much more detail in Dependent Rational Animals. Among the many key distinctions to be made is that the sine qua non of the right polis for MacIntyre is the ability to respond immediately to another’s suffering. Beyond these fairly immediate surroundings, moral deliberation itself falls short, just because dependence is hopelessly attenuated. By contrast, Niebuhr sees the multiple ties of dependence in social relations as extending far beyond immediate communities. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 142. 22 Much is given over to theological analysis of Incarnation in Bonhoeffer’s ethics, but he ties it to responsibility with regard to following the Sermon on the Mount: “The Sermon on the Mount as the proclamation of the incarnate love of God calls people to love one another . . . the Sermon on the Mount itself confronts a person with the necessity of responsible historical action. . . . Since individuals are always faced with responsibility, it is wrong to ask the odd question whether the Sermon on the Mount might be addressed only to individuals as individuals, but not to those having responsibility for others. The Sermon on the Mount regards us as responsible for others and knows nothing of persons as isolated individuals. Moreover, the Sermon on the Mount is not content with simply preparing individuals for their tasks in the community. Instead, it claims them

Choosing sorrow 163 in the very midst of their responsible action itself.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 242/sec. 241 and 243/sec. 242. 23 “The worship of God leads to contrition; not merely to a contrite recognition of the conscious sins of pride and arrogance which the human spirit commits, but to a sense of guilt for the . . . inescapable pride involved in every human enterprise . . . particularly in the highest and noblest human enterprise. Such a contrition will probably never be perfect enough to save the enterprises of collective man from the periodic catastrophes that overtake them . . . but this contrition is possible at least for individuals.” Reinhold Niebuhr, writing before WWII in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 44–46. 24 He goes on to consider the ramifications for treatment of defeated enemies in war. Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1946), 18–19. 25 The initial quote is from “The Hazards and Difficulties of the Christian Ministry” (1953), in Justice and Mercy, 131. 26 Succinctly, Niebuhr says, “Our gospel is one which assures salvation in the cross of Christ to those who heartily repent of their sins. It is a gospel for the cross; and the cross is a revelation of the love of God only to those who have first stood under it as a judgment. . . . Repentance is the first key in the door of the kingdom of God,” in “The Christian Church in a Secular Age” (1937), in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 83–84. 27 “How could family life exist without this? . . . as [two people] live together, something more grows up as a matter of the spirit, ultimately what the New Testament calls reconciliation, mutual forgiveness, mutual forbearance. Sometimes this can be done with a little sense of humor rather than some obvious form of reconciliation.” Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, 45; see also Ibid., 37. 28 “The Son of Man Must Suffer,” in Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, 94–95. 29 From Niebuhr, “Worship and the Social Conscience” (1937), Essays in Applied Christianity, ed. D. B. Robertson (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 50; also see “A Christmas Service in Retrospect” (1933), in Applied Christianity, 31–32. 30 Niebuhr, Essays in Applied Christianity, 33. 31 Niebuhr, “The Providence of God” (1952), in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 38. 32 “The question arises why an obviously honest man, such as Graham, cannot embody the disavowal of race prejudice into his call to repentance.” Niebuhr, “Proposal to Billy Graham,” in The Christian Century (August 1956), reprinted in Love and Justice, 157. In 1957, Graham held a watershed revival at Madison Square Garden that left mainline liberal Christians basically flabbergasted. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a prayer. The contempt Niebuhr feels for Graham, his followers, and the “simple” Gospel Graham advocates is nearly palpable. For more on the tensions between Graham and King, see Jason Stevens, “Should We Forget Reinhold Niebuhr?” Boundary 2 34:2 (2007); for more on Graham and race in the context, see Michael G. Long, Billy Graham and the Beloved Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Stephen Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 33 “What Resources Can the Christian Church Offer to Meet Crisis [sic] in Race Relations?” in The Messenger (April 1956) in Love and Justice, 153. 34 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). I will note here that, as Niebuhr suggests, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s understanding of forgiveness was not uncalculating nonviolence, but a thoughtful and strategic use of a political

164  Christopher Dowdy strategy. See Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper, 1958) for the remarkable account King portrays as basically a stumbling into leadership, and then the furious, lucid account of revolution, its necessity, and the related necessity of nonviolence in Why We Can’t Wait (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). 35 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 252. 36 The most important recent critiques on Niebuhr’s racism, which was basically invisible to him, can be found in Traci West and in James Cone. Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); See also Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone’s critique is especially detailed and persuasive on the way that Niebuhr’s enmeshment in a white power structure blinded him to Black suffering. 37 This is not to exaggerate or crystallize the differences between Black and predominately white traditions. Contemplation, valorized rationality, and suspicion of emotion are just as much a part of some Black Church experiences as mainline white churches; plenty of energetic embodiment arises out of the charismatic and white Evangelical traditions as well. 38 Diana Fritz Cates, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 39 I am poaching this concept of prosthetic feeling somewhat from Alison Landsberg, who analyzes the production of shared memory this way in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). There is no sense here in which prosthesis is meant to connote a subtraction in meaningfulness or completeness, but rather it denotes a comprehension of difference even when function is very similar. 40 Mercedes Fulbright, “Story of Motherless Child: Pushing Back Shame & Redefining Brave,” TEDxSMU 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue= 1&v=KjP96RL3-Sc.

10 Reinhold Niebuhr, virtue, and political society A key to the Christian character of prophetic realism R. Ward Holder Reinhold Niebuhr has gone through many phases since his death in 1971. Though never wholly off the academic and ethics radar, Niebuhr’s influence has waxed and waned, and there have been at least two Niebuhr “moments,” in the decades after his death.1 Niebuhr seems paradoxically on a cyclical historical relationship with American scholarship. The exegete of human history who denied the possibility of history presenting a series of cycles appears to suffer the vagaries of fortune’s wheel, sometimes celebrated, at other times almost forgotten. This reception of Niebuhr is loosely reflected in his own considerations of the society and the political and economic machinations that undergirded it. Reinhold Niebuhr wandered through the 20th century like a badly calibrated gyroscope. A socialist, a capitalist, a hawk, a pacifist, and an interventionist – this near constant change earned him the ire of many who believed that he had betrayed deeply held convictions, or friends who felt that Niebuhr had betrayed the shared principles that had bonded them in Christian fellowship. Yet, was there a core that made sense of Niebuhr’s peregrinations, or was he simply someone who shifted with the times? Analysts, both popular and academic, regularly claim Niebuhr for their own party, or reject him through caricature. Niebuhr regularly suffers in the analysis of political and ethical thinkers. His output was voluminous, tracing the contingencies of history and giving ample fodder for polemic.2 As well, the conflicting claims about Niebuhr stem from the ill-fit of Niebuhr within the traditional ethical categories of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. While the Christian realism that Niebuhr hammered out across his career does not fit well with any of these options, an important caveat about the necessity of including Christian virtues must be maintained. Nowhere is this better revealed than in the junction of Niebuhr’s idea of the public sphere and its connection with the theological virtues. Niebuhr’s early statement, “Any justice which is only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice,” serves as a disregarded notice of the center of his ethics. Niebuhr would continue throughout his career to marry justice with the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope.3 Niebuhr tended to blur

166  R. Ward Holder the distinctions between society and politics, so this chapter will concentrate upon his political thought. In classical Aristotelian ethics, no simple distinction between the study of virtue and the study of politics can exist. Both concern the good, and both are practical studies. As well, the virtues and vices of a populace are inseparable from the political structures they inhabit. The character of citizens is shaped by the politics of the city, society, or nation, and the politics of these provide the context, possibilities, and limitations for citizens expressing virtue and participating in vice. Reinhold Niebuhr was not in any straightforward way a descendent of Aristotle. But in some ways his thought is more classical than modern. He rejected the modern picture of politics in which citizens should privatize their own religious and philosophical traditions, pictures of humanity, and conceptions of the good in favor of some generic image of humans as ideally rational agents. Like Aristotle, Niebuhr deployed a rich picture of humanity drawn from his own Christian tradition. Politics is a space conceived to contain, restrain, and enable the virtues and vices. Of course, in other ways, Niebuhr was no Aristotelian. Aristotle’s ethics aimed for a harmoniously ordered life for individuals and imagined that politics should ideally produce a harmoniously ordered polis. Niebuhr conceived of the individual as paradoxically finite and free, unable under the conditions of history and sin to realize complete fulfillment. His conception of politics is similarly fraught. Unlike Aristotle, Niebuhr understood politics, at least democratic politics, as inherently conflictual, even agonistic. At the same time, Niebuhr never reduced politics to mere procedure. Properly, there could be no politics without justice, rooted in faith, hope, and love.4 This chapter will consider Niebuhr’s history that makes him difficult to classify, then examine his sense of the problem of politics, and the root causes of that. Finally, the conclusion will consider the key of the theological virtues as providing the necessary conditions for political life, and the impossible possibility of a politics that provides true justice.

The problem of placing Niebuhr Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought defies easy classification. Theologically and religiously, some argue that even in his criticism of the liberalism of the Social Gospel of his youth, he had not escaped it.5 He proclaimed himself a socialist in the early 1930s and argued for a brand of Christian socialism, working for it in his efforts with Kirby Page and Sherwood Eddy.6 In the build-up to the war in the 1930s, Niebuhr was laying the foundations of a Christian realism that depended upon an Augustinian and Reformationtinged anthropology. In the middle of the war, with the publication of The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr shifted his realism toward a prophetic model that criticized not only those children of darkness for their sinful acceptance of their self-interest, but also the children of

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 167 light who rejected any sense of their own sinfulness and how that hindered any effort at justice or charity that did not maintain their position in society.7 At times Niebuhr was seen as an American form of neo-orthodoxy.8 But Niebuhr would attack Barth and Barthianism as being unable to come to grips with the realities in which sinful people lived. In the world of history, religious perfectionism represented a significant danger, because “the distinctions between good and evil on the historical level” were frequently almost reduced to matters of irrelevance.9 Niebuhr would move onto the stage of international relations and do such significant work there that some claimed he had given up Christianity completely. Even in death, Niebuhr’s fundamental commitments were questioned, most especially by Stanley Hauerwas, who asked the question, “Do we have anything more in Niebuhr than a complex humanism disguised in the language of the Christian faith? Probably not.”10 If Niebuhr’s theological journey was difficult to chart, his political leanings were no less difficult. During the years of his pastorate in Detroit, he was an American patriot, under the sway of the power of the American dream. He wrote a critical essay in 1916, published in the Atlantic, that chastised German-Americans for not accepting more fully the patriotic task expected of citizens.11 Niebuhr continued this form of patriotism as the German Evangelical Synod’s executive secretary of its office for the war, the War Welfare Commission.12 Niebuhr argued that the effects of war on the human psyche were subversive and significant. War gave a momentary priority to the nation and to courage.13 Yet even with such dire warnings about the corrosive effects of war on the individual psyche, Niebuhr did not surrender his patriotism or support for American political and imperial goals. Niebuhr’s shift to pacifism would follow the war, in 1923 after a visit to the Ruhr Valley in Germany convinced him of the inhuman effects of the Treaty of Versailles. Niebuhr, who had resisted pacifism in America, could not accept the impact of vengeance on Germany.14 Niebuhr would consider himself as a pacifist for most of the next decade. But that pacifism did not quell Niebuhr into quietism. By the end of the 1920s, Niebuhr was attacking capitalism, and suggesting the possibility of socialism as both an economic and political solution to the problems of modern society. In 1928, Niebuhr moved to New York to take a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary and to take a position at the socialist journal The World Tomorrow. He joined the Socialist Party and the next year published an article signaling his new political stance. “Political Action and Social Change” argued that the labor movement was short-sighted in acceptance of capitalism and their failure to gain significant wage increases was proof of that mistaken choice. Instead, labor should advocate for a socialist political party, like the Labour Party of England.15 In 1932, Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society. Though the first responses to his book were savagely critical, the work brought Niebuhr onto the world stage of theology in a manner his other works had not.

168  R. Ward Holder Though an avowed socialist, Niebuhr became disappointed in the realpolitik of Communism in Russia through the decade of the 1930s and simultaneously intrigued with Roosevelt’s ability to enact with the New Deal much of what the Socialist Party had campaigned on. Niebuhr throughout the 1930s moved toward support of liberal Democratic ideals. Though he was not a hawk by any means, Niebuhr did support the United States’ assistance to the countries to which it was allied by both treaty and a common liberal democratic spirit.16 The Munich Crisis brought to a head the differences between mainline pacifist liberal Christianity and Niebuhr.17 In 1940 he left the Socialist Party to endorse the necessity of America defending its culture and civilization. The dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the theological world and brought World War II to a close. Niebuhr participated on the special commission appointed by The Federal Council of Churches to formulate a statement upon this new reality. The report argued, “The surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are morally indefensible.”18 Niebuhr signed the document, but his own opinions on the war were far more measured. In Christianity and Society, Niebuhr wrote of the necessity of paying heed to “historic forces more powerful than any human decision,” and defended the development and use of the weapon.19 By 1950, Niebuhr had found his characteristic paradoxical stance. Commenting on the discovery of the hydrogen bomb, he wrote, “Thus we have come into the tragic position of developing a form of destruction which, if used by our enemies against us, would mean our physical annihilation; and, if used by us against our enemies, would mean our moral annihilation.”20 In the aftermath of the war, Niebuhr’s status as a public intellectual in both political and religious realms reached its zenith.21 He was invited to attend George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff, and he appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in March of 1948. Hans Morgenthau called him the greatest political philosopher of his day.22 His political work took on the significant task of addressing the question of two competing empires. He addressed this in The Irony of American History, a work that Andrew Bacevich has called the most important book ever written on American foreign policy.23 Niebuhr’s presentation of the American and Soviet conflict through religious lenses and as influenced by America’s self-image exhibited the importance of international relations in his mature work. Niebuhr was an early supporter of the Vietnam conflict but came to recognize that the war represented the worst of American imperialism, without a counterbalancing defense of either American interests or Western culture. As he approached his death in 1971, Niebuhr provided a wary prophetic voice, noting that the Cold War and nuclear peace that he called a “balance of terror” illustrated the limited freedom of collective humanity.24 The moving target that Niebuhr created allowed a variety of later thinkers to claim him as their spiritual or intellectual forebear. Sometimes, the argument seems stretched, as when neo-conservatives took up the Niebuhrian cause.25 At other times, Niebuhr seems the last refuge of those who

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 169 are losing their faith.26 But if considered through the lens of justice that is tied to faith, hope, and love, greater possibilities arise, both for understanding Niebuhr’s coherence and for the application of his thought in latter day circumstance.

Niebuhr’s conception of the society and state Niebuhr was never a theoretical political scientist or even ethicist, and he built his conception of the state from his consideration of the ways that humans work together in societies. He accepted a modified form of the basic Aristotelian concept that humans were political animals, viewing them as social animals, but in Niebuhr’s estimation that reality had not brought the species very far in its necessary considerations of the political realm. The opening sentence of Moral Man and Immoral Society drew upon this insight. “Though human society has roots which lie deeper in history than the beginning of human life, men have made comparatively but little progress in solving the problem of their aggregate existence.”27 Niebuhr saw that human collectives engaged in great hypocrisy, displaying time and again the failure to conform collective life to individual ideals.28 Niebuhr built his conceptions of political life upon the realities that he believed derived from the human condition.29 He saw the human subject as both material and spiritual, a situation that allowed both great possibilities and extraordinary flaws. This character necessitated dependence of the human subject upon the creator, a relationship against which humanity rebelled. The rebellion sought to achieve the powers and prestige of the creator – in hubris attempting to become divine. But mortals were incapable of such a leap and consistently failed. Instead of accepting this state of existence, humanity constantly sought refuge in lies – to other humans, to the divine, and to the self. Among those lies were the overestimation of the self and the privileged group to achieve wisdom unmarred by mistakes, morality unsullied by sin, and justice unblemished by self-interest. These realities created the perfect storm that any conception of political life or justice would have to address dynamically. Nevertheless, Niebuhr maintained the hope of a greater possibility. He noted, “Every society needs working principles of justice, as criteria for its positive law and system of restraints. The profoundest of these actually transcend reason and lie rooted in religious conceptions of the meaning of existence.”30 The essence of the political efforts at justice was founded upon the true religion – but every concrete instantiation of that failed to bring to full materiality the spirit that made it worthwhile. Niebuhr’s hope for justice remained tied to the historically contingent nature of human communities and the humility to realize that history’s path was not, and could not be, fully known. Just as Niebuhr saw humans as broken within history, he was also far more pessimistic than Aristotle about the potential for a society to realize

170  R. Ward Holder social harmony. For Niebuhr, the state’s pursuit of two principles of justice, equality and liberty, involved the state in paradox – as these principles existed in tension with the survival of the national community, and with each other. Examining equality, Niebuhr saw that every community existed in a hierarchical structure, and that the utopian dreams for equality of Levelers and Marxists did not change that historical fact.31 Niebuhr believed that there were two basic facts – that some degree of hierarchy in a society’s structure was necessary, and that power and privilege would always tend to be gathered in greater amount than was required to tend to the needs of the society.32 Likewise in analyzing liberty, he saw the unity of any society being threatened by that principle. Any fully developed libertarian stance would threaten the life of the society because of the denigration of its unity. However, Niebuhr also warned of the danger of too little liberty, The tendency of the community to claim the individual’s devotion too absolutely, and to disregard his hopes, fears, and ambitions which are in conflict with, or irrelevant to, the communal end, makes it necessary to challenge the community in the name of liberty.33 Niebuhr believed ideological approaches to these problems were impossible to sustain in the real world application. Instead, he favored the partial accomplishment of liberty and equality, achieved through a separation of powers that stemmed from Calvinistic anthropological roots that so distrusted the human pretensions.34 The greatest achievement of liberty and equality would come from a balancing of powers. Niebuhr defended democracy because “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”35 He taught that democracy contained both substantial and historically contingent or accidental elements. The historically contingent elements were its debts to its founding in the ideals of the bourgeois societies of Europe. But democracy offered more than the bourgeois idealism that N ­ iebuhr believed was passing away.36 For Niebuhr, the greatest good of democracy is that it was in keeping with the needs of the human spirit that could constantly transcend itself, while not surrendering to anarchy at the feet of the will-to-power that freedom could become. But other forces within the society, including Christianity, could throw a mask over the self-interest and provide a cloak preventing the identification of the self-interest.37 Niebuhr’s agenda was to show Americans the power of self-interest in society and politics that could easily overwhelm reason and morality in human interactions.38 Small wonder, then, that he believed that social cooperation on the level of the state required reliance on some form of coercive force, but that this would in turn introduce the possibility of new forms of injustice.39 He saw the highest individual ideal as being motivated by disinterested intentions, a theme that was the opposite of the will-to-power he portrayed as the heart of sin.40 But while individuals might respond to a call to Christian love,

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 171 social groups did not. Democracy, with its bourgeois roots, encouraged the vices associated with inordinate self-interest. Niebuhr pointed out that Adam Smith’s conception of laissez faire was intended to establish natural harmony, but that the economically powerful groups had used that creed for their own purposes, transferring freedom from the individual to corporate structures, which enabled them to throw off the shackles of political control.41 Therefore democracy could and did use coercion to achieve a greater approximation of justice. However, coercion introduced a number of problems. These problems arose in the application of coercion that did not escape the inherent vices of those men and women applying it and the systemic vice intrinsic to the systems in which it functioned. It also appeared in the ability of the hierarchically and economically powerful to bend that coercion to serve self-interest rather than egalitarian justice. The mature Niebuhr accepted democracy for the possibilities it created for human communities. He wrote, Ideally democracy is a permanently valid form of social and political organization which does justice to two dimensions of human existence: to man’s spiritual stature and his social character; to the uniqueness and variety of life, as well as to the common necessities of all men.42 For Niebuhr, the human spirit was that which constantly gave rise to transcendence, constantly rose toward the creative and novel. Its combination with the material bodies of humanity provided the specific combination that made humanity different from all other creatures. But that spark of innovation would always need to be nurtured by communities that provided the intellectual and moral space in which to flourish. Thus, the permanently valid form of social and political organization had to be flexible enough to create space for the creativity and genius of the human spirit, while having enough governing and channeling capacity to set out the rules for the social groups into which all societies sort themselves. Niebuhr’s defense of democracy, especially as it had been posed in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, was not the pure worship of democracy as the divinely chosen tool of the right side of history. He knew that there was no “inoculation against national sin and self-­ interest.”43 Writing in Christianity and Crisis in 1947, Niebuhr wrote, “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.”44 While the United States in the post-war period descended into a fusion of a self-proclaimed godliness against its godless foe, Niebuhr maintained a critical distance. In a perfect Niebuhrian paradox, democracy offered gifts as it also offered perils. The public sphere might be succored by democracy but as easily could be led astray through its fallible nature. Niebuhr took up two related questions of religion and the state. The first was the responsibility of Christians to be involved in the mud and blood of the political sphere.45 The second was the manner in which they should

172  R. Ward Holder do so. Niebuhr never flinched from the necessity of working in the public realm.46 For him, this was required by the absolute demand for social justice found in Scripture. The fact that one could never fully realize it did not alleviate the obligation to work to approximate it.47 The entirety of Niebuhr’s work demonstrated that this choice remained firm.48 For him, religion provided resources for politics, for the public realm, and for the bettering of humanity.49 Paradoxically, it also provided a temptation toward idolatry and resources for imperialism, for the justification of bigotry, and for the hubris of the dominant group’s belief in its superior morality. Only a balancing of interests could provide a way forward. Niebuhr took up the issue of religious believers participating in the political realm of their world for two reasons. The first was out of necessity – he believed that Christians bore a particular calling that compelled them to do so. Even though one might want to avoid political questions as being beneath the calling of Christians, at times the events of history forced an answer.50 Considering war, Niebuhr wanted to avoid the absolutism he believed was inherent in Barth’s position and recognized that “discriminatory choices still had to be made.”51 As well, though Niebuhr recognized the paradox invited by the commandment not to judge, he realized the impossibility of such a position for a state. He argued that bringing a Christian sensitivity to the concrete problems of American statecraft was not an abandonment of the task of the theologian or pastor for that of the amateur politico.52 Instead, he believed that the application of Christian doctrine to secular issues was necessitated by the reality that Christians are called upon to better the world and forced to live in it.53 The fact that Niebuhr did receive praise in circles outside of the theological realm only seemed to make the value of Christian thought in the political world obvious to him.54 As well, Niebuhr took up the second question of how religious believers might participate in the political realm. He wrote, One of the greatest problems of democratic civilization is how to integrate the life of its various subordinate, ethnic, religious and economic groups in the community in such a way that the harmony of the whole community will be enhanced and not destroyed by them.55 Niebuhr set out three different approaches for the religious speaker to have a voice in the wider culture or political community. He recognized that religious voices made truth claims that contradicted the truth claims of others. First, one religious tradition or religion might become established, and thus gain coherence through hegemony. Second, Niebuhr recognized the possibility of the relinquishing of the peculiar religious truth claims, so that the religious person would only participate in the public sphere as a secularized figure.56 Both of these solutions had been tried at various times by various thinkers and regimes. But Niebuhr himself preferred a third approach, the two-fold

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 173 test of tolerance. The religious person must take seriously and avowedly the claim of religious truth, while maintaining the humility to recognize that she or he could be wrong.57 He wrote, The solution requires a very high form of religious commitment. It demands that each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving an humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual expressions of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity.58 True conviction was necessary for Niebuhr. The goodness and truth of the religious values had to be put forward in a genuine manner, not by replacement with secularized philosophy, nor by shunting religious value into the dustbin of history as unfit for political consumption. But that true conviction was necessarily linked to humility that saw the possibility in a history of religious people failing to understand, or being deceived, or following radical evil garbed in the purest of white garments. The tragedy of the human condition, its constant necessary reach toward self-transcendence and thus idolatry and self-deception, necessitated a humility that listened to other voices and other truth claims. On this side of history, humans had to be satisfied with finding the proximate solutions to the problems of life. Only through such a model could the ultimate solution be validated.59 For Niebuhr, the practice of the political task had to remain within the sphere of the complexity of human history, rather than achieving a false and imposed sense of a perfected political system.60 The manner in which this would be followed mattered to Niebuhr. That was the reason for his long and somewhat uncritical support for democracy. He believed that its mesh of flexibility and stability provided the best venue for the explorations of the human spirit, and the effort to become more just. Niebuhr’s anthropology supported an analysis of the human condition wherein humanity continually divided itself into interest groups that sought to escape justice through accumulation of society’s goods, supported by malicious claims to extraordinary virtue, wisdom, goodness, and even divinity. Religion did not solve this problem, but only complexified it. Politics was the necessary venue of balancing competing claims for goods – ­material, spiritual, and intellectual. But politics, even liberal democratic politics, could not survive without a vision. That vision, in Niebuhr’s thought, would be in broad terms provided by Christian virtues.

Justice which is only justice – Niebuhr’s concentration on Christian virtues Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethical teaching is rarely considered as a form of virtue ethics. Since the publication of G.E.M. Anscombe’s classic article “Modern

174  R. Ward Holder Moral Philosophy” in 1958, moral philosophy has been divided into three main streams, deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.61 Niebuhr’s Christian realism does not fit neatly under any of these. However, while it is difficult to characterize, it is also false to call it an example of mere complex humanism disguised in the language of faith. Niebuhr’s consideration of the political sphere was bound together by a sense of something that transcended the simple boundaries and balances of human interest. Frequently, his thought was unintelligible without the foundations of Christian thought, and especially Christian theological virtues. He noted it himself when concluding his The Irony of American History. There, he asked the question, “To be specific, is an ironic interpretation of current history generally plausible; or does its credibility depend upon a Christian view of history in which the ironic view seems to be particularly grounded?”62 Niebuhr noted that many secular realists who were willing to agree with him on positions he argued in The Nature and Destiny of Man were also careful to state that their agreement did not extend to his “theological presuppositions.”63 This was a crucial factor in Niebuhr’s thought from early on in his career that he developed as he progressed. In 1932, he wrote, “Any justice which is only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice.”64 The mathematical calculation of justice could only ossify into a caricature that neither gave to all their due, nor protected those who would be marginalized by the tyranny of the majority. He noted, “Since all political and moral striving results in frustration as well as fulfillment, the task of building a world community requires a faith which is not too easily destroyed by frustration.”65 In much the same way, he noted the necessity of faith, faith that life has a center and source of meaning beyond the natural and social sequences which may be rationally discerned. This divine source and center must be discerned by faith because it is enveloped in mystery, though being the basis of meaning.66 For Niebuhr, the Christian faith that provides the instrument of this judgment is indispensable. The criticism of Niebuhr as being less than Christian fails to note the essential character of these Christian virtues.67 Hope is a crucial factor in Niebuhr’s thought, and a virtue that cannot be rejected.68 It is part of the Christian inheritance he insisted on in forming his work, even when some of his admirers went out of their way to ignore the intrinsic connections he drew between Christianity and politics.69 James Keenan links hope to the other two theological virtues and notes that “hope is particularly applicable to the ambiguous time in which Christians life, that ‘already but not yet.’ ”70 That ambiguous time, the time between the times, defined Niebuhr’s reality. His consideration of the end of history depends upon a vision of Christ as both judge and redeemer.71 That was part of the Christian hope, and its faith in a God upon whom it depended.

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 175 Keenan notes that “hope is not first an action, but a virtue that keeps us in action.”72 The effort at this virtue maintains the motive force for the Christian, the power that keeps her moving in spite of those evidences that she cannot succeed. But hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into the hearts of believers.73 Niebuhr’s use of love presented a balancing foil to justice. While the discussions of the function and goal of justice in Niebuhr’s thought are frequent, his consideration of love is much less frequently engaged. In part, this may be because of the manner in which Niebuhr took up the topic – using the biblical terms of eros and agape in much the same manner as Anders Nygren had.74 But that stark contrast between self-sacrificial and selfinterested love cannot blind the modern analyst to the importance of this virtue in Niebuhr’s thought. Considering the function of love in Niebuhr’s thought, and applying it to the American criminal justice system, W. Clark Gilpin wrote, “Instead, when Christian theology followed the lead of Jesus, it made the ‘law of love’ its central principle, and this was an ‘impossible ethical ideal.’ ”75 That impossible ethical ideal was an impossible possibility, an asymptote that could never be reached but had to be essayed. Keenan claimed that love was a reality that dwelt inside of believers that changed them and their actions.76 Niebuhr’s audience would see this function of love in Niebuhr’s thought as he took on tasks that transcended calculations of interest. Niebuhr recognized this character to his thought, and knew that at times he was drawing on elements quite outside the political realm through which to change and even redeem it. He wrote, “Whenever religious idealism brings forth its purest fruits and places the strongest check upon selfish desire it results in policies which, from the political perspective, are quite impossible.”77 Niebuhr seemed to accept that sentence, that since such ideals were impossible, humanity would have to accept a strong bifurcation between the individual and communal morality, with different virtues to guide them. But that acceptance was short-lived. Niebuhr characterized the tendencies of the industrial era as traveling a definable trajectory. That trajectory both aggravated injustices and united human communities in a system of economic interdependence.78 That interdependence would force the consideration of both individual and corporate virtues, would demand a consideration of human goods that took seriously the total human enterprise. His solution was a sort of “sublime madness.” In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul.79

176  R. Ward Holder The core of that sublimity was hope, not based upon a possibility built from human ingenuity, but one that sought for the desired good under the calling of the eternal. Finally, Niebuhr’s ethical models around the political sphere cannot stand without the support of virtues, and especially the theological virtues.

Niebuhr, history, and the virtues Reinhold Niebuhr’s life was one of change. In international relations he moved from war supporter, to pacifist, to interventionist, to apologist for the atomic bomb, and finally to critic of the Vietnam policy. His thought in the domestic sphere was no less fraught with change. It is fair to ask, was there anything Niebuhr stood for, or did his malleability demonstrate a lack of a foundational commitment that allowed such wide movements? The answer to that question lies in Niebuhr’s self-understanding of both his own vocation, and that of Christian realism. Niebuhr never saw himself fundamentally as a theologian or even a theoretical ethicist. Niebuhr believed that he was called to be a Christian ethicist working at the issues of applied Christian morality and political action.80 His fusion of political action and commentary with Christian morality seemed wholly normal to him. His seemingly careless mixing of the language of moral ideal and of law was resolved, in his mind, by the sense of the law of love as an ideal.81 Niebuhr’s choice to be a practitioner of Christian morality led him time and again to make the active choice, to be applying Christian morality to given historical situations.82 Likewise, Christian realism did not produce a social program per se, but rather a Christian and political attitude. While on this side of eternity, there could be no finality to any program, to any alliance. Christian realism recognized the fundamental transitory character of modernity, and met it with the faith that God’s providence in history, though inscrutable, was inseparable from the divine love, enacting such a force in history that hope was neither a delusion nor a rhetorical game.83 The never-ending tension between practical Christianity and practical politics could only be treated, though not resolved, through his dependence on the theological virtues. For Niebuhr, the “importance of the assurance of the Kingdom of God coming at the end of history is that the belief assures hope, and thus Christianity does not lead to a finally tragic view of life.”84 Therefore, while Niebuhr had a practice of appropriate action in the public sphere, it was always and only a practice, rather than a doctrine. For Niebuhrian Christian realism, the public sphere was a venue where the morality of Christianity should be applied.85 Because the challenges changed, so did the working out of the Christian life. But the foundational commitments to faith, hope, and love were a shibboleth by which all particular programs would be measured.

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 177

Notes 1 In the middle of the 1980s, interest rose in Niebuhr, marked especially by Richard Wightman Fox’s Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1985); and Richard Harries, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). In the first decade of the 21st century, so much came forth on Niebuhr, that Liam Julian wrote of a “Niebuhr resurgence.” Liam Julian, “Niebuhr and Obama,” Policy Review, 154 (April–May 2009):19– 33; See also John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–11. See also Martin Marty’s sense that no matter how other movements have tried to decenter Niebuhr from the American ethical and political-theological scene, his work remains the subject and conversation partner of countless other works. Marty, “Foreword,” in Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original, ed. Daniel F. Rice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), xi–xv. 2 See Gary Dorrien, “Introduction,” in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944, reprint with a new introduction by Gary Dorrien, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ix. For a more detailed treatment, see Michael G. Thompson, “An Exception to Exceptionalism: A Reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Vision of ‘Prophetic’ Christianity and the Problem of Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 834–36. 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, intro. Langdon Gilkey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932, reprint edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 258. 4 The previous section owes greatly to conversations with Kevin Carnahan and David True. 5 Dorrien, “Introduction,” xii. 6 See Christopher H. Evans’ consideration of Eddy, Page, and the Social Gospel in his The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 7 Gary Dorrien, “Introduction,” ix. 8 Langdon Gilkey, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Theology of History,” The Journal of Religion 54 (1974): 360–62. Gilkey characterized Niebuhr as one whose theology represented a “half-hearted” existentialist neo-orthodoxy. 9 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Barthianism and the Kingdom,” The Christian Century 48 (1931): 924. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, “Answer to Karl Barth,” The Christian Century 56 (1949): 234–36; “Barth-Apostle of the Absolute,” The Christian Century 45 (1928): 1523–24. 10 Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), 131. 11 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Failure of German-Americanism,” Atlantic 117 (July 1916): 13–16. 12 Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 49–50. 13 Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Foreword by Martin E. Marty. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1980, reprint edition), 21. 14 Ibid., 42–43. 15 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Political Action and Social Change,” The World Tomorrow 12 (December 1929): 493.

178  R. Ward Holder 16 Michael G. Thompson, “An Exception to Exceptionalism: A Reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Vision of ‘Prophetic’ Christianity and the Problem of Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 846–47. 17 Gary B. Bullert, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Century: World War II and the Eclipse of the Social Gospel,” Journal of Church and State 44 (2002): 281. 18 Federal Council of Churches’ Special Commission Report, quoted in Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 224. 19 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Atomic Bomb,” Christianity and Society 10 (1945): 4. 20 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Hydrogen Bomb,” Christianity and Society 15 (1950): 5. Campbell Craig’s assertion that Niebuhr learned realism through the experience of the nuclear Cold War rejects the sense of history that Niebuhr had generated in the Gifford Lectures, before the start of World War II. See “The New Meaning of Modern War in the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 687–701. 21 Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 238. 22 Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Influence of Reinhold Niebuhr in American Political Life and Thought,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice in Our Time, ed. Harold R. Landon (Greenwich, CT: Seabury Press, 1962), 109. 23 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), includes a statement by its editor, Andrew Bacevich, that this is “the most important book ever written on U.S. foreign policy.” (ix). 24 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Idealist and Realist Theories,” in Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965, reprint edition. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 80–81. 25 See Daniel F. Rice, “The Fiction of Reinhold Niebuhr as a Political Conservative,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 98 (2015): 59–83; Gary Dorrien, “Consolidating the Empire: Neoconservatism and the Politics of American Dominion,” Political Theology 6 (2005): 409–28. 26 See John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, with “On My Religion”, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 Niebuhr’s consideration of human anthropology has been analyzed frequently. Among the studies available, see Peter B. Josephson and R. Ward Holder, Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice: Christian Realism and American Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019); Langdon Gilkey, On Niebuhr: A Theological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” The Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–12; Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 30 Dorrien, Children of Light, 71. 31 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Liberty and Equality,” in Pious and Secular America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 64–71. 32 Ibid., 64. 33 Ibid., 66. 34 Ibid., 75–77. 35 Dorrien, Children of Light, Foreword to the First Edition, xxxii. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Religious Politics,” Christianity and Society 16 (1951): 4.

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 179 38 Daniel F. Rice, “The Fiction of Reinhold Niebuhr as a Political Conservative,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 98 (2015): 65. 39 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 21. 40 Niebuhr has been severely critiqued by feminist theologians, including Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” The Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–12; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980). See also the more recent effort to rehabilitate Niebuhr in part by Daniel A. Morris, “ ‘The Pull of Love’: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology,” Political Theology 17 (2016): 73–90. 41 Dorrien, Children of Light, 26. 42 Ibid., 3. 43 John D. Carlson, “The Morality, Politics, and Irony of War: Recovering Reinhold Niebuhr’s Ethical Realism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 36 (2008): 640. 44 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Democracy as a Religion,” Christianity and Crisis 7 (1947): 1–2. K. Healan Gaston notes that Time magazine excerpted this in August 1947. See her “ ‘A Bad Kind of Magic’: The Niebuhr Brothers on ‘Utilitarian Christianity’ and the Defense of Democracy,” Harvard Theological Review 107 (2014): 1–30. 45 This stance put Reinhold on a collision course with his brother, H. Richard. See Gaston, as well as the Niebuhrs’ public dispute in the pages of Christian Century in 1932. 46 See Josephson and Holder, Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice, 67–68. 47 In my research I have found almost a complete lack of academic attention to how Reinhold Niebuhr used Scripture, other than his acceptance of the Tillichian myth. But Niebuhr returns again and again to the Sermon on the Mount, to consider both its religious and legal meanings. 48 Gaston criticizes him for this, concluding that this turned Christianity into a utilitarian position on the meaning of religion for democracy. Gaston, “A Bad Kind of Magic,” 29. 49 Gaston, “A Bad Kind of Magic,” 29. 50 Kevin M. Carnahan notes the necessity of responsibility in any Niebuhrian approach. See his “What Should a Christian Realist Presume About War?” Studies in Christian Ethics 26 (2013): 430. Douglas Ottati traces this theme through a variety of important American ethicists in the latter half of the twentieth century, linking all back to the Niebuhrs. “The Niebuhrian Legacy and the Idea of Responsibility,” Studies in Christian Ethics 22 (2009): 399–422. 51 Michael G. Thompson, “An Exception to Exceptionalism: A Reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Vision of ‘Prophetic’ Christianity and the Problem of Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 846. 52 Though as formidable a statesman as George Kennan took Niebuhr’s ideas seriously, and even saw him as a prophet. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 543. 53 Thus, Niebuhr denied both the Radical Reformation’s call for Christians to abandon the world, and American popular belief in the “religion of the church” that discarded any sense of the necessity of Christian involvement in “secular” affairs. 54 Arthur Schlesinger lists several thinkers who greeted Niebuhr’s thought approvingly in his “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr,” New York Times, September 18, 2005. The most recent edition of The Irony of American History, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008, includes a statement by its editor,

180  R. Ward Holder Andrew Bacevich, that this is “the most important book ever written on U.S. foreign policy.” (ix). 55 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 124. 56 David Joseph Wellman, “Niebuhrian Realism and the Formation of US Foreign Policy,” Political Theology 10 (2009): 26. 57 Josephson and Holder, Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice, 80–82. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 2:219. 58 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 134. 59 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:211. 60 Carnahan, “What Should a Christian Realist Presume About War?” 413. 61 G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–19. 62 Niebuhr, Irony, 152. 63 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Changing Perspectives,” in Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965, reprint edition. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 24. Mark Haas has recognized Niebuhr’s practical nature which he terms his pragmatism, but he finds Niebuhr to derive his principles deontologically. See his “Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Christian Pragmatism’: A Principles Alternative to Consequentialism,” The Review of Politics 61 (1999): 605–36. 64 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 248. 65 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 186–87. 66 Niebuhr, Irony, 168. 67 Gabriel Fackre sought to defend Niebuhr’s Christianity in “Was Reinhold Niebuhr a Christian?” First Things 126 (October 2002): 25–27. 68 Kevin M. Carnahan, “Recent Work on Reinhold Niebuhr,” Religion Compass, 5:8 (2011): 372. 69 Wellman, “Niebuhrian Realism,” 24. 70 James Keenan, S. J., Moral Wisdom: Lessons and Texts from the Catholic Tradition (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 161. 71 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:291–93. 72 Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. and James F. Keenan, S.J., Paul and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges Between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 105. 73 Romans 5.5. 74 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: S.P.C.K., 1953). See also Daniel A. Morris, “ ‘The Pull of Love’: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology,” Political Theology 17 (2016): 73–90. Morris takes seriously the critiques of Niebuhr’s anthropology, and suggests that his thought can be retrieved by a more adequate consideration of love. 75 W. Clark Gilpin, “Criminal Justice and the Law of Love: Reflections on the Public Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Doing Justice to Mercy: Religion, Law, and Criminal Justice, ed. Jonathan Rothchild et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 233. 76 Daniel Harrington, S.J. and James Keenan, S.J., Jesus and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges Between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 202), 86. 77 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 270. 78 Ibid., 276. 79 Ibid., 277.

Niebuhr, virtue, and political society 181 80 James Gustafson, “Theology in the Service of Ethics: An Interpretation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Theological Ethics,” in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time, ed. Richard Harries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 30. 81 Ibid., 31. 82 Thus Hans Morgenthau said of Niebuhr, “I should say in defense of Reinhold Niebuhr’s political thought that this organic relationship between political philosophy and a particular historic situation or concrete political problem is by no means accidental. It is, so it seems to me, a prerequisite for creative political thought.” Morgenthau, “The Influence of Reinhold Niebuhr,” 103. 83 See Richard Wightman Fox, “Reinhold Niebuhr: The Living of Christian Realism,” in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time, ed. Richard Harries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 9–23, esp. 21–23. 84 Gustafson, “Theology in the Service,” 37. 85 Robin W. Lovin argued that “Christian realism proposes that the range of moral possibilities and problems with which we have to deal becomes clear in the political relationships where we pursue happiness, seek security, and construct the systems of justice that order our lives on a large scale and across generations.” “Christian Realism and the Successful Modern State,” Studies in Christian Ethics 20 (2007): 56.

11 A Niebuhrian virtue of justice Kevin Carnahan

It is rare in contemporary society to think about justice as a virtue. It is much more familiar to think about justice as a set of principles or a formal structure. This is not entirely unique to our present age. While Plato attempted to treat justice as both a quality of society and moral psychology, it has always been easier to make sense of what justice means for communal structures than for individuals. Even Aristotle, who certainly wanted to locate justice as a moral virtue, focused primarily on an arithmetic account of distributive and retributive justice rather than an account of justice as a quality of character.1 Modern, Western society has special obstacles to talking about justice as a virtue. The classical definition of the virtue of justice is roughly “the consistent desire to give to each what they are due.” Surely this made more sense in a premodern society, marked more explicitly by concerns of honor, shame, and social class. What would it mean in a liberal, democratic society to give to each what is due? Pay fair market prices for goods? Don’t steal, defraud, or bilk? For most liberal theorists since John Locke, people have primarily been due space to make of themselves what they wish. Justice in such a system can be reduced to an account of the principles and procedures needed to protect equal negative liberties. Not so much the basis for a virtue as a counsel to stay out of the way of others.2 With the slow collapse of modernity, however, many have recognized the need for more robust discussions of justice. We see that abstract principles of justice, liberty, and equality have been used to justify the oppression of people and peoples through modern colonialism, racism, sexism, and great power imperialism. Today in America we wonder if the structures of justice in our society are strong enough to withstand the assaults of populist politics and tyrannical Presidents. With new surges of racist and partisan efforts to manipulate vote counts, we begin to lose confidence in the idea of balance of power. We also come to question, given the history of social inequality, whether there was ever any reason to have confidence in such a chimeric balance to begin with. When the principles and structures of justice begin to fail us, then, at least, we must recognize the need for a virtue of justice within us to provide guidance.

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 183 In this chapter I shall argue that Reinhold Niebuhr provides us a rich context for thinking about what such a virtue might look like and provides a particularly useful framework for thinking about what the virtue of justice may require in the light of the political catastrophes we see developing around us. This may seem an unlikely thesis, especially since some have critiqued Niebuhr’s conception of justice as an instance of modern formalism and proceduralism and others have suggested that Niebuhr’s ethics are antithetical to virtue theorizing. No doubt, Niebuhr was involved in articulating abstract principles of justice and with defending the structures conducive to agonistic balance-of-power politics. And Niebuhr provides us with no developed account of virtue, much less a virtue of justice. With many in his generation, he lacked the mental furniture necessary to develop such an account. But Niebuhr’s critics have often shortchanged his approach to justice via an uncharitable reading of selections from this work. And while he provides no account of justice as a virtue, his thought, I shall argue, carves out the location for the virtue and assumes its functioning. I shall argue that in terms of Niebuhrian virtue, justice is best conceived of as a disposition to correctly judge when and how one should support a position in the midst of political conflict. To put this a bit differently, the Niebuhrian virtue of justice governs judgments about which way one is to push in the midst of social conflict and how and how hard one should be willing to push. To make the case for the viability of this account I will begin by arguing that Niebuhr’s anthropology is constructed to provide space for judgment – a space which Niebuhr sees as having been collapsed by alternative anthropologies. I will do this in two parts. The first part shows how Niebuhr’s concern for transcendence opens the possibility for creative judgment beyond the limits of either reason or natural impulse alone. Then, turning to a consideration of Niebuhr’s doctrine of sin, I will show how human rebellion re-shapes the possibilities for judgment while maintaining that Niebuhr did not see this as foreclosing on the space for judgment. I will then argue that Niebuhr’s thought provides us with a relatively developed picture of concerns that influence the shape of judgment. I shall treat these concerns under the categories: creativity, paradox, publicity, power, realism, regulative principles, and criticality. Penultimately, I will return to the issue of the virtue of justice in contemporary politics to ask whether Niebuhr’s biography is coherent with the picture of the virtue of judgment that I have proposed. I conclude with a general judgment about what we need in politics today.

Locating virtue: transcendence The majority of Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man is composed not of the articulation of Niebuhr’s own understandings of history and anthropology, but of his critique of the understandings produced by others. With

184  Kevin Carnahan dizzying speed, Niebuhr takes up claim after claim – picking them up, glancing them over, sizing them up, and tossing them to the side. But by what measure is Niebuhr assessing these ideas? It is true enough to say that Niebuhr finds all alternative positions to be wanting in relation to his own (“the biblical”) understanding of history and anthropology. But he also believes that his own understanding is superior in that it lives up to a set of standards that exists partially independent of the view itself. Cases could be made that Niebuhr is measuring different philosophies against their ability to build a sustainable account of meaning in human life or against their ability to make sense of the moral ambiguity of human life. Looking more immediately to Niebuhr’s historical context we could see Niebuhr as arguing that alternative positions fail to provide us with the resources to understand and react to the evils of a regime like Nazi Germany. Or, perhaps, to bring us closer to the discussion of virtue, we could see Niebuhr as attempting through his argument to instill in his audience some of the qualities necessary for appropriate reactions to a regime like Nazi Germany. We need not read the argument in Nature and Destiny as reductive; Niebuhr’s method is clearly complex, and the aims noted earlier are not contradictory. As such I don’t see any reason to reduce his project to any one of the earlier accounts. But I do want to claim that at least one of the standards Niebuhr is using is whether positions create an appropriate space and context for human judgment. Different understandings of the self and history can motivate or intimidate, spur judgmentalness or pusillanimity. To understand one’s nature and the world in which one lives is to understand the limits and opportunities of human life. And one of Niebuhr’s continuing themes is that the proposals offered by others create artificial infringements upon or delude human judgment. Take for instance Niebuhr’s critique of Aristotle and Plato. He finds that both identify the self with reason and embrace forms of material/spiritual and mind/body dualism. In the midst of his critique, Niebuhr suggests that from such a perspective, “Individuality is no significant concept, for it rests only upon the particularity of the body.”3 Here the individual self and its perspective is subordinated to abstractions of reason. Once the philosopher has determined the most rational organization of society, there is no further appeal for the individual. Human judgment is subsumed under obedience to the structures and principles of rational order. When Niebuhr moves on to consider the “naturalism” of Democritus and Epicurious, he laments that they “reduced the immanental reason in the world to mechanical necessity and sought to understand man in terms of this mechanism.”4 Again, the space for judgment is stymied by the posited anthropology. When Niebuhr reaches the tragedians he notes in their works an irresolvable clash between the order of reason and the “vitalities” of the passions. This, he finds, allows for the development of a creative individual, but only

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 185 at the price of a tragic contradiction between this creativity and the order of the world. The act of judgment becomes meaningless, even if pitiable, as conflicts in the world are found to run all the way down.5 Plotinus’ mysticism improves upon the alternatives by recognizing that within the self, the individual has access to resources transcending the self. But instead of creating the space for judgment, this philosophy debases the individual in its search for undifferentiated oneness. Again, relative judgments in the world are stripped of their raison d’être.6 Tragedy collapses the space for judgment by shining a light on the unresolvable conflicts of history. Mysticism collapses the space by looking to a light outside of history that is so bright that all of history simply looks dark. At this point Niebuhr has the basic tools of his analysis on the table. The ancient world has provided the categories from which other anthropologies will work. For Niebuhr, the alternatives of reason or nature and form or vitality are played off against one another in endless variety across the history of Western thought about humanity. Occasionally, self-transcendence appears, either subsumed under one of the above categories, or in ecstatic experience that grasps something beyond either reason and nature. Niebuhr has a constant concern that in the midst of all of these “parts” of the self, the self ought to be recognized as dialectically suspended in a way that allows the self to maintain a space for judgment. That is, a space where judgment is neither reduced to rational abstraction, natural instinct, or rendered meaningless by the pressures of the world or the wish to escape the world. This basic patter recurs when Niebuhr comes to assess the social context for the rise and endurance of modernity. Medieval rationalism identifies reason with the feudal order, utopians like Meister Eckhardt discover transcendence but lose the individual self, bourgeois liberalism develops as a challenge to medieval rationalism but eventually claims its own identity with reason, fascism claims to represent unalterable natural loyalties, and communism claims to free natural vitality from the corruption of property. In each, the space for judgment is foreclosed upon. Niebuhr contrasts these alternatives with “the biblical” or “Christian” view. This view begins not from within the self, but from the perspective of God. The self is known by God before it knows itself, and the self always exists in relation to God. Transcendence of the self then is not a height gained by any independent faculty of the self, be it reason or natural impulse. Transcendence of the self is given to the self from beyond itself. This transcendence is the “image of God” within the human. “The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world, which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world.”7 This transcendence gives the self a resource beyond reason or nature. But unlike the transcendence posited in mysticism which moves beyond the world into undifferentiated abstraction, Christian transcendence is grounded in the “will and personality” of God.8 Rather than standing over

186  Kevin Carnahan against the forms and vitalities of nature, God is located as the source of those forms and vitalities. This is the goodness of creation. Thus, in the moment of transcendence, the Christian finds a divinely grounded harmony of beings in the world rather than the negation of all relations. In positive terms, this transcendence provides the power of “creativity.” It is here that justice is funded by agape and mutual love. In content, justice is informed by the view of harmony achieved in the moment of transcendence.9 In disposition, justice is motivated by love for the other that surpasses even what is possible under the conditions of history. The self is able to “transcend natural forms within limits and to direct and redirect the vitalities.” And ultimately, the self is able to imagine a “new realm of coherence and order.”10 Suspended between the immanent and the transcendent, being both natural and reasonable, finite and free, the self is able to imagine alternatives to present realities. It is in this space that judgment is possible, neither cowed by natural impulse or reason, nor destroyed by the heights of transcendence itself.

Locating virtue: sin It may be objected at this point that while my argument thus far has located a space for judgment in Niebuhr’s thought, and while this seems like an appropriate locus for a virtue of justice, I have not yet addressed the source for Niebuhr’s criticism of the virtue tradition: his doctrine of sin. Such criticism would have some basis. After all, for Niebuhr pride is the quintessential form of sin, and one of the basic types of pride is “pride of virtue.”11 And Niebuhr almost always links the capacity for creativity, which I have noted above, with the capacity for destruction.12 The link is no mistake. It is the same capacity for creativity and justice that makes possible our injustice. And the two are not separate. They are mutually active in all human activity. Creativity is “always corrupted by some effort to overcome contingency by raising precisely what is contingent to absolute and unlimited dimensions.”13 In our self-transcendence we are able to see alternative possibilities, but we are also able to see our own limitations. Aware of our own inability to achieve all that we are able to see in our moment of creativity we become anxious, and our anxiety inevitably gives rise to our sin. We either pridefully assert ourselves in the midst of our creativity, or we subvert our creativity into obedience to some finite and ultimately oppressive system. In our imposition of justice is hidden our injustice, in our pretense to virtue our vice. This is the paradox of creativity and destruction. It is here that our transcendence has one more function, to convict us of sin. The judgment enabled by transcendence is not only a judgment against the particular order around us, it is a judgment against the order within us. Looking back upon the self we are able to feel our own guilt for being implicated in the evil that is enacted in the world. The feeling of guilt may

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 187 not be universal. But the judgment is. “The Pauline assertion: ‘For there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’ (Romans, III, 22,23) is an indispensable expression of the Christian understanding of sin.”14 This is the basis of what Niebuhr would call the “principle of indiscriminate criticism” against all human endeavors, including all human judgments.15 No judgment should be thought to emerge from an unbiased standpoint. The influence of sin is present even in the most apparently selfless acts. No struggle in human life is a struggle of right against wrong. All are the struggles of sinners against sinners. This is also the basis for Niebuhr’s occasional treatment of the subject of justice under the category of “balance of power.”16 Sinful human beings, he suggested, are typically corrupted in their views of justice to the point that the least bad option is to have the power of any one person or group limited by the power of others. The power of government maintains order. At the same time, civil society provides a field of play for the competing powers of various individuals, institutions, and groups in the society. Relative justice is best achieved when the centripetal power of government and the centrifugal powers of civil society are balanced, and when the power of various interest groups within the society are balanced against one another. Thus are judgments about justice reduced to judgments about relative power. Thus is ostensibly fair procedure placed above judgment. And thus does Niebuhr become a conservative, constantly rejecting any proposal that radically shifts the power of society. Imagine telling a black person not only that they must limit their push for equality so that they do not face a de facto backlash from the white supremacist, but that justice is best achieved when their power is perpetually limited by the power of the white supremacist. This seems the conclusion if sin is so severe an impediment that procedure and balance of power are the only ways to restrain our own evil. But before we accept such a picture of Niebuhr’s thought on justice, we ought to remember that Niebuhr speaks of the relation between creativity and destructiveness in terms of paradox and not negation. Sin does not eliminate the space for judgment. In fact, Niebuhr seems extremely concerned about maintaining the space for judgment even in the darkness of sin. His thought takes on two different threats that sin poses to judgment: the motivational and the intellectual. The motivation for judgment is threatened by demoralization in the face of sin. The precarious location of the self as finite and free is the condition for anxiety, but anxiety can give rise to either creativity or destructiveness. Sin traps us in cycles of destructiveness. Within sin-stained history, progress is often stymied regardless of what we do or do not do; we are unable to effectively aid others and bring about harmony. Worse, in sin our efforts often end up producing harm. In such a context the meaningfulness of judgment is threatened.

188  Kevin Carnahan Addressing the problem of demoralization requires an appeal to resources beyond the self. Through revelation the self comes to know itself as forgiven. Forgiveness allows the self to suffer history. But Niebuhr is careful to point out that Christianity “does not regard the mercy of God as a forgiveness which wipes out the distinctions of good and evil in history and makes judgment meaningless.”17 The grace of God goes beyond forgiveness in offering possibilities for fulfillment of our partial, imperfect, and occasionally abortive moral efforts within history. It is here that Niebuhr finds that the human is in need of the theological virtue of hope, and a renewed possibility of faith, in order to approximate love through judgment. A Niebuhrian virtue of justice is dependent upon the infusion of these other virtues. Because there are separate treatments of these virtues in the present volume, I shall not rehearse the key function of them here.18 But suffice it to say that they are essential to re-establishing the possibility of judgment on the far side of sin. Niebuhr is also concerned to establish that one still has the categories necessary for judgment. As suggested above in his note about forgiveness, Niebuhr is concerned to maintain that there are significant categories of human action that allow us to speak about and name relative evils in the world. Here it is instructive to look at Niebuhr’s criticisms of Augustine. On the basis of his principles he could not distinguish between government and slavery, both of which were supposedly the rule over man and were both a consequence of, and remedy for, sin; nor could he distinguish between a commonwealth and a robber band, for both were bound together by collective interest.19 Niebuhr’s concern here is that Augustine has allowed the principle of indiscriminate criticism to eliminate significant particular judgments about justice within the world. Augustine, he fears, has reduced Christian ethics merely to ascetics. On this picture, the Christian merely endures and reacts to the shape of the world rather than judging and acting within the world. The upshot is the reproduction of the errors of mysticism on an alternative grounding. This concern is telling, because it brings us back to what I have argued is one of the goals of Niebuhr’s anthropology: maintaining a location for judgment. It is quite apparent that [the universality of sin] imperils and seems to weaken all moral judgments which deal with the “nicely calculated less and more” of justice and goodness as revealed in the relativities of history. It seems to inhibit preferences between the oppressor and his victim; between the congenital liar and the moderately truthful man; between the debauched sensualist and the self-disciplined worker; and between the egotist, who drives egocentricity to the point of sickness,

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 189 and the moderately “unselfish” devotee of the general welfare. Though it is quite necessary and proper that these distinctions should disappear at the ultimate religious level of judgment, yet it is obviously important to draw them provisionally in historic judgments. The difference between a little more and a little less justice in a social system, and between a little more and a little less selfishness in the individual, may represent differences between sickness and health, between misery and happiness in particular situations.20 There is within Niebuhr’s thought both an indiscriminate criticism of all positions and the possibility for discrimination between relatively better and worse options in history.

(Relatively) Virtuous judgment If what I have argued thus far is correct, Niebuhr is careful to protect a space for judgment. Niebuhr is, then, concerned about finding a space in which the passions, emotions, and reason of the self are arranged so that the self is free to make (relatively) just judgments. Inasmuch as Niebuhr delimits this location through the articulation of Christian myth of creation, sin, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and parousia, we can see him as claiming that the space for judgment is best maintained and curated internal to the Christian narrative. Or stated alternatively, that ideally the Christian narrative self is located in a way that allows for (relatively) just judgment. This, at the very least, sounds like a space created for a virtue of justice. If this is right, then Niebuhr’s discussion of the relative justice of institutional relationships, balances of power, and principles of justice is in an important sense secondary to the functioning of judgment. The self transcends every claim about abstract principle, balance of power, and arrangement of political institutions. His comments on principles and structures of justice are thus to be read as councils of prudence or reflect statements about ideal contexts for judgment, but do not reflect statements of conditions either necessary or sufficient for the functioning of judgment. So much for the space for judgment. What is the shape of this virtue we are positing? Here I will suggest several overlapping areas where Niebuhr provides a rich context for a virtue of justice. Creativity First, the virtue of justice on a Niebuhrian account does not rely exclusively upon any one foundation within the self. Unlike Aristotle’s or Plato’s accounts of virtue, it is not determined by “right reason.” While virtue requires attentiveness to the input of reason and sense, it also depends upon the capacity of the individual for creativity. The self is able to transcend itself and conceive of possibilities other than what it has received. This allows it

190  Kevin Carnahan to question its own reason and moral senses. The capacity for creativity in Niebuhr’s thought also presses the self outward. Reaching toward infinite creativity, the self cannot be happy simply with itself. It can only be fulfilled within ever broadening schemes of harmony and relationship. Ultimately, it is this pressure which also presses the individual past the tribe, the nation, the species, and on and on. Niebuhr attempts to show the influence of this element in judgment when reviewing the history of the development of both distributive and penal justice in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. Creativity in distributive justice first brought attention to the possibilities of equality and then pushed beyond equality toward “a consideration of the special needs of the life of the other.”21 Western society, he suggests, moved first from an elitist distribution of education toward a more equal “public” system, and more recently has started to make special allowances for special needs students. Sin limits what is possible in particular contexts, but in the transcendent moment the self is always capable of seeing beyond its own context. It is here that love funds justice by pressing it toward ever higher possibilities. Paradox Niebuhr’s doctrine of sin has doubtless complicated the space available for judgment. The virtue of justice must partially be constituted by the knowledge that one lacks the virtue of justice. This paradox is never resolved. One has never adequately taken one’s injustice into account so that they move beyond it. Part of the content of any Niebuhrian virtue of justice will include the cultivation of a certain amount or kind of cognitive dissonance that acknowledges the “virtuous” person’s own inability to judge rightly even as they judge. A Niebuhrian virtue of justice will be a paradoxical virtue. In terms of practice, we can see the paradoxicality of judgment in Niebuhr’s thought in his tendency to state both the indiscriminate and the discriminate judgment about any particular issue at the same time. Take for instance this statement on unemployment insurance. The benefits which are paid to the unemployed are almost always higher than the privileged would like to pay, even though they may be lower than the poor would like to receive. Some members of the privileged classes in modern communities have in fact obscured the issue of justice in regard to this problem by the most obvious and transparent of all ideologies. They have sought to maintain that the unemployed are the victims of sloth rather than of the caprices of an intricate industrial process; and that the fear of hunger might cure their sloth. The actual schedule of payments upon which the community finally decides represents the conclusions of the social, rather than any individual, mind, and is the consequence of a perennial debate upon the subject.22

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 191 The first and the last sentence remind us of the relativity of all standards of justice that we can deploy within history, thus expressing the indiscriminate judgment. But in between these, Niebuhr offers partisan criticism of one side in the contemporary dispute, thus expressing discriminate judgment. The indiscriminate judgment relativizes the discriminate judgment, but it does not eliminate it. Publicity At the end of the previous quote, Niebuhr reminds us that the actual distribution of goods arranged for unemployment insurance is a matter of public and not private discernment. The emphasis on publicity of judgment, that judgment should be open to public critique, is both a reflection of Niebuhr’s concern for our finitude and his concern about sin. As a finite creature, humans are dependent upon that which is beyond them. Submission to processes of public discernment is an acknowledgement of this facet of human nature. Because of sin, especially when the individual makes judgments alone there is the potential for biases. Again here, we see some of the paradoxical nature of the virtue of justice worked out in practice. The virtue of justice is involved in both assertion and an openness to negation. As Niebuhr writes: The church would do more for the cause of reconciliation if, instead of producing moral idealists who think that they can establish justice, it would create religious and Christian realists who know that justice will require that some men shall contend against them.23 There is an extent to which this modifies the scope of particular judgments. The “just” person will have to judge the weightiness of the case at hand and their relative confidence in their conclusion. Niebuhr is not claiming that World War II should have been replaced with public debates over the merits of Nazism at the League of Nations. There are cases in which the one has confidence in a serious judgment that justifies action rather than further debate. The decision of whether and in what way to participate in agonistic debate is a matter of judgment. Niebuhr councils us that we ought to be self-critical in a way that leads us to submit to this process more than we might want, but it does not establish an absolute rule. To make the judgment in practice, one needs virtue. Power Once we move past the idea that a balance of power is the structure that constitutes justice, we can see perceptions about balances of power as contributing to the shape of the virtue of justice. While all are sinners, says Niebuhr, there is yet to be expected an “inequality of guilt.” By guilt, Niebuhr

192  Kevin Carnahan is referring to “the objective consequence of sin, the actual corruption of the plan of creation and providence in the historical world.”24 Individuals with greater power tend to have greater guilt for two reasons. First, because greater power gives one more opportunity to act upon sinful inclinations.25 Second, because greater power allows one to wreak more havoc when one does act on sinful inclination. Here Niebuhr is influenced by his reading of the Hebrew prophets. “The strictures of the prophets against the mighty, accusing them of pride and injustice, of both the religious and the social dimensions of sin, are consistently partial.”26 Niebuhr here comes extremely close to articulating what has come to be known as a “preferential option for the poor” in contemporary theological ethics. This means that the Niebuhrian concern for balance of power always has within it a progressive edge. It is no mistake that in the earlier quoted note on unemployment insurance, Niebuhr’s expression of discriminate judgment is expressed against those with the greater power of wealth. Realism Otto Von Bismark once stated that “politics is the art of the possible.” For Niebuhr one can make the same claim about justice. As such, the virtue of justice must be concerned with perception of what is possible. As noted, Niebuhr critiques Augustine for treating government and slavery in similar moral terms. In part Augustine’s problem is that he was unable to conceive of a world without slavery. Living in a period when we have outlawed slavery in the form of ownership of another person, we know that life without this institution is very much possible. Augustine’s judgment overestimated the extent to which sin had placed permanent limits on human creativity. Niebuhr, of course, is aware of the possibility of life without slavery. He implicitly contrasts this with the possibility of life without government. As noted above in Niebuhr’s treatment of balance of powers, Niebuhr sees government as required for ordering an anarchic and sinful society. He makes a similar judgment about war, which he sees as an action that is necessary to reign in particularly unjust regimes in international politics. Niebuhr does not foresee a world in which this action could be categorically eliminated without setting free forces much worse than the wars that would be required to restrain them. These judgments can be further compared with Niebuhr’s critique of communism.27 The fault of communism is not that it is aimed at an evil goal. The problem was rather that the goal of communism was too good for a sinful world. Communists believed that they could bring about a society that manifested perfect equality with perfect liberty. But they could only believe this by underestimating the reality of human sinfulness. They identified the power of property with the source of evil, thus failing to see how intractable

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 193 sin is, growing out of the will of the human being regardless of the kind of power available to abuse. Determining what is possible under different circumstances is as difficult as it is important. Niebuhr was famously wrong at key points in making judgments about what was possible in terms of advancing racial and gender equality. History has been kinder to his judgments about the limited possibilities for communism, world government, and the development of democracy via military expansion. Perceiving the world accurately engages other virtues, like humility and phronesis.28 No virtue exists in independence. And while Niebuhrian virtues should be expected to aid in moral discernment, we should not expect it to eliminate errors. The self remains finite and sinful, even when possessing relative virtue. All political action is dependent upon forgiveness and the grace of God for completion. Regulative principles Justice is, as noted above, funded by agape and mutual love. Each represents a fuller realization of harmony than is available at the next lower level. Niebuhr also recognizes that justice must be processed in terms of further lower level principles that may conflict with one another. These principles are discovered in the process of history as humanity repeatedly attempts to approximate the goal of perfectly loving society. In a 1963 article, Niebuhr articulates a set of regulative principles: “Equality and liberty, security of the community or the freedom of the individual, the order of the integral community and, as is now increasingly the case, the peace of the world community.”29 Regulative principles do not always work together. Societies constantly trade off liberty for equality or vice versa. In order to maintain liberty or equality, it may be necessary to wage war or violate the order of one’s community. Life in a sinful world always requires some trade-offs among the goods named in the regulative principles. Further, the goods named in the regulative principle are not simply exchangeable. One cannot, as the utilitarian might, convert these goods into some common currency of happiness and then calculate a maximum. Minimal levels of these goods are necessary to any good human life, and trade-offs between them are often tragic. This does not mean, however, that the trade-offs are always a wash. More of one good and less of another can make significant differences to human life. Unfortunately, given the apparent tidiness of the relation between liberty and equality, it has often been suggested, especially in American society, that in order to have liberty one must give up on equality. Libertarians go so far as to make this an absolute proposition. While Niebuhr acknowledged that there were tragic trade-offs, he would not accept that (1) it is possible to trade off all of one good for the other while maintaining justice, or (2) that

194  Kevin Carnahan a society should ever give up on the effort to increate the realization of all goods through the exploration of creative alternatives. Niebuhr also suggests that assessing the balance of goods, one should take into account the particular predilections of the culture one is addressing. As Niebuhr noted, it was the tendency of bourgeois liberal society to fetishize liberty at the expense of equality.30 His own judgment was that American society consistently failed to realize as much equality as was suitable to justice. The broader point here being that while the principles provide a context for judgment, judgment itself is not determined by the principles, but draws upon a wider range of concerns. Criticality Each of the above categories provides context for judgments, but none usurps the space of judgment itself. The person with the virtue of justice must remain constantly critical of all human institutions and even her or his own judgments. While Niebuhr suggests that balances of power usually underwrite relative justice, he also acknowledges that “every civilization, as a system of power, idealizes and rationalizes its equilibrium of power, and how these rationalizations invariably include standards of morals which serve the moral and spiritual pride of the ruling oligarchy.”31 Thus, one can never rest on a claim to have a balanced system. While Niebuhr offers a kind of qualified preferential option for the oppressed, he does not do so because those with less power are better than others. He recognizes that if power shifts, they are as likely to become oppressors. A too simple social radicalism does not recognize how quickly the poor, the weak, the despised of yesterday, may, on gaining a social victory over their detractors, exhibit the same arrogance and the same will-to-power which they abhorred in their opponents and which they were inclined to regard as a congenital sin of their enemies.32 One must always be ready to shift one’s position depending on the fluid dynamics of power in context. While Niebuhr is often identified with his defense of democracy, even there Niebuhr refuses to claim that democracy is always the best option for any society, or to identify democracy as beyond criticism from the perspective of transcendence. Sometimes modern secularism expresses itself in more modest religious terms. It holds that the end of life is the creation of a democratic society. In so far as a part of the meaning of life is created and fulfilled in man’s social relations, this form of the secular faith is at least half true. But it

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 195 is also half false; because it fails to recognize that man has the capacity and the necessity to transcend every social and political process in which he is involved and to ask ultimate questions about the meaning of life for which there is no answer in the partial fulfillments and frustrations of the historical process.33 At every turn, Niebuhr maintains the space for judgment. And it is here that a virtue of justice is needed; humble, paradoxical, limited, but real.

The prospects for a radical Niebuhrianism A witty twist on Aristotelian wisdom states that one should take “everything in moderation, including moderation.” Given Niebuhr’s penchant for paradox, one might wonder if this sentiment might apply to Niebuhrian thinking about virtue. Could virtue be the mean between extremes, except for when extremism is required? Earlier, I laid out a theoretical framework in which this is possible. In this last section, I want to argue for a reading of Niebuhr’s own biography that allows for such a possibility in judgments about political activity. This is to say that I want to argue for a view of Niebuhr that allows for judgments that there are conditions under which the virtues typically identified with American democracy (moderation, tolerance, bipartisanship, etc.) should be set aside in favor of a more consistently partisan and disruptive alternatives. Think, from the top down, of Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts at court-packing in 1937 – placing more than nine justice on the Supreme Court so as to swing the majority.34 Or, from the underside up, of what Miguel De La Torre calls an ethics para jodar – one that “refuses to play by the rules established by those who provide a space for orderly dissent.” De La Torre gives an example of this kind of ethics as the “East Harlem garbage offensive” when in 1969, to protest failures of garbage collection, Hispanic residents of New York collected trash and “built a five-foot-tall barricade across the avenue and set the garbage bags ablaze.”35 To argue that Niebuhr’s own judgments are compatible with such actions may seem strange to many since Niebuhr’s “mature” thought has, in some circles, become identified with conservatism, or at most a moderate, incremental progressivism. This reading of Niebuhr emerges primarily from his work in the 1950s and ’60s.36 Niebuhr had, all acknowledge, more of a radical temperament in his early writings, from the 1920s to the 1930s. Then, Niebuhr was a self-proclaimed “Marxian.” In Moral Man and Immoral Society, written in 1932, Niebuhr’s considerations of race relations sound much like De La Torre. While Niebuhr appreciated “educational and conciliatory enterprises” aimed at promoting interracial understanding, he found these efforts too tame for the goal of racial justice. This was because such efforts “operate within a given system of injustice.” Moral suasion, an ethics of ideas, was not going to

196  Kevin Carnahan change the landscape. The “white race in America” Niebuhr wrote “will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”37 It was here that Niebuhr wondered aloud about the need for a “fanatic.” The fanatic is a utopian activist, one who believes “in the possibility of a purer and fairer society than will ever be established,” and deploys the image of this society to motivate a popular movement to realize this society.38 By the 1950s and ’60s, however, according to the “conservative reading,” Niebuhr had matured past such fanaticism. He was now a cold warrior, tilting against communism and decrying fanaticism. But while he left behind Marxist revolutionism, he continued his critique of bourgeois liberalism. Liberals overestimated the capabilities of human reason and education to reshape society. With both of these options out of the way, Niebuhr became a kind of Burkean conservative. He doubted the extent to which humans knew the good, and thus favored small incremental changes that maintained the bulk of what worked in status quo society. At best, we trust in the balances of power at work in the present order, and tinker around the margins.39 If this reading of Niebuhr is correct, then by the time Niebuhr’s thought had matured, he had largely foreclosed upon the space that he had worked to open for judgment in The Nature and Destiny of Man. Judgment had become marginal while the weight of established custom and order had come to dominate. Fortunately for my project, there are good reasons to reject this reading of Niebuhr. Most significant among these reasons is the fact that Niebuhr rejected it himself. Tellingly, the form of his rejections suggests that his problem with the conservative reading of his work was largely that it undercut the space for judgment in his own thinking. As Daniel Rice has shown, Niebuhr rejected the claim that he was a conservative exactly because he considered himself a “realist.” While he rejected the idealism and naive optimism of some forms of liberalism, he also rejected the pessimism of Burkean conservatism. While the naive liberal claimed that the world was transparent to reason, the Burkean left no room for transcendent perspective. Niebuhr could, he believed, use resources from the one to critique the other without becoming tied down to either one.40 A more subtle reading of Niebuhr’s maturing suggests that the shift in his approach to politics from the 1930s to the 1950s was not so jarring as the conservative reading suggests. Rather than leaving behind the image of the “fanatic” Niebuhr internalized it. In the 1930s, Niebuhr had been working with a generally Weberian picture of society wherein change was achieved via the effort of irrational charismatic leaders, but order was maintained by the bureaucratic rational forces of society. As Robin W. Lovin has suggested, in Niebuhr’s mature thinking he allows for the dynamics of vitality and order, engagement between utopian transcendence and finite and sin-stained reason and moral sense within the self.41 In the moment of transcendence every person can have a vision of the world beyond the status quo. On this

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 197 reading, Niebuhr has not abandoned the fanatic. He has placed “fanaticism” for justice in an eschatological/theological context and recognized it as one of the resources in every act of judgment. In the terms developed in this chapter, the virtue of justice is the quality one needs to bring together this resource and the other resources of the self and convert them into political judgment. On this reading one could make the case that the changes in Niebuhr’s temperament over the decades are not fundamental shifts in his approach to politics, but rather the outcome of a contingent set of political judgments. From the 1920s to 1930s America was in the grips of a set of libertarian leaning presidential administrations then in the throes of the Great Depression. Economic inequality was high. Tax rates were low. New forms of industry were outpacing the ability of government to regulate. The partisan divide in the country was extreme; the memory of the Civil War was still relatively fresh in the nation’s conscience. Progressives, Niebuhr perceived, were too politically naive to do what was necessary to bring about the changes needed in the country. This was the context in which Niebuhr exhibited his more radical judgments. By the 1950s and ’60s, America had shifted significantly. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had increased taxes and begun the creation of the welfare state. Economic inequality was near its lowest levels in American history. The world wars and the Great Depression had created a shared sense of struggle for the generation that endured them. Focusing on the common enemy Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, many Americans decided to put their own partisan disputes on the back burners. Bipartisanship reached its highest point in American history during this period. And, this period saw the success of the civil rights movement in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964. While nostalgia for this period has romanticized it, and while we should avoid whitewashing the failures of the post-war era, there are reasons to celebrate what was achieved during that time. It is during this period that we find Niebuhr expressing more of an incremental approach to justice. We need not agree with all of Niebuhr’s judgments about what was possible or what was best in any particular issue to acknowledge that the reason that Niebuhr’s judgment shifted may have less to do with foundational shifts in his thought than it had to do with the way he saw the changing situation around him. He appreciated the impact of the development of the welfare state, saw positive developments in race relations and other areas of racial justice, and gained a new appreciation for the dangers of communism as information about Stalin’s regime became public. In this context, Niebuhr was more concerned with maintaining the stability of the (moderate) progressive consensus than with pushing the pace of change. As such, Niebuhr tended to emphasize the indiscriminate judgment that stood over against all positions in domestic politics, thus attempting to prompt the humility necessary to work together within the

198  Kevin Carnahan progressive consensus that existed from the 1940s through the early 1970s in the United States. The context that we face today is not the same one that Niebuhr faced in either of these previous periods. We live after the collapse of the (moderate) progressive consensus in American politics. The stagflation of the late 1970s sent a shock through American economic policy, opening the way for the new libertarian taxation policies that have dominated since the Reagan Revolution. The generational shift away from those who had lived through World War II and the Great Depression led to more cultural fragmentation around the same time. Having Russia as a common enemy never paid the moral dividends of opposing Nazism (witness McCarthyism), but the collapse of the Cold War in the early ’80s contributed even more to the strength of centrifugal forces in the country. And today we face regressive racist and sexist politics on levels not seen for at least half a century. Given these shifts, there is no reason to think that Niebuhr would have adopted the same judgments today that he did in the 1950s.

Conclusion Perhaps it is appropriate in a chapter on judgments and justice to conclude with at least a general judgment about the present. The question for the Niebuhrian is: what judgments are appropriate for our context? I cannot speak for others here, but my own conclusion falls on the side of emphasizing discriminate judgment against the growing authoritarian, racist, sexist, and xenophobic forces in our own society. This should not lead us to uncritical endorsement of the political forces that oppose these developments. But I judge that it should lead to a more activist and partisan politics than Niebuhr at times seemed to endorse in the 1950s. In articulating this judgment, I am making some claim to possess a virtue of justice. I make this claim humbly, not thinking that I have somehow earned this virtue, knowing that my judgment is finite and tinged by my own sinfulness. I recognize that I am a sinner, corrupted by injustice. But I refuse to abandon this claim to paradoxical virtue, lest I am left with no grounds on which to make judgments about politics in the world. In doing so, I have argued, I stand with Niebuhr in refusing to cede the space for judgment.

Notes 1 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terrance Irwin (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), Book V. 2 E.g. while later in his life John Rawls found a space for a minimalist account of “political virtues” in his theory of liberalism, he maintained that these were separable from the virtues of any “comprehensive position,” and the virtue he writes of most is the “virtue of reasonableness” which leads one not to impose one’s views upon others. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

A Niebuhrian virtue of justice 199 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (London: Lisbet and Co., 1941–1943), 1:7. 4 Ibid., 1:9. 5 Ibid., 1:12. 6 Ibid., 1:15. 7 Ibid., 1:14. 8 Ibid., 1:15. See also, 1:145–46. 9 See Mark Douglas’ chapter in this volume. I differ from Douglas in that I don’t read Niebuhr as thinking that the kind of “harmony” viewed in the moment of transcendence is a realistic goal within history. Justice is informed, and in some ways transformed by that view, but cannot, on my reading, be aimed at this harmony. See Kevin Carnahan, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 55–56. 10 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:28. 11 Ibid., 1:200. 12 Ibid., 1:39, 52, 56, 111, 122, 130, 191–98, 298. 13 Ibid., 1:198. 14 Ibid., 1:233. 15 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 113–16. 16 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:267. 17 Ibid.,1:152–53. 18 See especially the chapters by Lovin and Paeth in this volume. 19 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 127. 20 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:233–34. 21 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 109. 22 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:259. 23 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (New York: Meridian Books, 1967), 43. 24 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:236. 25 It is important to avoid reading consequentialism into Niebuhr’s treatment of the inequality of sin. He certainly is concerned about the consequences of actions, but he also suggests that power allows one to act upon flawed motive where one with lesser power would not have the option. As he writes: “Men who are tempted by their eminence, and by the possession of undue power, become more guilty of pride and of injustice than those who lack power and position” (Nature and Destiny, I237). His claim here seems to be similar to later philosophers who have argued that circumstantial moral luck plays a role in assessments of guilt. See Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 26 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:237. 27 Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 49–60. 28 See chapters by Lyon, Dowdy, and James and True in this book. 29 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Development of a Social Ethic in the Ecumenical Movement,” in Faith and Politics (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 177. 30 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 86–118. 31 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:239. 32 Ibid., 1:240.

200  Kevin Carnahan 33 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 132–33. 34 The history of this move is more complex than often portrayed, but a reading of it as a political maneuver serves my purposes here. See Judge Glock, “The Lost ­History of FDR’s Court-Packing Scandal,” Politico Magazine, February 24, 2019, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/24/the-lost-history-of-fdrs-courtpacking-scandal-225201. Accessed August 25, 2019. 35 Miguel De La Torre, “Doing Latina/o Ethics from the Margins of Empire,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 33:1 (2013): 12–13. 36 Though, contrast this picture with the image of Niebuhr’s life in Ronal Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1960s: Christian Realism for a Secular Age (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019). 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and ­Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 253. Italics mine. 38 Ibid., 221–22, 277. 39 For the roots of this reading of Niebuhr, see Daniel Rice, “The Fiction of ­Reinhold Niebuhr as a Political Conservative,” Soundings, 98:1 (2015): 59–83. 40 See Ibid. 41 Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 89.

12 Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis Tom James and David True

At the center of a traditional virtue ethic one often finds the cognitive virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom. This virtue, sometimes translated as prudence, has a unique role among the virtues. Phronesis operates to deliberate, discern, or judge, and decide how the moral virtues ought to be practiced if one is to pursue the good and avoid doing wrong. Especially key is the element of judging or discerning. What does it mean to be just in these circumstances or what action is just in these circumstances? Phronesis, in short, is excellence in moral discernment with regard to particular issues. This kind of thinking does not easily fit with many conceptions we have of Niebuhr. Among the most common views is that Niebuhr was a creative one-of-akind thinker who relied on intuition and dialectical thinking.1 From this perspective, one might worry that practical wisdom is part of a conservative or even reactionary politics. Such scholars tend to prefer the Niebuhr of the pre-war years, finding his post-war writings overly cautious. There is, no doubt, something to this periodization. The later Niebuhr was largely concerned with American foreign policy and Cold War politics. His practice of phronesis illumined “hazards” that warranted caution and consideration. At the same time, we will argue that Niebuhr’s phronesis rendered judgments that did not fit neatly into any single partisan agenda. More importantly, our interest in Niebuhr’s phronesis is not finally that of historians, but of moral theologians more concerned with what we have to learn from Niebuhr’s performance of phronesis than we are in simply imitating it. In this way, the primary question this chapter seeks to answer is whether Niebuhr’s phronesis is actually that. After all, Niebuhr nowhere mentions the word phronesis. The claim that Niebuhr performed phronesis might also be questioned by virtue theorists skeptical of Niebuhr the liberal protestant and Christian Realist. For such critics, Niebuhrian phronesis amounts to little more than means-ends reasoning about matters of self-interest to the United States. Some go further and argue that Niebuhr’s notion of justice was proceduralist in nature – making it less about a substantive vision of justice than a liberal way of managing conflict.2 In what follows we argue that Niebuhr’s performance of practical wisdom was cautious but also critical of powerful interests and prevailing wisdom.3

202  Tom James and David True Second, we argue that his criticism was grounded in what he called “biblical religion,” “prophetic religion,” or “Christian wisdom.”4 At the heart of his perspective – refracted through the Protestant Reformation – was a critique of self-righteousness or moral pretension. Such a perspective makes for a complex notion of virtue.5 For Niebuhr, as for the Reformers, virtue was beyond fragile; it was dangerous.6 This suspicion of virtue informed his critiques of American pretensions as well as ideologies of all types. Such critiques point to a rich, complicated vision of an agent – whether a person or a nation-state – as well as that agent’s context. This chapter makes the case that Niebuhr’s critiques of ideology and agency emerge out of practical wisdom that is itself rooted in a theological anthropology. We argue that Niebuhr engages in a form of phronesis that revolves around four key criteria. First, Niebuhr reasons in light of a specific and delimited telos, whether of a nation-state, families, or an individual. Second, the telos is pursued in light of limitations, whether constraining circumstances or the frailties of human nature. Third, Niebuhr asks about the telos in light of the capacities of particular agents, be they political leaders or ordinary individuals. Fourth, Niebuhr’s judgments are expressed in public and for the public. That is, they are part of a public debate, which means that they are intended to inform others, but also that Niebuhr may be criticized and informed by others. The result is a theologically informed virtue of phronesis that produces guidance that is at once rooted in a Christian vision and conversant with contemporary sources. By themselves, of course, these four criteria are abstracted from the practical guidance that Niebuhr’s practical wisdom offers. What is needed is a view of his performance of phronesis. We have opted to examine Niebuhr’s practice of phronesis in two cases, the Vietnam War and human sexuality. While Niebuhr comments on many different moral cases, we’ve selected these two because they illustrate the range of Niebuhr’s practice of phronesis. Niebuhr’s practical wisdom is fully capable of challenging both conventional wisdom and progressive views. This should not be confused with an argument that Niebuhr always gets it right. Indeed, part of Niebuhr’s own theological vision is that moral perfection is an illusion. Human beings are deeply flawed, broken to such an extent that virtue itself may be twisted into vice. One may be forgiven then for being skeptical of our claim that Niebuhr performs phronesis. What he does discuss is the need for a practical turn in how we approach political and social ethics.

A practical approach Niebuhr’s call for a more practical approach emerged out of his own understanding of the ethic of the New Testament as an ultimate or eschatological ethic. He writes that “the ethic of the synoptic gospels is eschatological in its framework and in substance enjoins the purest love.”7 The problem according Niebuhr is that self-interestedness admits to no easy solution in politics.

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 203 Consequently, he worries that the love ethic will either be ignored – as ­irrelevant – or that progressives and radicals will naively try to impose some form of it directly in politics. Niebuhr’s turn from his early pacifism and his engagement with Marxism can be understood in part as a search for a sober account of human beings as self-interested. Such an account was needed, he felt, for a realistic assessment of politics. Niebuhr famously makes such an assessment in Moral Man and Immoral Society, where he contended that the self-interestedness of groups is more complicated, concealed, and stubborn than that of individuals – be it in terms of class interest or national interest.8 What distinguishes Niebuhr’s critique is that he turns it against all sides, arguing that ideology serves interests. It has long been appreciated that Niebuhr’s critique of ideology remained a consistent feature of his work going forward. His suspicion of ideology and his refusal to abandon the field of politics drove him toward what he called a practical approach. An example of this argument can be found in an editorial Niebuhr writes in the summer of 1951 titled “We Need an Edmund Burke.”9 Therein he commends what he calls the American “pragmatic historical approach” that he thinks is comparable to that approach of Edmund Burke. His interest in Burke is not Burke’s political conservatism, but Britain’s “history-informed wisdom,” compared with the rationalism of the French Revolution. Turning to his own contexts, Niebuhr is critical of “Marxist rationalism and bourgeois liberalism” – calling them “brothers under the skin.”10 His point is that despite their stark differences, each tended toward ideological purity. And it is that dogmatism, both British and American that is the target of his editorial. This is true throughout the editorial but especially clear in the last few paragraphs where Niebuhr criticizes “ideological prejudices” the British Left and the American Right have of one another. The occasion for the editorial is a leadership crisis in the British government owing in part to proposed cuts in the Health System. A debate had arisen in budget negotiations, which in turn precipitated the crisis. According to Niebuhr, a member of the Labor coalition, Aneuran Bevan, had quit to protest compromises in medical services as well Britain’s rearmament policy, which Bevan felt was owing to the influence of American imperialism. The sticking point wasn’t the principle of universal care, but whether universal care might in some cases involve a fee.11 Niebuhr illustrates with a practical case involving dentistry. Let us assume that a dentist is dealing with a patient who has four good teeth in his upper jaw. The possibilities are either to pull the remaining teeth and give the patient a ‘plate’ or to leave the teeth and give the patient a costly “bridge.” He criticizes Bevan’s “too abstract Marxist concepts” that would mandate the same coverage for every patient. Instead, he argues that the British Health System should be more flexible. While everyone ought to be offered

204  Tom James and David True a basic level of care commensurate with human dignity (in this case, the plate), the system should require a modest fee for “the best possible treatment” (in this case, the bridge).12 In supporting a modest fee for some procedures, Niebuhr reasons first from his understanding of human nature. Human needs, he claims, are indeterminate and human desires are inordinate. Such claims may be understood to undermine traditional notions of human nature and attendant concepts of natural law. In their place, however, Niebuhr offers a more open-ended notion of human nature. Given this, Niebuhr contends, it is wise to place some check on inordinate desire – in this case in the form of a modest fee. Some may find it frustrating that Niebuhr does not judge what the just citizen should do or be. Instead, Niebuhr’s advice goes to what makes for good government. In this sense, the policy itself may be thought of as just in that it provides for universal healthcare. Niebuhr takes it as a telling example for political leaders in the United States and Great Britain, who should resist Cold War ideologies and mutual suspicions and instead take up the hard work of practical wisdom in relation to their citizens, allies, and adversaries.

Practical wisdom and the Vietnam War From the perspective of contemporary American politics, Niebuhr’s practical approach may appear quaint, naive, and understated. What is needed in this age is not sage advice, one might argue, but prophetic criticism of abuses of power and blatantly immoral politics. Ironically, Niebuhr found himself in a similar situation a decade later during the Vietnam War. In a series of more than ten editorials, articles, and interviews, Niebuhr stakes out a position that is at once practical and critical, performing phronesis that was capable of speaking in a prophetic vein. These writings, however, are not uniformly against the U.S. having a military presence in Vietnam. That is, Niebuhr’s position on the war evolves over a period of a few years, growing more critical as the Johnson administration becomes more hawkish and reliant on military power. Niebuhr’s reasoning makes no pretense of appealing to the categories of just war theory or tradition. Just as Niebuhr was suspicious of natural law as possessing “too-fixed norms . . . in which the endless contingencies of history are obscured,” so too does he judge just war theory too static to fit the challenges of history and the (moral) demands of the situation.13 Instead of just war theory or casuistry, Niebuhr turns to the performance of practical wisdom. Like just war, however, practical wisdom asks about the ends of the war, U.S. foreign policy, and the Cold War, the nature of democracy, and the possibilities and limits of the actors. In pursuing these questions, Niebuhr takes into account both the larger geopolitical contexts and the situation on the ground (in Vietnam). Finally, he performs these elements in a public forum and he does so consistently across his many statements on Vietnam, even as his position evolves. In what follows we first identify the

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 205 change in his evaluation of the war effort before discussing in greater depth the features of his practical wisdom. By the 1960s Niebuhr had been watching what was developing in Vietnam for some time. He had written on the failures of French military action in the country, and had reason from the very beginning of America’s engagement to be skeptical of American policy.14 One of Niebuhr’s earliest comments on the American action in Vietnam is a 1962 article titled “Can Democracy Work?” published in the British journal, The New Leader.15 He takes up the “South Vietnam situation” within the context of the Cold War struggle. For Niebuhr, it is important to deliberate on the immediate and larger context with care – considering the possibilities and limits of the agents within these contexts. To fully appreciate the agents and their multiple contexts, one must critically examine them in relation to the narratives about them and the war. Already in 1962, the Kennedy administration’s narrative on Vietnam was that the United States was assisting a small democracy defend itself against Communist aggression. Thus, Niebuhr begins by raising questions about the purpose of the war and goods at stake. Having identified a key claim about the war’s purpose being to defend democracy, he turns to an examination of the nature of democracy. For Niebuhr, the “question is whether we have not too simply regarded Western-style democracy as the alternative to Communism in non-European cultures.”16 What may appear a rather abstract discussion is actually a critical question about the possibilities and limits of South Vietnam in terms of becoming a functioning democracy, which gets at the justification of the war itself. For Niebuhr, democracy requires “a degree of uniformity sufficient to serve as a community base for a free society” as well as “a degree of literacy and of technical development sufficient to provide the intellectual maturity and social flexibility necessary for a system of self-rule.”17 Having established these two criteria for judging the democratic potential of developing nations, Niebuhr proceeds to tell his readers of the recent history of Vietnam (and Laos) and how the United States came to be involved. It is, in short, not a story of an emerging democracy. It is instead a story of a complicated post-colonial situation in which Vietnam is partly liberated and partly held a client; that is, South Vietnam is propped up by the United States. Niebuhr characterizes the situation as “serious” and summarizes the U.S. presence as one of futility. “The U.S. military assistance group there has more and more become involved in the actual fighting between the North and South, which continues unabated.”18 Niebuhr is clearly suspicious that the Kennedy administration has covertly expanded the U.S.’s role from one of advising and support to combat. After a short paragraph, he turns to his primary interest – the political situation in South Vietnam. In three short paragraphs Niebuhr offers a summary account of the administration of President Ngo Dinh Diem, characterizing it as corrupt and repressive – and hardly democratic. He clearly thinks that the situation and prospects are sobering. Within the space of these few short paragraphs

206  Tom James and David True he asks if our involvement isn’t a mistake. The political situation is, he writes “so serious . . . that the question must be raised whether it has not been a mistake to commit our prestige unqualifiedly to the defense of this nation.”19 No sooner does he sum up the situation than he again poses the issue of political legitimacy. We face the question, in short, of whether South Vietnam has sufficient political and moral health to invest its struggle against Communism with the necessary moral capital? Or, to put the question another way, have we been mistaken in investing our moral prestige in Asia in this kind of struggle? As readers might now suspect, Niebuhr is sensitive to larger strategic considerations of the Cold War. In his view we are caught between two great hazards, “a considerable strategic loss in Southeast Asia [and] the loss of moral prestige through the support of an unpopular and unviable regime.”20 While Niebuhr judges this situation to be problematic, it is important to understand that for him, Vietnam is part of a much larger contest. Of course, as the United States’ involvement grows and becomes more aggressive, Vietnam comes to dominate public and policy debate. The same is true of Niebuhr’s commentary on U.S. foreign policy – Vietnam increasingly plays a larger role and his practical wisdom grows more deliberative as well. Nonetheless he continues to work within the framework of phronesis evident in his early pieces. Using the same components of practical wisdom, he will continue to interpret the situation as one of two great hazards, making any policy decision difficult. Indeed, in his early commentary his titles speak of Vietnam as an “impossible problem” or “mess.” What changes over time is his assessment of the strategic nature of losing South Vietnam. Writing in February of 1965, Niebuhr states that our contest with an essentially imperialistic religio-political movement forces this task upon us. We cannot afford strategically to deliver the whole of Southeast Asia to the Communist empire, which is now under pressure from China and its partners in the whole of Asia.21 At this point, Niebuhr appears to share the conventional wisdom of the socalled domino theory – lose South Vietnam and lose all of Southeast Asia. Eventually, he will come to question this assumption and in so doing conclude that South Vietnam is not a strategic good. Writing in February of 1965, Niebuhr still judges the U.S. to be in an “impossible situation.” What is notable is that Niebuhr is concerned that the Johnson administration is deceiving the American people about the significant challenges of the war. In this brief editorial his criticism is muted. He characterizes those serving in government as “our political leaders – all honorable men (emphasis added).”22 At the same time he calls for a genuine public

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 207 debate in which “American voters . . . become mature enough to measure the hazards of this imperial conflict.”23 In other words, he commends practical wisdom not only to the elected leaders but also to the citizenry. How are ignorant citizens to engage in phronesis? Niebuhr turns to the free press to enlighten them. “Therefore, we are glad that ‘irresponsible’ journalists are better teachers of the hard facts of life than the ‘responsible’ statesmen, who need to garner votes for incomprehensible imperial tasks.”24 As we will see, his patience with the Johnson administration will quickly wear thin. Writing just a month later, Niebuhr authors a short commentary in The New Leader entitled, “Pretense and Power.”25 He begins by flatly contradicting the Johnson administration’s assessment of the war. “Following each of his periodic inspection trips to Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returns home with assurances that the situation is improving there. The unhappy truth is, however, that matters have been going from bad to worse in Vietnam for years.” What changed in the short month? Niebuhr does not bother to explain his shift. These are after all commentaries, not a full treatment. What is clearly new is the U.S. bombing campaign. From this point forward, the U.S. bombing campaigns feature as the key issue in his deliberations. Niebuhr’s interpretation is striking. While he allows the administration’s claim that the airstrikes prove “our resolution,” he is unimpressed by the administration’s justification. If anything, the administration is too resolute, too convinced by its own rhetoric. Niebuhr’s point is that our reliance on superior airpower suggests that we are fighting an unwinnable war. The airpower seems to slow but not stop the gains of the North. “In short, we seem clearly bogged down in a war which neither side can win.”26 Niebuhr also raises the issue of the protection due noncombatants. Our willingness to destroy Vietnam to save it, he claims, makes a mockery of our moral pretensions. The same is true of a realistic look at the political crisis of South Vietnam. Niebuhr questions our “ideological defense of the war” as “less than plausible.” The ideology of defending democracy serves to “veil” our strategic interests. Niebuhr goes on to question whether Vietnam is of strategic importance. He raises the possibility that Thailand might also serve as a bulwark against Communist advances and notes that Thailand’s “tight military dictatorship” does not make for a heroic narrative about defending democracy. By pointing this out, Niebuhr means to puncture any ideological pretensions. He calls on the administration to stop “pretending that our only concern is for the liberty of that ‘democratic’ government” and speak candidly with the body politic about our strategic national interests. Niebuhr performs such public deliberation, raising the possibility of other courses of action, specifically that of an international conference that would settle the future of North and South Vietnam. Such a conference would not result in the defeat of Communism in Vietnam, but it might now be the better part of wisdom to accept the proposition that our confrontations with Communist power, in this case Chinese

208  Tom James and David True Communist power, will result in our having to live with unsolved problems – whether in Berlin or Korea or Indochina. As early, then, as March of 1965, Niebuhr criticizes the war as “unwinnable” and recommends a negotiated settlement. He consistently holds to this judgment in later commentaries. This is not to suggest that his later writings offer no new insights or problems. Niebuhr continued to develop new and fruitful critiques of the Johnson (and eventually the Nixon) administrations and their policies in Vietnam. But from this point it was clear that he did not support the continuation of the war. If the predominant tone of Niebuhr’s performance of practical wisdom on Vietnam is critical, it is important to understand that his criticism emerges from the work of deliberation and judgment that in turn renders advice or a decision on what virtues the good or virtuous agent ought to perform in a specific context. This is not consequentialism but practical wisdom that includes considerations of the excellences and moral failures of agents. In this case, Niebuhr is concerned with the virtue of the United States, President Johnson and his administration, and the American body politic. Niebuhr’s chief contribution is to aid these agents to seeing what they have failed to see. This is partly a critical task, as we have noted, but it is also a constructive task in that his “correctives” are addressed to a broad public – that is for political leaders but also for the body politic. Niebuhr published the majority of his Vietnam commentaries in popular periodicals such as the New Republic and The New Leader. His intention was clearly to educate a broader public, especially politicos. Niebuhr’s interest in this broader public is not simply to persuade them of his position on Vietnam. Indeed, with most of the commentaries it is not obvious what his policy position is. Most do include his preference for a negotiated settlement and withdrawal, but they do not set out to persuade the reader of this. Instead, Niebuhr deliberates on the situation, judges among the ends and means and in so doing renders a critical judgment on our blindness. The point of Niebuhr’s critique is to enable or empower deliberation and judgment – so that the body politic might deliberate more fully without the ideological veils that tend to blind them. In this sense, Niebuhr is a teacher or mentor of phronesis. There is more to be said on this point and we’ll return to this in the conclusion, but in terms of Vietnam, it is also important to identify three other virtues that Niebuhr commends. Earlier we discussed that he praises the courageous leader capable of accepting a negotiated settlement and withdrawal of military forces. We might also add that courage is required if the powerful are to give up their illusions of omnipotence and innocence. It takes both courage and humility for an imperial power, such as the U.S., to meet a small nation at the bargaining table as a full equal in negotiations. In light of Niebuhr’s critique of self-righteous, we have good reason to conclude that he commends the virtues of humility and temperance. Niebuhr is often associated with humility, but throughout his writings on Vietnam he

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 209 notes the overwhelming power of the U.S. and calls on the Johnson administration to practice restraint. The overwhelming strength of the United States tempts our leaders to employ our power without careful deliberation and discerning judgment. In Vietnam, the chief example is bombing North Vietnam. Johnson failed to consider the negative consequences, especially as they relate to our larger interests. This is emblematic of how the United States often fails to see its practical limits and moral failings. How then is a great nation to practice temperance? The Niebuhrian answer would be to practice humility and that starts by carefully considering one’s own limits.

Sexuality and practical wisdom Niebuhr is much less known for his engagement with cultural issues than he is for his contribution to matters of public policy. His views on sexuality, in particular, have been mainly addressed in the form of rightly placed criticisms from feminist theologians, and in recent years Niebuhr has not often been seen as a source of insight in this sphere. However, if we are asking whether Niebuhr’s approach to theological ethics is a performance of practical wisdom, it may turn out to be especially illuminating to examine some of his writings on a set of issues for which his contributions have not been widely praised. We can observe him struggling to find light upon a terrain that was much less familiar to him, at least as a critic. We can observe his progressions and his failures: where he gained insight and where he remained frustratingly bound to masculinist pretensions. Any discussion of these matters should begin with Niebuhr’s account of what he calls “sensuality” in the first volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man. Famously (or perhaps infamously),27 Niebuhr uses the term to describe a subordinate and derivative modality of human sinfulness (i.e., one that elaborates a more basic modality of sin as “pride”). He argues that there is an irresolvable ambiguity in sensuality: it at once expresses a fixation on the self’s own desire for satisfaction and a giving of oneself over unreservedly to some finite source of pleasure – thus vacillating between idolizing the self as the center of existence and undermining the self’s independence by idolizing some other creature.28 Niebuhr does not simply equate sensuality with human sexuality, but he singles out the latter as an especially vivid expression of the capacity to be dominated – in this case, by desire.29 What makes sinfulness in its sexual expression possible is, as always for Niebuhr, freedom. The capacity to inject meaning and purpose into sexual activity invests animal impulses with the possibility of exaggeration.30 Sexual desires in humans can become imperialistic, disrupting the natural harmony of instincts and desires characteristic of animal life. The result is sexual addiction, fixation, and forms of abuse that allegedly are not found in the non-human animal world. Niebuhr writes that human sexuality under the conditions of sin degenerates into a drama of domination and self-abnegation. Although the same paradox of creativity and sinfulness

210  Tom James and David True characterizes every arena of human activity, Niebuhr writes (suggestively) that it reaches a climax with sexuality.31 Here, we might interpret, the twin possibilities of creatively constructing human meaning and descending into the worst forms of debasement and violence are brought to their most extravagant expressions. Niebuhr does not develop these views in the context of an explicit search for policy guidance, but rather as an example of how human nature is a perennial compound of creativity and sin. But, his account of human sexuality as an expression of sensuality does clearly serve practical interests. First, it signals a rejection of any attempt to equate animal sexuality with human sexuality, and thus of any complacency about the expression of sexual desire. Second, it evinces a corresponding wariness about the imperial pretensions of human sexual impulse – its quest to dominate the rest of life. It therefore inculcates both an appreciation for the complexity of human sexuality and a wariness about its capacity to dominate human life. Niebuhr’s position on human sexuality did not rest with his reflections in the late ’30s, however. He wrote two articles that were published in Christianity and Crisis in 1953 and 1964, respectively, that were instigated by different phases of a dramatic change in sexual practices in the U.S. that came to be known as “the sexual revolution.” Both pieces, compared with Niebuhr’s reflections in The Nature and Destiny of Man, develop an account of sexuality that is focused on human life as created. Though Niebuhr’s view of human nature is famously characterized by the contradictory admixture of finitude and freedom and thus yields not a serene and harmonious but a disturbed and tension-filled account of human sexuality, the later articles present a more positive view of the subject, stressing order at least as insistently as disruption. At times, we will see, his stress on purposes embedded in human sexuality in these texts becomes a frustration of practical wisdom because he too readily accepts gender roles as they are given in a patriarchal society. He fails to see that those roles may instead be expressions of the disordering of human relations by sin. The first article, “Sex and Religion in the Kinsey Report,” offers observations and criticisms of a massive and controversial study on human sexuality in mid-century U.S. culture. The findings of the study aroused concern in the churches because of its scientific confirmation of changing sexual practices that church leaders and many others knew anecdotally: that pre-marital and extra-marital sex were on the rise, and that prohibitions on these activities by churches and other religious groups were increasingly being ignored. What worries Niebuhr, however, is what he calls the “presuppositions” of Kinsey’s study. “The basic presupposition,” he writes, “is that men and women face a rather purely physiological problem in their sex life.” Kinsey thus proceeds on the basis of a “consistent naturalism” that treats human beings simply as animals, neglecting that human beings are persons in whom a whole hierarchy of values and ends can be related to, superimposed upon, the natural basis of their

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 211 life; and that they must try to preserve a creative unity between the various levels of their existence.32 This reductive naturalism, in turn, produces a hedonistic elevation of sexual pleasure as the highest good to be achieved in human sexual relationships. Niebuhr does not deny that sexual pleasure is a good worth pursuing, but argues that a significant feature of human nature left out of account in Kinsey’s hedonism is that we have the capacity to subordinate immediate gratification for the sake of broader, more inclusive social ends.33 If Kinsey construes such subordination as an artificial blockage of sexual fulfilment, Niebuhr sees it as a capacity that humanizes us. What Kinsey does not understand, Niebuhr argues, is the radical freedom of human beings and the heights and depths of sexuality that it produces. At its height, human nature is characterized by the infusion of meaning and purpose into instinctual behavior patterns, and by its capacity to orient them toward the service of persons and social relationships. Sexuality among humans is a site of personal and social fulfillment and not merely of pleasure and reproductive function, and it is that factor that produces norms of fidelity in every culture. At its depth, on the other hand, human nature is characterized by the capacity for inordinate desire. Echoing earlier arguments from The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr suggests that if the satisfaction of desire can be coordinated with meaningful human relationships to produce fulfillment it can also become an obsession that takes on an imperial posture, overriding other needs and desires. Sexual obsession, Niebuhr argues, is not found among non-human creatures – it is a feature of human freedom that can generate a uniquely human form of debasement.34 A key difference between how Niebuhr and Kinsey approach human sexuality is signaled by their very divergent interpretations of sexual guilt. For Kinsey, guilt is produced artificially by society and especially by the prohibitions imposed by religion. What we need for sexual health, in his view, is to liberate ourselves from those prohibitions and thus from the guilt they artificially produce. Niebuhr argues, however, that guilt comes not from religion per se, but from our human nature which militates against being debased as our desires become obsessions that undermine our personhood and run roughshod over the broader array of values that give our lives meaning. As Niebuhr had claimed in his account of justitia originalis in The Nature and Destiny of Man, the inherent harmony with the self that is implicit though obscured in human experience generates its own protests of its broken condition.35 Religion, he argues, is among other things a way that we deal with guilt – but the source of guilt lies much deeper and will not therefore be eliminated if we pretend to liberate ourselves from religious instruction about sexuality. Another important site of difference between them is the fraught issue of a sexual double standard for males and females in mid-century U.S. culture. For Kinsey, such a normative duality makes no biological sense, and his study reveals that female sexual desire is just as potent as male desire,

212  Tom James and David True and just as capable of embracing experimentation and multiple partners. ­Niebuhr’s response bears attention: The “double standard,” to which one must raise objections from an ultimate standpoint, has been preserved, not so much because of male dominance but because the woman, as mother, is closer to the heart of the family, more necessary to the children; her loyalty is therefore more necessary to the integrity of the family than that of the male. Kinsey might profitably read Timasheff’s Great Retreat in which the history of sex relations under communism is recorded. All efforts to protect the integrity of the family were relaxed, prompted by the Marxist notion that nothing but the male’s “property” interests were involved. Gradually it became apparent that the woman, with her more intimate relation to the child, had more at stake in a stable family than the man.36 Once again, the issue between Kinsey and Niebuhr has to do with the former’s tendency to reduce sexual relations to physiological dimensions, and the latter’s attempt to situate them amid broader social relations. Clearly, Niebuhr’s position problematically essentializes women’s desires (more on that below), but it is worth noting that his approach to female sexuality at this point makes some attempt to understand women’s interests – to place their desire within a social context. The problem, of course, is that Niebuhr’s account of the social context supports a patriarchal division of labor. The later article “Christian Attitudes Toward Sex and Family” also features criticisms of Kinsey, but its focus is very different. Here, Niebuhr offers a critique of historic Christian orthodoxy and its “abhorrence of sex” and clams that we need a “radical rethinking” of human sexuality in the church so that we might approach it “with honesty and charity rather than with hypocrisy.”37 He blames the church’s internalization of some features of its broadly Platonic intellectual milieu for its failures wisely to understand human sexuality, but he singles out Puritan rigor and Victorian prudery for particular scorn as the more immediate backdrop of contemporary (early 1960s) dysfunction in church teaching and practice. Niebuhr remains very far from any sort of libertinism, but he stresses the need for a more adequate account of human sexuality that is at once true to the deepest insights of Christian faith about creation and sin and properly attuned to the social and economic as well as moral realities facing young women and men in the modern world. While he does not offer a full-orbed proposal for such a “radical rethinking,” a key ingredient in his judgment would be the notion of the family as a “community of grace.” This phrase, peppering the article throughout, is used to describe a normatively Christian attitude toward the family that is obscured by an historic obsession with law and purity. If Puritanism and Victorianism have obsessively focused on the application of law to human sexuality, the deeper and more basically Christian interpretation of the

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 213 family has been that it is a community of grace, and therefore it should be the site, not of rigorous adherence to standards, but of forbearance and of adjustment to human need.38 Niebuhr once again broaches the issue of the “double standard” regarding male and female sexuality. He again insists on taking special note of the differences between men’s and women’s interests, and suggests that female reluctance to engage in premarital sexual relations is a consequence of women’s awareness of the greater “hazard” they face in the event of a pregnancy.39 Once again, but on a very different terrain, we find Niebuhr paying attention to what he often calls “hazards” and limitations that are specific to agents but rooted in human nature. It is “wise,” therefore, when young women and their parents exercise a degree of scrupulosity that would not be expected from young men and their families. So, again, the double standard is affirmed, and with it a whole array of problematic assumptions about gender roles in the family, not the least of which is the fact of unequal guilt attributed to women and men for sexual activity outside of marriage. Niebuhr’s failure to address this latter factor suggests that he has not fully appreciated the power dynamic involved in the double standard.40 The duality is now affirmed, however, with the proviso that the scruples that women are obliged to adopt may well be satisfied in the context of a relationship that has proceeded to engagement to be married. Only a “wooden legalism,” Niebuhr argues, would protest sexual activity in that context. And the proviso suggests that women’s sexual desire as such is not what is problematic – the double standard is, rather, the function of an apprehension of unequal risk. In both pieces, what Niebuhr seems to be searching for is a “triumph of religious common sense” over the wooden legalism of traditional Christian teaching, on the one hand, and of an “antinomian” hedonism, on the other. In “Christian Attitudes Toward Sex and Family,” Niebuhr places what he calls “discriminating wisdom” at the normative center of human sexual experience, not explicitly calling upon Aristotle’s theory of the golden mean but clearly reproducing its logic. It is in this late piece, therefore, that we find him making appeals to “wisdom, prudence, and charity” as the necessary ingredients of an adequate approach to the changing sexual practices being brought to light during the sexual revolution. It is symptomatic of Niebuhr’s general approach to social problems that both of these rare later forays into sexual ethics interact with the Kinsey Report, setting it before Niebuhr’s readers as a prime example of how not to think about human sexuality. In both cases, the problem Niebuhr sees with Kinsey is a reductive misuse of scientific method that fails to take account of both the heights and depths of human nature. This is a common theme for Niebuhr, of course, and here he makes typical appeals to human freedom in opposition to natural necessity, arguing that Kinsey’s method effectively reduces human beings to the status of merely biological beings that Niebuhr elsewhere consigns to the repetition of “pre-established harmonies.”41 As

214  Tom James and David True with other matters, it is freedom – the capacity to reorient and possibly distort the regularities of nature – that renders human sexuality a bearer of distinctively human fulfillment and a striking emblem of its brokenness. But an additional feature of Niebuhr’s critique is that he accuses Kinsey of being insufficiently empirical: he fails, in Niebuhr’s judgment, to take all the relevant data into account. Because he utilizes a reductive method, Niebuhr argues, Kinsey cannot grasp the role of the quest for meaning in sexual relationships and therefore is not able to comprehend certain trends within human behavior in response to social changes. And, because he fails to understand what is going on, Kinsey’s proposals are inadequate and badly formed. Seeking to foster the maximization of human fulfillment, Kinsey proposes behavioral patterns that would in fact frustrate it. In other words, Niebuhr’s charge is not that the data Kinsey unearths are wrong or without value: it is that Kinsey mishandles the data in what might be regarded as a foolish way. In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr argues that pretension is not simply ignorance of one’s own ignorance, but the willful obscuring of one’s intellectual limits that seeks to hide insecurity and uncertainty. It is pretension that allows a researcher to be dismissive of other perspectives on human sexuality without further ado, reducing them to “crude” and “outdated” “prejudices,” while their own claims are grounded securely in empirical fact. Niebuhr goes further and identifies scientific reductionism as an example of the “vain imaginations” of the proud. It is a method suited to a bourgeois class in search of domination of nature by means of the latter’s thorough subordination to rational calculation. Indeed, one may go further still and argue that any kind of reductionism is a form of “vain imagination,” seeking foolishly to exert an impossible intellectual dominance over an arena of creaturely existence that is sufficiently complex to guarantee a permanent residue of mystery. Where such ineluctable mystery prevails, only an approach that is constantly open to revision, and that confesses its partial character from the outset, can resist the charge of vain imagination. As we will see, even a thinker like Niebuhr, who is attuned to complexity and mystery, can fall prey to reductive interpretations – to a kind of naturalism that reduces human agency to biological trajectories. As his analysis of the politics of dentures in the U.K., and U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, a fruitful way to understand what Niebuhr is seeking in contrast to the abortive effort of intellectual domination through rational calculation is the virtuous, or well-functioning, intellectual skill of practical wisdom. The role of practical wisdom here is to frame and interpret research data. There is no such a thing as raw, uninterpreted fact – empirical findings are always framed by some interpretive scheme, however implicit. The question is whether a particular scheme is one which opens to further insight – whether it has the power to take a wide variety of factors into account – or whether it obscures and restricts our view of relevant features of human experience. The result of utilizing a framework that opens to further insight

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 215 is generally to foster actions and policies that are comparatively satisfying and sustainable because they are more or less in accord with the dynamics of human nature. On the other hand, the result of a restrictive and reductive framework is a failure to appreciate the complexities of human nature and therefore a frustration of its ends. What seems clear from these articles – particularly if we take them as artifacts of an extended period of reflection on changing sexual ethics over a decade – is that Niebuhr’s attempt to balance respect for the natural conditions of human life with his emphasis on freedom in this instance produced a commendation of virtues of wisdom and charity as ways to guide thinking about sexual life. The outcome in his own reflection tended, as was likely the case for many intellectuals in the church in his and subsequent generations, toward somewhat greater tolerance of changing sexual practices while attempting to hold on to traditional practices of fidelity. A problem we are left with, of course, is Niebuhr’s often explicit account of the role and the interests of women – what we called “telos” above. In the two later articles, while acknowledging an “ideal” of absolute equality, he takes the natural condition of women (i.e., their finitude) to be tightly bound to family and to the domestic sphere in a way that men are not. The wisdom and charity that Niebuhr commends alert him to women’s interests, and his perspective grows correspondingly complex and capacious. But his appeal to these virtues does not go so far as to allow women to articulate those interests independently of what he takes their natural role to be. The result is ironic, given Niebuhr’s devastating critique of Kinsey’s naturalism: Niebuhr reduces women’s agency to the ways in which it is embedded in what he takes to be natural, biological trajectories, to a given order, while continuing to ascribe the capacity to transcend those trajectories to men. One might even say that Niebuhr does not go far enough in his critique of Kinsey. To suggest that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures and not merely biological automatons seeking to gratify sexual appetites is surely correct. However, tying the interests of women to raising children manages to do something that is inconsistent with Niebuhr’s most characteristic insights about human nature: it reduces women’s agency to mere repetition of the “pre-established” harmonies of biological reproduction. Where does this leave us on the question of Niebuhr’s performance of practical wisdom? We have argued that the components of practical wisdom in Niebuhr’s writing are the following: some kind of telos or end(s) that is/ are tied to his account of human nature (often appearing in a more subjective guise as “interests” that acknowledges that there may not be much harmony between the ends of different groups), an account of both possibilities and limitations for moral agents, and revisability in light of public criticism and discussion. We clearly see evidence of the latter in the small but important shifts in his thinking about sexuality from the 1950s to the 1960s. The trouble that we have identified has to do with a restrictive account of the ends of sexuality – despite himself, Niebuhr falls into a selective naturalism

216  Tom James and David True in sexual ethics, mistaking biology for moral destiny in the case of women, treating nature as the “source of virtue.”42 This failure, in turn, leads to an unduly restrictive account of women’s moral agency. Here the mistake is to take the ordering of roles in a patriarchal society within heterosexual practices as given. Niebuhr in effect naturalizes the double standard. By doing so, Niebuhr renders the obligation of motherhood as inevitable, and thus fails to take into account any number of options that might intervene: birth control (oral contraception was new, but available in 1964), the termination of pregnancy, expanding the role of fathers in childcare, or even extending the community of grace beyond the monogamous pair so that childcare might be more widely shared. However problematic any of these solutions might have been in execution, they suggest that there were resources for transcending the allegedly “natural” condition of women as principal caregivers of children. It hardly needs to be said that a similar method – indeed, a Niebuhrian one – working with a different account of the ends of sexuality, could produce very different results. It is clear from the evidence of the past five decades since Niebuhr wrote of these matters that his “indeterminate transcendence” of nature should be more equitably applied, and that women have in view ends of production and broad public participation as well as reproduction. In addition, contemporary Niebuhrians performing practical wisdom about sexuality will likely have a greater appreciation for sexual pleasure as a good. Though Niebuhr sharply criticizes a pervasive “abhorrence of sex” in the churches, he stops short of acknowledging the sexual pleasure is a good worth pursuing for its own sake. His interpretation of the double standard, moreover, fails to address the fact, stressed rightly by Kinsey, that women are just as capable of sexual pleasure as men (if not more so), and are therefore just as likely to regard it as a good to be pursued. Despite his worries over puritanism in American Christianity in 1964, there remains a puritan disparagement of sexual pleasure as an end in Niebuhr’s thought, and it functions to restrict women’s choices. Finally, these considerations suggest the possibility of a much more expansive account of women’s agency, and a correspondingly broader array of personal as well as policy choices available to them. The point is, given an accumulation of experience and knowledge about human sexuality in American culture, one can continue Niebuhr’s pursuit of practical wisdom about sexual practice, appreciating what he was able to achieve while acknowledging its contradictions and pressing much further.

Conclusion We have argued that Niebuhr’s writings on a variety of subjects during his mature years can be understood in terms of a performance of practical wisdom, or phronesis, that serves to educate and inform public deliberation and judgment. Beyond simply seeking out pragmatic solutions that avoid

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 217 dogmatic foreclosure of viable options, practical wisdom involves identifiable components. It has, in other words, a substantial normative core, including teloi or ends (often put in the more subjective guise of “interests”) that are rooted in an account of human nature, an account of agency – the limitations and possibilities of moral agents under given circumstances – and a commitment to public debate and accountability to reason. We have seen how these components interact to produce a perspective that is often illuminating both descriptively and normatively. That is, in essence, what practical wisdom is about: fostering public deliberation and facilitating judgments that enable agents (persons, leaders, policymakers, etc.) to employ their moral resources (virtues, for example) in appropriate ways. We have also seen how Niebuhr’s practice of wisdom can be frustrated, both by imperfect knowledge and experience and by the very kind of “vain imaginations” he discerns in the ideologues that he critiques. But this is the peril of phronesis, as well as its promise. Phronesis is perilous because it can go wrong, sometimes badly, when the guiding insight into human nature turns out to be truncated, one-sided, or badly framed, or when circumstances are not properly measured. And yet it is hopeful precisely because of its dynamic and unsure quality which continually opens it for further discussion and debate in light of human experience. Phronesis as Niebuhr practiced it, though beholden to divine revelation, is eminently a human enterprise, resisting by its very method any claims for certainty or finality. It is a practice of virtue for theologians who know that they are not unambiguously good, and that they are not God.

Notes 1 Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2 Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Ironically, such critics have shown little interest in the virtue of phronesis themselves. 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Fulfillment of Life,” in Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 299; The Nature and Destiny of Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), 214. 5 See the exchange between Mathewes and Lovin in this book. 6 G. Scott Davis, Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue: An Essay in Aristotelian Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010). 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Development of a Social Ethic in the Ecumenical Movement,” in Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald H. Stone (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 166. 8 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). 9 Reinhold Niebuhr, “We Need an Edmund Burke,” Christianity and Society, 16:3 (Summer 1951), 6–8. 10 Ibid.

218  Tom James and David True 11 Ibid. Niebuhr writes that “All this . . . is no argument against socialized medicine. There must be basic security in matters of health; and we may expect our American policy to move as certainly toward that end as the British policy has done” (7). 12 Ibid. 13 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Problem of a Protestant Social Ethic,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 15 (November 1959): 7–8. Cf. John D. Carlson, “Is There a Christian Realist Theory of War and Peace? Reinhold Niebuhr and Just War Thought,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 28:1 (Spring–Summer 2008): 133–61. 14 See, for instance, Reinhold Niebuhr, “Editorial Notes,” Christianity and Crisis, 14:9 (May 31, 1954), 66. 15 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Can Democracy Work?” The New Leader, 45:11 (May 28, 1962), 8–9. 16 Ibid., 8. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 Ibid. 21 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Vietnam: An Insoluble Problem,” Christianity and Crisis, 25:1 (February 8, 1965): 1. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ibid. Cf. Elsewhere Niebuhr writes, “If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not be some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory.” The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 174. 24 Ibid. 25 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Pretense and Power,” The New Leader (March 1965), 6–7. 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Ibid. 28 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 233. 29 Ibid., 230–31. While Niebuhr treats sexuality under the rubric, “Sin as sensuality,” there is no reason why sexuality could not also display the modality of pride as well. 30 Ibid., 235. 31 Ibid., 236. “Furthermore these corruptions are complexly interlaced and compounded with a creative discovery of the self through its giving of itself to another. The climax of sexual union is also a climax of creativity and sinfulness.” 32 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Sex and Religion in the Kinsey Report,” Christianity and Crisis, 13:18 (November 2, 1953): 138. 33 Ibid., 139. 34 Ibid. 35 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:267. 36 Niebuhr, “Sex and Religion,” 139. It should be noted that Niebuhr’s reading of the history of sexuality in the Soviet Union here is highly suspect. With much more attention to historical detail, Kate Millet argues that the reactionary turn that happened in the U.S.S.R is accounted for by the fact that the revolution grossly underestimated the psychological power of patriarchy. It was in fact sexual reactionaries across Europe and the U.S. that made the kind of argument that Niebuhr is making here: that the traditional family returns because of the nature

Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis 219 and interests of women. See Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Equinox Books, 1969), 176. 37 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Christian Attitudes Toward Sex and Family,” Christianity and Crisis, 24:7 (April 27, 1964): 73. 38 Ibid., 75. 39 Ibid., 74. By “hazard,” Niebuhr has more in mind than the medical dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth. These, of course, are indisputable. What he appears to have in mind, as well, are the resources and energies that would be required of the mother (he assumes) in raising a child. 40 For a near-contemporary and much more adequate account of the sexual double standard, see Millett, Sexual Politics, 38. 41 Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:21. 42 For Niebuhr’s famous critique of this strategy, see Nature and Destiny, 1:104–12.

13 Reinhold Niebuhr and the aesthetics of political leadership Tom James

During Barack Obama’s presidency, much was made of his having been influenced by the political wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr. David Brooks’ famous interview with then-candidate Obama, impressively on the fly, brought out the former president’s admiration for Niebuhr and his facility in paraphrasing him freely and accurately.1 Given this (at least) rhetorical affinity for Niebuhr, and the approval that Obama’s approach to politics often wins from Niebuhr enthusiasts (especially as it contrasts with that of his successor), we may well reflect on Obama as our former Niebuhrian president, coldly and shrewdly realistic, embracing pragmatic compromises without succumbing to the cynicism of realpolitik.2 To misappropriate TaNahisi Coates, we were eight years in power! But this correlation, to the degree to which one accepts it, also raises critical questions. Critics of the former president have pointed out several alleged failings. Obama was, by some accounts, far too modest on policy goals, often reflecting a sense that they came already as it were pre-negotiated. Examples here would be things like his, by most accounts, woefully inadequate stimulus package in 2008 and a health-care policy based on market principles that have proven vulnerable. Critics to his left have alleged that Obama was too loyal to business interests, as evidenced, for example, by his embrace of tepid reforms of the banking industry. They have also suggested that he was too constrained by assumptions of center-right hegemony and correspondingly too limited in his political imagination. He failed, according to Cornel West, to stand up effectively against white supremacy and to implement policies to change the conditions of black people in the United States.3 Obama relied on populist appeals in campaigns but failed to mobilize popular energy as a governing strategy. His method of governance suggests that we must simply accept a huge divide between politics as campaigning and the exercise of political governance: the former involving grass-roots organizing and mobilization and the latter eschewing those things in favor of finding the least common denominator among lobbyists, elected officials, and other political insiders. What I want to do in this chapter is to trouble Brooks’ praise. First, to turn it inside out, as it were: do Obama’s failures (if such they are) reflect his

The aesthetics of political leadership 221 Niebuhrian sympathies? Or, more to the point, do they reflect flaws in Niebuhr’s own understanding of political leadership? Another critical question to ask, of course, is: to which Niebuhr should we compare Obama, in his successes as well as his failures? Niebuhr’s analysis of politics shifted remarkably over the decades of his writing. He was a card-carrying radical in the 1930s, but by the ’50s he was a cold warrior and a fervent anti-communist. Most of the writings we will consider here are from the later period, but the earlier “red” Niebuhr left a considerable and influential legacy, and his account of political leadership in earlier texts like Moral Man and Immoral Society was understandably quite different. So, while much of this essay considers the more “conservative” Niebuhr that is primarily concerned with the kinds of statesmanship that advance American interests during the Cold War, I turn later in the essay to his nuanced but still enthusiastic appreciation for the radicalism of labor and leftist politics and the very un-Obama-esque figure of the “fanatic.”4 The question we should ask is whether the historical situation of Niebuhr’s radical years aligns more closely with the issues and conflicts of our own time, and whether an authentically Niebuhrian leader today wouldn’t embody the virtues of the fanatic, at least to some degree. I focus here on political leadership rather than Niebuhr’s accounts of “nations and empires” because I believe that attention to his entire corpus reveals that there is much more to Niebuhr than a theologically informed political theory, even if this “much more” has seldom been recognized. Part of what Niebuhr has to offer, I am arguing, is what I will call an “aesthetics of character.” This involves three things: an empirical appreciation for what Martha Nussbaum has called the “fragility” of contingent goods as well as outright moral tragedy,5 an account of character traits to be admired and cultivated in face of contingency, and the identification of a wider context of fragile goods and fitting response by means of an overarching view of reality that brings them into view and orients one among them in such a way that one can act. This wider view Niebuhr often invokes with language about the “beauty and terror of life,” which I will argue is not to be taken simply as rhetorical flourish, but as a way of encapsulating and leveraging his entire theological framework toward a sensitive if not always entirely accurate reading of circumstances. However, lest I seem to be leading readers down a primrose path, I should re-assert and provisionally clarify the critical point that this chapter intends to develop. I will conclude that the aesthetics of character we find in Niebuhr’s cold warrior period, while understandable when considered in relation to the historical conditions of a protracted nuclear standoff between rival empires, substantially limits the agent’s (i.e., the political leader’s) capacity to undertake needed political action in the context of a breakdown of the welfare state and a normalization of neoliberal austerity that we have seen in recent decades. In this context, what appears to be needed is the capacity to act in a way that creates new political realities and alignments rather than simply adjusting admirably to the old ones – that, in other

222  Tom James words, alters the framework by which actions are conventionally evaluated. In the last section of this chapter, I will argue that the difficulty with an aesthetics of character as Niebuhr develops it in the 1950s and ’60s is with the second component: the character traits that are admired and recommended for cultivation in the face of radical contingency. During this period, Niebuhr tends to appreciate traits that are oriented toward the values of a professional political class that has grown distant from activist struggles and that cedes too much to the values of a capitalist civilizational ethos. This generates a normative view of character that warrants passivity in relation to what political science calls “the Overton window” (roughly, the range of political opinion deemed acceptable at a given time) and therefore leaves the agent condemned to offer policies that fail to address the need for radical political change – and that, perhaps more seriously, fails to tap actual political forces that could bring those changes about. In the end, I will suggest that Niebuhr’s earlier and more radical aesthetics offer a more politically useful account of the possibilities of leadership for a time of domestic upheaval like our own. Generally, I believe that aspects of Niebuhr’s aesthetics of character can be gleaned from across a broad sweep of his major writings, but here I will focus my attention much more narrowly, examining a small sampling of writings in the latter half of Niebuhr’s career where he reflects on the merits and the faults of various political leaders, together with an odd little piece on literary characters in American fiction and a section from The Irony of American History where he discusses Sophocles’ Antigone. I argue that this genre within Niebuhr’s broader corpus does not appear accidently, or simply because of an older man’s tendency to eulogize (or bitterly condemn) the past, but rather is connected to very important shifts in his thinking about politics that nevertheless fit with the larger theological and political themes for which he is famous. The emphasis we find in these writings – surprisingly, perhaps – is on character qualities or dispositions that are deemed admirable as they enable political leaders to sift various kinds of situations and to respond to them creatively. In other words, what we find here is something very much like talk of virtue.6

Aesthetics and character The first piece I consider provides the terms in which I will analyze Niebuhr’s takes on political characters, and makes clear why I am pointing to an aesthetics of character. The article is one Niebuhr wrote for The Nation in 1948, “The Sickness of American Culture.”7 As the title indicates, the argument is that the culture of post-war America, from politics to art to recreation, is not as healthy and vital as it often appears to Americans. In some ways, Niebuhr picks up on typically European critiques – he is somewhat sympathetic, for example, to European criticisms of the “slickness and vulgarity” of cinema and popular art in America. But Niebuhr argues that far

The aesthetics of political leadership 223 worse is the “deleterious effect of technical rationalism upon all the deeper issues of life,” which reduces and flattens human complexity and ambiguity so that life is trivialized or perhaps moralized.8 He writes, It is difficult to present the ambiguity of human motives from the standpoint of such presuppositions. It is even more difficult to give an account of the tragic conflict of loyalties and values in which human beings are constantly involved, a conflict which no amount of rational analysis or prudential action can resolve.9 The point of these lines, I want to stress, is not only the typically Niebuhrian observation that such a misreading of the human condition ill prepares us to deal with complexities of political situations, but also that such misreadings are unfitting to life or intrinsically unpersuasive. They look askew; they fail as art – they are ugly. That is why, perhaps, Niebuhr also observes that “our novelists and other artists do not take this idea too seriously.” They are too absorbed in the beautiful and terrible ambiguities of life not to find the rationalism Niebuhr finds so prevalent in post-war American society a cheap, aesthetically unpleasing imitation. And it is this ugliness, in fact, this lack of adequacy to rich complexities as well as tragedies characteristic of life, that malforms the American character and renders its deficiency morally and politically, as we will see later. But novelists and other artists are not necessarily to be relied upon, either – even the prevalent American novelists most often fail to capture life’s intricacies, on Niebuhr’s reading of them. Many good novels are written on limited themes, but few of them rise to the level of presenting life in all of its beauty and terror and in the curious intermingling of the two. A culture which has officially disavowed the tragic sense of life does not find it easy to deal with life’s deeper perplexities without despair or with its nobilities without sentimentality.10 Niebuhr focuses his critical attention on the development of character in three prominent mid-century American novelists. John Steinbeck, he urges, invites the reader to view his central characters as due some measure of sympathy, because we recognize in them the marks of those who have been pushed or pulled by external circumstances well beyond their control. The result, though, is somewhat revolting – they are “too obviously pathetic.” Lost here is a certain depth, a complexity that is created by the interface between external forces and the power of internal motivations. William Saroyan’s characters, on the other hand, arouse admiration for their more noble and generous qualities, paying attention to the springs of internal motivation, but on the other hand situating them in a “never-never” land that appears unrealistic, in large part because it fails to do justice to the serious effects

224  Tom James of external circumstances upon personal identity. Finally, Ernest Hemmingway’s characters have a certain toughness that seems to account both for the accidents of circumstance and the power of inner resolve, but at the price of a sort of despairing attitude toward the lack of fit between the two, which Niebuhr discerns in a line from one of Hemmingway’s characters: “Life is a dirty trick.”11 One can easily see in these criticisms a number of classic Niebuhr polarities: finitude and freedom, mystery and meaning, for example. But the point I wish to stress here is that the characters of each of the novelists he briefly considers in this essay are for one reason or another unpleasing to us – they fail to arouse genuine admiration. Steinbeck’s characters are weak and too easily pushed about; Saroyan’s characters are detached or out of touch with reality as we know it, and therefore not sufficiently tested to invoke our admiration; Hemmingway’s are too given over to a despair that fails to grasp the gratuitous beauty of life. It is important to see here the connection between Niebuhr’s critique of “rationalism” and the flattened, to some degree unattractive characters of Steinbeck, Saroyan, and Hemmingway. A culture that has “officially disavowed the tragic sense of life” has done so on the basis of an unrealistic confidence in the power of technical reason to control outcomes, a confidence that skews our vision of life since it does not enable us to appreciate its fragilities and its tragic conflicts. Elsewhere, Niebuhr describes this in terms of a “scientific culture.” In doing so, he is not casting aspersion on science per se, but pointing out that a culture that thinks of rationality strictly in terms of reduction and technique fails to appreciate the “dramas of history.”12 Niebuhr’s interpretation of these characters is similar in interesting ways to Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian response to Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone. According to Nussbaum, Creon, who is ruthlessly and without remorse willing to sacrifice his niece Antigone and her passion for her dead brother’s honor for the well-being of the city, creates for himself an artificial world, a technical artifice, in which all value is reduced to civic value, enabling him to avoid tragic conflicts between incommensurable goods like city and family. The chorus in the drama finds Creon’s callous attitude toward family culpable, however, thereby exposing the artificiality of his reduced world. Perhaps we don’t need the chorus’ disapproval to find Creon a deplorable and unattractive character. Nussbaum suggests that our feeling of revulsion arises from the fact that he has attempted to foist a cruel reductive calculus on the fragilities, the vulnerable goods, that give life meaning and depth. Antigone, and indeed the tradition of Greek tragedy generally, on Nussbaum’s reading, is an attempt to show the deep connection between vulnerability and value.13 Niebuhr would perhaps be sympathetic. We don’t admire characters who are or who pretend to be invulnerable to life’s contradictions, or who are not tested by them. Niebuhr’s reading of Antigone in the last chapter of The Irony of American History, it has to be admitted, appears initially to be a bit shallower than Nussbaum’s. He cites the drama as an example of the “tragic,” by

The aesthetics of political leadership 225 which he means the unavoidable clash of mutually exclusive values amid the ambiguities of history. To frame Creon’s position in terms of a tragic clash seems at first to excuse Creon, and perhaps even to laud him for having the courage to make a difficult choice. This misses Sophocles’ critique of the cold moral rationalism that cannot or will not acknowledge vulnerability. However, when Niebuhr turns toward issuing a theological response, we find his position drawing somewhat nearer to Nussbaum: All rational resolutions of such tragic dilemmas which pretend that a higher loyalty is necessarily inclusive of a loyal one, or that a prudent compromise between competing values can always be found, are false. We have already observed the tragic character of the dilemma which modern democratic nations face, when forced to risk atomic warfare in order to avoid the outbreak of war. The alternatives to this dilemma, proposed by moralists and idealists of various types, will prove upon close scrutiny to involve a dubious sacrifice of some cherished value; in this instance the security of our civilization.14 A tragic sense of the irresolvable clash of values – thus, we might infer, their vulnerability to the complexity the value-networks in which we find ourselves – is for Niebuhr an essential component of admirable character. Perhaps sacrifices must be made, but these cannot be made with approbation without also incurring a deep sense of loss. In the same way, Nussbaum’s critique of the Platonic tradition (at least of the tradition that flows from the middle dialogues) recalls Niebuhr’s critique of “scientific culture.” Nussbaum pits the tragedians’ linkage of vulnerability and value against Plato’s attempt rigorously to separate them. Taking on conventional approaches to morality in favor of a radical critique and reconstruction of moral and political life, she suggests, Plato seeks to develop a rationalistic moral technology (techne) that will eliminate the contingencies of time, place, and circumstance (tuche, or “luck”) upon admirable character. He does so by rigorously distinguishing between false or apparent and true value, and aligning the latter with goods which are not susceptible to change. So, for Plato, the true good is the contemplation of eternal, unchanging ideas. To see this, Nussbaum suggests, we have to adopt a perspective from beyond the merely human. In other words, we have to abstract ourselves from the entanglements of what Niebuhr would call finitude, with all of its attachments and interests, in order both to recognize and to realize the true good.15 Niebuhr, for his part, doesn’t fault the Platonic tradition alone for this rationalistic distortion of life, but his aesthetic critique of the rationalism of American culture is somewhat similar to Nussbaum’s critique of Plato’s. In both cases, the depths of human attachments and interests are flattened and reduced. The Platonic character looks oddly detached and his/her invulnerability to circumstance does not appeal so much as revolt.

226  Tom James The point is not to say that Nussbaum’s Aristotelian reading of Greek tragedy is essentially the same as Niebuhr’s criticism of contemporary American novelists. Niebuhr in fact is neither an Aristotelian nor a Platonist, strictly speaking, and his interpretation of fictional characters has its own distinctive focus. Specifically, as we saw earlier, Niebuhr’s attention is drawn to the clash between inner and outer, between motivation and external circumstance. In his own terms, his concern is the contradiction between freedom and finitude. If we were to place him in a broader intellectual tradition, we would do best to link him with Augustine rather than with Aristotle in his analysis of the precariousness of human agency. And this means that Niebuhr is somewhat akin, after all, to Plato, whose rationalist technology was developed out of a profound and painful awareness of such a split between inner and outer. But the radical break from Plato in Niebuhr is that he does not have any kind of Platonic confidence in a rational technique for avoiding the fateful drama of irrevocable decision. True character, as we will see more fully in the next section, does not foolishly attempt to abstract from the contingencies of tuche, but to live courageously, serenely, and wisely in the midst of it.16 Only as we develop those capacities are we able to appreciate both the “beauty” and the “terror” of life. Statesmanship, irony, and character In the assorted pieces I am coming to finally, Niebuhr’s aesthetics of character is focused on a particular type of political leadership that we may call “statesmanship.” While it certainly is not a dominant theme in any phase of Niebuhr’s writings, I suggest that the focus on wise statecraft we see in his writings during the 1960s has a connection to the development of Niebuhr’s mature views on politics. Briefly stated, working from the theological framework set forth in his Gifford lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr develops an approach to politics that refuses a wide variety of what he views as political dogmatisms, from right-libertarian to MarxistLeninist. He distances himself from ideological dogmatism because of his insistence that sin “taints” every political perspective, and because of the “indeterminate possibilities” for both good and evil ineluctably present to human life which dogmatic political perspectives often fail to consider.17 Niebuhr develops from this theology of freedom and sin a deep and famous sense of irony. Funded by this Augustinian theology, irony goes beyond a Sophoclean account of tragedy in two important and reciprocally related ways: (1) irony assumes, as tragedy does not, that we are not fated to the clash of values by nature or by the task of realizing our humanity, but that there is always the “ideal possibility” that we will be able to negotiate the ambiguities of history without unleashing what the Greeks called “nemesis.” But this means (2) that the fact of evil is not a natural result of the task of realizing our humanity, but rather a corruption of the gifts we have been given to carry out that task.18 Thus, Niebuhrian irony is at once more

The aesthetics of political leadership 227 optimistic and more pessimistic than Sophoclean tragedy, affirming the goodness of creation and the lack of finality accorded to tragic conflict, but also acknowledging the deep responsibility we bear for the presence of evil in creation. A sense of irony, as may be imagined, is not more easily cultivated than a sense of the tragic. Importantly, for Niebuhr the recognition of irony depends upon the ability to see the limits of moral virtue without being indifferent or hostile to it.19 Niebuhr links the capacity for irony to his views on sin: the awareness of a deep, intractable self-interest involved even in the most ostensibly altruistic motives enables us to appreciate the incongruity of beneficent results arising from impure motives and/or foolish illusions. Niebuhr takes evident pleasure, for example, in pointing out that the establishment of “approximate justice” in American domestic economic policy simply could not have been expected from dominant ideological positions on either the right or the left. The “triumph of experience over dogma” embodied in the welfare state, according to Niebuhr, can only be recognized in terms of irony.20 In The Irony of American History, the concept of irony is articulated alongside and in deliberate distinction from two other literary concepts: pathos and tragedy. All three invoke aesthetic senses. We have already observed Niebuhr’s account of tragedy. He identifies the concept of pathos with characters, fictional as well as historical, who are pushed about by external circumstances.21 We recall his critique of John Steinbeck’s development of characters who are “too obviously pathetic,” for instance. As we noted, such characters fail to evoke our admiration because their inner motivations are insufficient to influence outcomes. They are, we might say, morally virtuous insofar as they embody a generous and benevolent spirit, but they are not practically wise: they are not able to leverage their good intentions to make a practical difference in the world. And here we come upon a key virtue in Niebuhr’s implicit, never-­ articulated table of political virtues: practical wisdom.22 In one of several memorial pieces we find in his editorial writing in the 1960s, Niebuhr mourns the recent death of two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Niebuhr celebrates the distinctly political virtues that had been embodied by Stevenson and that, it appears to Niebuhr, are now in danger of being lost to the political scene in America. Among these are eloquence, wit, and modesty. From our current vantage point, it hardly needs to be said that these worries are magnified. In reflecting on the fate of these virtues in the contemporary political arena, Niebuhr invokes the notion of pathos. Stevenson’s career was marked by pathos in part because he was defeated in his first presidential run by a popular General Eisenhower whose victory was all but inevitable, and a second time in large part because contingent historical events (especially, Niebuhr notes, the Suez crisis) which made the president look indispensable. In other words, as in instances of pathos more generally, Stevenson’s political failures were borne by the force of external

228  Tom James circumstances, and they belied his own admirable skills as a public figure. However, after recounting these factors, Niebuhr goes on to observe: The pathos of this urbane tribune’s career is heightened by comparison with the two Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Their toughness, not to say ruthlessness, in wielding the immense power of the most eminent power center in the democratic world seemed to contrast vividly with Stevenson’s self-doubts, even selfmockery, and perhaps indecision.23 So, though Stevenson was in many respects a picture of political virtue, Niebuhr clearly did not believe that he had all the requisite virtues for statesmanship. The “ruthlessness” of Kennedy and Johnson, while not endorsed whole-heartedly by Niebuhr, seems to be contrasted favorably with the image of Stevenson as possessed of self-doubt and possibly indecision. As we will see, humility is a key political virtue for Niebuhr, and readers of his diatribes against excessive pride can certainly see its importance within his overall theological program. But, and this is the main point here, it does not stand alone as an admirable character trait – its virtuousness can become vicious when it is not supplemented by something akin to what older traditions of political wisdom called “prudence.”24 Practical wisdom or prudence, according to Aristotle, is “a true and reasoned capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for [human beings].”25 If justice has to do with acting with the right sorts of ends in view, practical wisdom has to do with acting with the right means to achieve those ends. Practical wisdom is an excellence or virtue for obvious reasons: we admire those who have cultivated the capacity to act efficaciously, and those who have not we consider deficient – if they are morally virtuous, perhaps we think of them as “dreamers” or “idealists,” unfavorably compared with practical persons or “realists.” I am suggesting here that practical wisdom, what Aristotle called an “intellectual” rather than a “moral” virtue, is a key excellence for Niebuhr’s conception of good political leadership, backed strongly by an account of history as shot through with deep ambiguities and incongruities. And for that, one needs to be able to see the world in the right way – indeed, practical wisdom consists precisely in seeing the world the right way. As we have seen already but will be made clearer in what follows, for Niebuhr seeing the world the right way in turn requires a certain appreciative capacity, an aesthetic sensibility, that is attuned above all to irony. The conceptual description of irony he gives in the preface to The Irony of American History deserves to be quoted at length: Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous. . . . If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in virtue; if strength

The aesthetics of political leadership 229 becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed on it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits – in all such cases the situation is ironic.26 Key here is that the ironic situation is generated not simply by historical characters being pushed about by fate (Niebuhr calls this “pathos,” and we may recall his attitude toward the characters of Steinbeck here), nor by them having to make painful decisions between incompatible goods (he calls this “tragedy”), but by a “defect in virtue” that leads to unconscious incongruities between intention and outcome.27 We may say that Niebuhrian irony pushes beyond the tragic awareness of fragility and contingency in Nussbaum’s reading of the Greek tragedians and Aristotle in a distinctly Augustinian direction: ironic agents are responsible, though inveterately prone to self-deception about their capacities and limitations. The near inevitability of some measure of self-deception makes Niebuhrian irony inclusive of at least some elements of tragedy: the outcomes are not the result of conscious malice, but of something very much like a tragic misperception of one’s motivations or of the relationship between one’s motivations and external circumstances. At any rate, the point is that the ironic situations that pervade life in the world, for Niebuhr, call attention to the need to develop the creative and responsive capacities of agents – including, of course, a cultivated selfawareness of limits and fallibility, as we will see in a moment. In the realm of the political, responding appropriately or fittingly to the irony of American (and global) history is what is required for an adequate politics. And for this, as we will see now, certain character traits or virtues which enable accurate discernment, emotional restraint, and measured action are desirable, and perhaps required. Among them is what we may identify as practical wisdom somewhat more narrowly understood – referring primarily to the use of means rather than to the broader intellectual capacity to discern what is going on (of course the two are related: one cannot choose appropriate means without discerning accurately what is going on). Niebuhr, following tradition, sometimes uses the term “prudence” to describe the capacity for the wise choice of means, and sometimes he evokes a Machiavellian sense of competing interests by describing it as “shrewdness.” It has often been suggested that Niebuhr is non- if not anti-Aristotelian in his account of moral reasoning because of his castigation of “merely” prudential considerations in some texts (especially where he is contrasting prudence with love). There is considerable truth in this judgment, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that prudential considerations, while they do play a role, are always circumscribed both by a deep suspicion of our capacities to cover inordinate self-interest with the veneer of prudence and by an awareness of the conflictual nature of finite goods

230  Tom James in a sinful world which often requires costly sacrifice. With that proviso, Niebuhr’s praise of “shrewdness” and his condemnation of its absence fits within the broader contours of his theological ethics. The point of political action, according to Niebuhr, must be to effect change. We have already seen how candidate John F. Kennedy is compared favorably to Adlai Stevenson for his political shrewdness. In 1961, we find Niebuhr highly critical of President Kennedy’s naiveté evident in his failed attempt at orchestrating the anti-Castro counter-revolution in Cuba and during its political aftermath. In this case, the poor means that Niebuhr cites is rhetorical: at a speech to the American Society of Newspapers after the failed coup, Kennedy invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a warning to communist nations that the U.S. will if necessary take unilateral action to defend its interests. Niebuhr responds: It is always morally dubious, but also politically unwise, to aver a naked national interest, when in fact such an interest is never quite naked but always both veiled and clothed by . . . mutual interest. That is why the President’s statements to the editors were so unwise, particularly since they affected the one web of mutual interest in which a giant nation is bound to weaker nations.28 Here we see the failure of both broader and narrow senses of wisdom: Kennedy, in Niebuhr’s judgment, fails to see international reality for what it is – fails, more precisely, to see its irony, embodied in the fact that strong nations often depend on the weak in some important respects. Kennedy is thus led into foolish rhetoric that erodes trust between the U.S. and Latin American nations, and so, ironically, invokes national interest in a way that undermines it. Again, there is an aesthetic dimension to Kennedy’s failure. So admirable for his political ruthlessness as a candidate – his strength of will, his resourcefulness, his unwillingness to be pushed about by external circumstances in Steinbeckian fashion – Kennedy becomes, at least in this instance, something of a Hemmingwayesque figure. He cynically reduces international politics to coercive power, failing to recognize his own nation’s limits but also the web of mutual interests that describes a political relationship or reciprocity – a good – that could be exploited rather than abused. Kennedy, the ruthlessly realistic savant in domestic politics, in this international episode looks rather foolish – uncompelling as a character and as a leader. It is not just Kennedy who gets this ironic judgment from Niebuhr, it should be said. In fact, it becomes a theme in Niebuhr’s writings on foreign policy during the period: he frequently notes an ironic coincidence of shrewdness in domestic politics and failed attempts at shrewdness that become positively foolish in international affairs. Lyndon Johnson is the recipient of this judgment more often than Kennedy, but it is perhaps best to attribute Niebuhr’s

The aesthetics of political leadership 231 focus on this irony to his sense of the immaturity of the U.S. in dealing with international problems.29 There are deeper springs of motivation at work in this foolishness, however, and the identification of them is funded in large part by Niebuhr’s Augustinianism. As I noted above, part of what plagued President Kennedy’s use of political rhetoric in the aftermath of the failed Cuban coup was a failure to acknowledge mutual dependence among nations in the Americas and thus a fundamental U.S. limitation in controlling global affairs. Another way to say this is that pride frustrates and confounds practical wisdom. We see this theme often in Niebuhr, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in a piece published in 1970 which reflects on the follies of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, “The Presidency and the Irony of American History.”30 This essay is comprised of two correlated themes: the increasingly unchecked power of the presidency in foreign affairs, and the ironic theme of national and personal pride precipitating failures (i.e., “pride goeth before a fall”). Here, Niebuhr criticizes pride not only as a moral and theological failing, but also as a failure of leadership. Throughout the essays written on political leaders during the era, as I mentioned, there is a strong tendency to praise leaders (Democratic ones, especially) for the virtues given expression by their domestic achievements and to blame them for their faults which are implicated in failures in foreign policy. It is not surprising, then, that while he does this Niebuhr is given to extensive reflection on an example of political leadership that is characterized by the sort of virtue appropriate to dealing with issues of national security and violent conflict. In 1965, Niebuhr published a substantial essay reflecting on the relationship between Abraham Lincoln’s (rather tepid, by 19th-century standards) religious faith and his political leadership. Lincoln demonstrated a deep humility that enabled him to deal effectively with a torturously complex and divided political situation. He notes that Lincoln’s humility was grounded not primarily in an individualized sense of personal sin, but rather in a sense of God’s otherness with respect to human political allegiances. He calls this sense a sort of “religious reserve,” and it underwrites a pious denial of special providence that seeks to discern God’s favor or God’s endorsement of any particular moral or political cause. The virtue that is most apparent in Niebuhr’s piece on Lincoln is one that is a commonly featured moral ideal in Niebuhr’s writing: the virtue of serenity. The kind of leadership that it produces is not only more effective in managing complex political realities – it is also a more aesthetically compelling quality of character than what Niebuhr finds in most other American political figures, and more compelling that those that are produced by novelists contemporary to him. Lincoln demonstrates, in his judgment, an appreciation of the dimension of depth that attends human life that contemporary politicians and novelists, even at their best, have failed adequately to measure.

232  Tom James As a sort of provisional summary, I believe we can see the degree to which Niebuhr’s interest in character does not undermine but extends and applies his famous sense of irony. In fact, the table of virtues that Niebuhr holds up for attention and admiration is comprised of just those qualities that are consistent with irony. The resulting understanding of the relationship between statesmanship and personal character puts him midway between two typical views: one embodied by moral philosopher Josef Pieper’s insistence that a leader must have the virtue of justice or there will be no justice (for Niebuhr, external factors play a larger role);31 and the other typified by the commonly held view that democratic structures guarantee justice. The virtue of Niebuhr’s mature understanding of politics, if you will, consists in his appreciation for radical contingency that makes any sort of dogmatic linkage between the moral virtue of leaders and just or sustainable political outcomes. It also suggests, as we have seen, a quite particular set of virtues that we might call “intellectual” or even “aesthetic” that are appropriate to a situation of radical contingency.

The sublime madness of radical politics Near the beginning of this chapter, I rehearsed several failures that allegedly plague former President Obama’s legacy. If we generalize and say that these reflect a certain passivity or at least a failure to supply sufficient pressure for more radical changes in American society and politics, we may see a connection between such an assessment and Niebuhr’s account of John Steinbeck’s characters: perhaps Obama was too easily pushed about by forces (the recession, center-right hegemony, a culture of white racism) that were conceded as beyond his ability to impact or challenge. A Niebuhrian critic may therefore charge that the former president needed a bit more Kennedy and a little less Stevenson – a little more ruthlessness and a little less eloquence, wit, and modesty. But is this really what happened? There is, of course, a gloomier analysis that has emerged from some left critics. Obama’s legacy could also be understood in class terms as a tendency to try and broker deals within a relatively narrow circle of lobbyists and professional politicians. On this reading, there was plenty of Kennedy in Obama’s approach to politics. In fact, one might say that Obama’s virtue was that he consistently was able to find a sort of golden mean between Stevenson and Kennedy, between Steinbeck and Hemingway, with the result that he was able to accomplish a great deal in a difficult and highly partisan situation. These successes, accordingly, have won him great admiration among the professional classes.32 Outside of this circle, of course, a different sort of aesthetics of character operates. While professionals see grace, eloquence, and intelligence, others see smugness and cold indifference to the plight of his inferiors. The point I am stressing is that there is a connection between an aesthetic that is borne by a professional class position and what constitutes what we may

The aesthetics of political leadership 233 call the “conventional wisdom” that directs leaders toward political ends. A critic of these ends, from the left or perhaps from elsewhere, does well to pay attention to the aesthetic, and to the question of whether an alternative aesthetics of character is possible. I suggest that one locus for an alternative aesthetics is Sophocles’ Antigone when it is read with attention to the subjective position of its title character. Both Niebuhr’s and Nussbaum’s readings of the play owe much to Hegel’s interpretation in The Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Hegel, Antigone represents the split between an ethics of the family that is traditionalistic and narrowly circumscribed and an ethics of the state that is public and thus political.33 Niebuhr’s and Nussbaum’s focus on Creon as the locus of civic virtue (or vice) essentially repeat this Hegelian analysis. However, what if we take Antigone herself, not as one who protests the totalitarian overreach of the political, but as a political agent in her own right? What if we take her action as a political intervention that undermines what is accepted as conventional wisdom and thus opens the possibility for alternative configurations of the political as well as the social? Such has been suggested in several readings of the play. In Jacques Lacan’s reading of Antigone in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, the moral significance of Antigone is that she refuses to give up on her desire,34 and it is this refusal that produces the only genuine political act in the play. The other characters are forced by Antigone’s imposture into a position of reaction. She unsettles everything in the polis. In Judith Butler’s more recent reading, Antigone produces a political challenge of a different type but with similar effect: her brother-love undermines reified conceptualizations of kinship, exposing their contingency and thus opening the possibility of different kinds of kinship than are accepted by conventional wisdom. However, rejecting Hegel’s (and Hannah Arendt’s) separation of politics from kinship, Butler argues that Antigone in effect re-politicizes kinship: if kinship was the static and allegedly non-political foundation for a patriarchal polis, Antigone’s act is to re-inject the radical contingency of the political into kinship and thus to undermine the secure foundations of the state.35 Once again, she unsettles everything in the polis. If Antigone commands admiration as a political actor, we have a more radical aesthetics of political leadership in Sophocles than we find in Niebuhr’s cold warrior period. On the other hand, the figure of Antigone does cast light on the image of the “fanatic” found in Moral Man and Immoral Society. In the latter text, written in Niebuhr’s much more radical period when he advocated for relatively sweeping social changes, strengthening the power of workers against capital and of people of color against white supremacy, the “fanatic” is one who intervenes in political controversy with a prophetic fervor borne of a sense of deep contradictions in society that demand a dramatic rupture from the past. The “fanatic” signals, therefore, a different aesthetics of character than does the figure of the “statesman” of the Cold War era. Without being able to develop it further, I wish to point

234  Tom James out two features of the earlier, more radical aesthetics. First, it is disentangled from a position of the network of privileges that enfold a state leader like Sophocles’ Creon. In Antigone, class privilege is intersected by gender in rather obvious ways. In fact, as Butler points out, that is why Antigone is such a threat to Creon – not only does she undermine his political authority, but in so doing she undermines his masculinity.36 The larger point is that this is a kind of leadership that emerges as a challenge to constituted, official power from the outside. It is not a wielding of privilege but of a power possessed by those with a compelling claim against the order of the state. This brings me to the second point: here is an aesthetics of political leadership that is disentangled from state rule without thereby becoming apolitical or otherworldly. Antigone represents a queer political presence within the polis that signals the contingency of its networks of power and that begins to create a wholly different political order. It is this, perhaps, that arouses admiration for Antigone. She not only unsettles everything – she actualizes a form of resistance that constructs the beginnings of a new world. An important question for Niebuhrians today is whether the historical conditions of Niebuhr’s aesthetic of the fanatic, paralleled by Lacan’s and Butler’s readings of Antigone, may not be more similar to our current moment than the conditions that animated his Cold War aesthetic. During the Cold War, while foreign policy threats – the spread of Soviet influence and nuclear proliferation – claimed significant attention, a comparatively robust welfare state was more or less universally accepted and appeared as a relatively permanent accomplishment. Today, foreign policy threats are far more complexly interwoven with the global economy while the domestic accomplishments of the New Deal have all but unraveled in the onslaught of neoliberalism over the past several decades. The domestic situation, with capital in ascendency and social democracy in retreat, is in many respects more like the 1930s than the 1960s. Given a sober assessment of our present situation, perhaps the virtues of the fanatic, acting from outside the state to mount a more sweeping challenge to the current social order, are better fitted to the demands of leadership than are the virtues of the Cold War statesman. There is a class dimension to this contrast that we should not ignore. The aesthetics of statesmanship that emerges from Niebuhr’s Cold War era writings that we have considered here is oriented toward state power wielded by a professional political class. The irony that Niebuhr frequently observes is that workable results are sometimes forthcoming from those who hold unworkable ideologies, and so a kind of leadership that is attuned to the limits of ideology and is therefore flexible and pragmatic is the kind that can take advantage of these kinds of historical serendipities. But, in the context of struggles over domestic issues today, this flexibility and pragmatism appears as a mark of one whose professional privilege distances them from daily struggle, and to the outsider may look opportunist and elitist. In other words, to those on the outside of the networks of power, such flexibility

The aesthetics of political leadership 235 and pragmatism is not admirable, but rather craven and ineffectual, and therefore accounts in large measure for the failure to act in decisive ways. The problem here is not with Niebuhr’s aesthetics, early or late, but with the valorization of a set of virtues that were tuned to the realities of domestic consensus for an age of domestic disintegration. The aesthetics of Antigone, by contrast, is animated by a much different and perhaps more radical sense of irony that is tuned to the frequency of state oppression. It is not that good results come from foolish motives, but that it is possible to build real political power from a position of comparative powerlessness. Here, the fool is not the ideologically rigid or “purist” political insider but the outsider who haunts the polis from its internal margins, its gaps. Such a fool is very much unlike Slavoj Žižek’s “fool” in The Plague of Fantasies who is allowed by the powers of state and capital to tell the truth about a society because the performative power of their speech is suspended. Žižek gives as a contemporary example of this folly the liberal multiculturalist after the fall of socialism whose allegedly subversive rhetoric only serves to supplement rather than materially to challenge state power.37 The folly of Žižek’s fool is that they are still oriented toward a pre-given, conventional organization of power even though they believe they are contesting it. The more radical fool who is the protagonist of a more subversive politics announces and enacts a possibility that remains unseen and unacknowledged by the state. If the political leaders who attract Niebuhr’s attention are also critically evaluated in terms that suggest similarities to the characters of Steinbeck and Hemmingway, the radical fool of a politics not confined to the limits of the state leans more in the direction of Saroyan. In “The Sickness of American Culture,” Saroyan is the writer who is dismissed the most abruptly. In Niebuhr’s later writing, the only figure who merits his attention that seems to fit his characterization of Saroyan’s characters is Norman Thomas, a figure whom Niebuhr actively dismissed as a political leader, though they had been comrades in struggle when they were younger.38 However, in a reflection on Thomas’ 80th birthday, Niebuhr characterizes Thomas’ life as “a monument to the value of complete courage.” True to the cold warrior posture of his later years, he writes that Thomas’ “socialist faith” “proved irrelevant to the American scene,” but he admits that the prominence of socialist agitators like Thomas and others involved in labor struggles “symbolize the fact that the organization of unorganized American workers changed the social and moral climate of American industry more than the nationalization of the means of production could ever have done.”39 In these observations we have an admission that a political “faith” that does not fall within the boundaries of what Niebuhr considers practical or realistic nevertheless produces a character that unleashes real political power, beyond the state, to redraw the lines of the possible. In this late piece, we hear echoes of an earlier, more radical political aesthetic employed by a much younger Niebuhr who was attuned to domestic political struggles in ways the cold warrior was not. In the concluding

236  Tom James paragraph of Immoral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr argues that, to address the problems of modern capitalism, we need leaders who have exchanged bourgeois illusions of the moral innocence of markets for the illusion of the achievability of “perfect justice” in collective life. Prefiguring his soon to follow reflections on love in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Niebuhr suggests that the fact that the perfect justice of the socialist society cannot be realized does not mean that the image of the socialist society has no power to orient effective political action. The leadership quality that is required to seek to organize public life around such an illusion is a “sublime madness of the soul.”40 The two figures Niebuhr upholds in this text as examples of sublime madness – Leo Tolstoy and V.I. Lenin – present dangers of fanaticism that must be constantly reined in by judicious use of reason. But the danger of fanaticism, Niebuhr argues, is no more serious than relying on rational tinkering that is founded on the illusion of moral markets and democratic parliaments.41 “One can only hope,” he writes, “that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.”42 With figures like Norman Thomas and other sublimely mad leaders in mind, one may defend the utopian aesthetic behind Saroyan’s characters by arguing that, as with black church spirituals, utopian fictional tropes need not be escapist or apolitical at all. As James Cone argues in Black Theology and Black Power, the heavenly visions of American slave communities were and are means to insist on the human dignity of the oppressed as well as their political agency in resistance and challenge to the systems that oppress them.43 Utopian vision enables political actors outside the networks of power to see real possibilities that are hidden from by the prudential considerations that flow from conventional wisdom or received opinion. The capacity to refuse to give up on one’s desire, or to be conformed to the reality principle or to confine one’s political vision to the Overton window (i.e., the ability to sustain Thomas’ “complete courage”), is what makes a political actor admirable from the point of view of those who do not substantially benefit from the array of agree-upon political possibilities, like black Americans through much of American history, including the present, and like laborers during the expansion of capitalist industry up until the present. It is also what makes such an actor dangerous, because, like Antigone, they signal hidden potentialities at the margins or in the gaps of the current political order. From this point of view, to regard former President Obama as our Niebuhrian president (at least if one confines “Niebuhrianism” to the kind of Cold War realism that so impresses people like David Brooks and that is so out of sync with the demands of our present moment) may be to see him as an epitome of professional class interest operating in support of the bureaucratic state and the power relations that it sanctions and deploys. To the extent that this whole system begins to look unpleasant – like it has stacked the deck against people on the outside of its sphere of interest – we

The aesthetics of political leadership 237 should perhaps expect this kind of “Niebuhrian” president to be followed by something else entirely. If not the fanatic, then perhaps the demagogue.

Notes 1 David Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” The New York Times, April 26, 2007. 2 Another way to say this is to suggest, recalling Robin W. Lovin’s account of Niebuhr, that Obama seeks a political realism that is shaped by moral realism. See Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9–18. 3 See, for example, Cornel West, “Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama,” The Guardian, January 9, 2017. 4 I am indebted to Jeremy Sabella for calling my attention to Niebuhr’s treatment of the fanatic in Moral Man and Immoral Society. 5 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. 6 For an account of virtue in terms of qualities that we admire in persons, see Edmund L. Pincoffs, Quandaries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986), 73–100. 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Sickness of American Culture,” The Nation, 166:9 (March 6, 1948): 267–70. 8 Ibid., 269. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Examples of this line of argument are numerous. See, for example, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 27–33. 13 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 51–82. 14 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1952), 157. 15 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 87. 16 Compare to Charles Mathewes’ claims concerning the ascetic nature of Niebuhr’s ethics in this volume. 17 Niebuhr, Irony, 89–108. 18 Ibid., 55–56. 19 Compare to Charles Mathewes’ claims about virtue ethics in this book. 20 Ibid., 100–3. 21 Niebuhr, “Sickness of American Culture,” 269. 22 See also the chapter on Phronesis in this book. 23 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Adlai Stevenson: 1900–1965,” Christianity and Crisis, 25:14 (August 9, 1965): 169. 24 In the analysis to follow, I focus on Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom, but it should be said that Niebuhr’s approbations are often more directed toward a Machiavellian type of prudence: one that recognizes conflicts of interest and seeks to navigate them strategically. 25 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 142. 26 Niebuhr, Irony, viii. 27 Ibid. 28 Reinhold Niebuhr, “President Kennedy’s Cuban Venture,” Christianity and Crisis, 21:8 (May 15, 1961): 69–70.

238  Tom James 29 See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr, “The President on ‘The Arrogance of Power’,” Christianity and Crisis, 26:10 (June 13, 1966): 125–26. 30 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Presidency and the Irony of American History,” Christianity and Crisis, 30:6 (April 13, 1970): 70–72. 31 Joseph Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 89–90. 32 Reinhold Niebuhr himself is a resource against such an elitist interpretation of politics. He criticizes classical views of politics precisely on these grounds. See Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 2:271–72. 33 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 284. 34 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 247. See also Slavoj Žižek, Antigone (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 35 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 72. 36 Ibid., 57–58. 37 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 2nd ed. (London: Verso Books, 2009), 45–46. 38 For a detailed account of Niebuhr’s relationship with Thomas, see Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 80–112. It is perhaps most accurate to say that Niebuhr dismissed Thomas and the Socialist Party he represented as political leaders when the latter’s ideology brought them into conflict with Niebuhr’s own assessment of the necessities of the day (military involvement against the Nazis), but he never dismissed Thomas a friend. 39 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Norman Thomas—Incarnate Conscience,” Christianity and Crisis, 24:23 (January 11, 1965): 271–72. 40 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 277. 41 Ibid., 262. 42 Ibid., 277. 43 James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 93.

14 The virtues of the social critic Jeremy Sabella

Looking back on his career Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped, “I had a few thoughts and a tremendous urge to express myself.”1 This was something of an understatement. Over a career spanning several tumultuous decades, it is estimated that Niebuhr published over 2,500 individual pieces of writing.2 Though he is best remembered for his books, a staggering portion of his output consisted of articles and op-eds engaged in social criticism, i.e. cultural analysis that exposes the sources of existing social dysfunctions and spurs one’s audience to remedy them. Part of what enabled this unremitting commentary was that Niebuhr possessed extraordinary energy. One colleague remarked, “Niebuhr put more energy into brushing his teeth in the morning than I would have for an entire day’s work.”3 He also had a remarkable capacity to focus. As Reinhold’s daughter Elisabeth recalls, “He could write in the middle of chaos going on – i.e. two small children, a dog, a busy wife – but he could keep going at the typewriter morning, noon, and night.”4 Yet energy and focus alone do not account for the breadth and depth of his output. He had also cultivated a conceptual framework and set of dispositions that enabled him to speak to an array of issues with his characteristic blend of incisiveness and clarity. And precisely because this framework and dispositions were tailored to modern democratic politics, he was able to analyze and respond quickly to events around him. In the process, he became one of the most influential social critics of his day. And while few of us can match his sheer dynamism, examining Niebuhr can sharpen our own critical voices. This chapter probes Niebuhr’s life and thought for insight into the virtues of the social critic. It begins with an overview of Niebuhr’s emergence as a critic of note, then explores the outlook and dispositions that shaped his critical voice. In good Aristotelian fashion, Niebuhr repeatedly couched his social criticism as seeking a mean between two vicious extremes. He coupled this with a commitment to non-Manichean approaches to social issues, awareness of his own fallibility even as he took strong moral positions, and the ability to pivot nimbly between a tone of admonishment and one of hope. In the process he showcased the virtues of the social critic and helped us envision how they might manifest today.

240  Jeremy Sabella

Tamed cynicism and social criticism Reinhold Niebuhr was conscious of his role as social critic before rising to national prominence. In the preface to Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1928) he writes, Inevitably a compromise must be made between the rigor of the ideal and the necessities of the day. . . . We are a world-conscious generation, and we have the means at our disposal to see and to analyze the brutalities which characterize men’s larger social relationships and to note the dehumanizing effects of a civilization which unites men mechanically and isolates them spiritually.5 For Niebuhr, the analytical and conceptual tools available to twentiethcentury thinkers paved the way for especially incisive social analysis. To be effective, social criticism cannot merely speak to material concerns. It must also address the glaring spiritual deficiencies of an industrial age. This approach retains its relevance nearly a century later: substitute “virtually” for “mechanically,” and the above quote aptly describes contemporary predicaments. By the time Leaves saw publication, Niebuhr had begun to make a name for himself as an astute social observer. He had embraced pacifism, resisted the Klan, and denounced national icon Henry Ford’s labor practices in a series of nationally circulated articles.6 These pieces analyzed how Ford’s philanthropic image obscured the ruthlessness through which he maximized the efficiency of his operations treating his workers as cogs in the assembly line machinery. For Niebuhr, Ford’s automobile plant was emblematic of an industrial age that cultivated mechanical prowess at the expense of spiritual well-being. Niebuhr had also learned just how delicate the critical task can be. He writes, “It is no easy task to deal realistically with the moral confusion of our day, either in the pulpit or the pew, and avoid the appearance, and possibly the actual peril, of cynicism.” For this reason, the critic must exercise care to be “generous in judgment,” lest they alienate the very audiences that they are trying to reach. This is particularly important when attempting to unmask apparent hypocrisy: When virtues are used to hide moral limitations the critic ought not be too sure that the virtues are bogus. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they merely represent the effort of honest but short-sighted men to preserve the excellencies of another day long after these have ceased to have relevancy for the problems of our own day.7 This speaks to the disposition of the social critic: they must discipline themselves to acknowledge the possibility that the person or group being

The virtues of the social critic 241 critiqued is being morally sincere in the very act of misusing virtue. To presume the evil intention of their opponents is to risk misdiagnosing the situation to which the critic is responding. The case of Ford is instructive in this regard. In a piece entitled, “How Philanthropic is Henry Ford?” Niebuhr praised Ford’s imagination and acknowledged him for funding Detroit’s largest hospital before taking him to task for failing to adjust wages for rampant inflation, insure workers against the risk of injury, or give job security to older employees no longer able to maintain the blistering pace of the assembly line. As he concludes, Niebuhr considers whether Ford is deliberately conning the American public by cultivating a philanthropic reputation. He writes, “My own guess is that he is at least as naïve as he is shrewd, and he does not think profoundly on the social implications of his policies, and in some of his avowed humanitarian policies he is actually self-deceived.”8 Conceding that Ford might mean well strengthens rather than blunts the force of the criticism. Though it would have been simpler and perhaps more viscerally satisfying to portray Ford as conniving and malevolent, this risked obscuring how easily the consequences of our actions can become divorced from our intentions. Portraying Ford as a cartoon villain would provide the readers a pretext for chalking up his abuse of power to him being an uncommonly bad person. Yet Niebuhr’s strategy of depicting him as a “deluded innocent with flashes of exploitative genius,” in the words of Niebuhr biographer Richard Wightman Fox, suggests the need for a more nuanced and self-reflective appraisal.9 Presuming that much of the time Ford’s actions grew out of praiseworthy motivations leaves open the possibility that we too can become complicit in abuses of power despite intending well. This removes a key pretext for readers to dismiss what the critique might reveal about themselves as well as society at large. By being generous in our estimate of those we criticize we leave open the possibility of seeing ourselves in them. Only then can we absorb the criticism’s full impact. That Niebuhr intended to spur his readers to self-criticism is clear from the article’s opening salvo: Henry Ford is America. If we judge men not so much by their achievements as by their hopes, not so much by what they are as by what they want to be, Henry Ford reveals the true nature of the average American.10 Niebuhr’s subsequent forays into social criticism frequently followed this pattern: he would concede the good intentions of his subject only to use that concession as a basis for inducing his readers to critical self-reflection. As the preface to Leaves makes clear, Niebuhr recognized the self-­ referential nature of social critique: “The author is not unconscious of what the critical reader will himself divine, a tendency to be most critical of that in other men to which he is most tempted himself.”11 Since what we deem

242  Jeremy Sabella serious enough to call out in others derives from personal struggles, there is an element of self-censure in our judgments. Remembering this helps safeguard our analysis from the distortions of self-righteousness. The virtues of the social critic rest on a paradox: we exercise them most effectively when we recognize how tenuous our grasp on those virtues is. To remove the speck in the eyes of others, we must acknowledge the plank in our own. For Niebuhr, the good critic is generous in assessing others’ motives and aware of how personal struggles shape one’s critical sensibilities. This hints at a key element in Niebuhr’s worldview: a commitment to a nonManichean approach to social issues. While Niebuhr leveled his share of devastating critiques, he nearly always managed to avoid framing them in absolutist terms of good and evil. In true Augustinian fashion, he presumed that since human action is shaped by an admixture of good intentions and ulterior motives, “there is no pure good in history, and probably no pure evil, either.”12 Rejecting Manichean distinctions forced Niebuhr to be more nuanced, self-reflective, and ultimately, effective as a critic. Indeed, the Niebuhrian virtues of the social critic can only flourish in a non-Manichean framework. From the start, Niebuhr points out the habits of mind that allow the social critic to function in a non-Manichean vein. And he carried these habits with him throughout his public life. Niebuhr’s critical approach would evolve over the course of his career. Particularly as he refined and deepened his theology, his social critique became more nuanced. At times, his work lost its critical edge, particularly in the years following his stroke in 1952. Yet the preface to Leaves provides key insights into how Niebuhr understood and executed the role of social critic. For Niebuhr, the social critic used our highest ideals to expose the brutalities of social relations without resorting to Manichean simplifications that bred self-righteousness or cynicism. The following analysis proceeds in two parts. Part one discusses the methodological and conceptual framework out of which Niebuhr operated. This is key to understanding his priorities as a social critic and helps us understand the coherence underlying his views on an eclectic range of topics. Part two examines the dispositions that Niebuhr exhibited and valued as a social critic and gestures toward how these dispositions might shape social criticism today.

The Niebuhrian outlook As the introduction to this volume notes, Niebuhr belonged to a generation of scholarship immediately preceding the emergence of virtue ethics in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In part because he lacked access to the conceptual tools available to virtue ethicists, his work has often been read as lacking the theological and philosophical substance necessary to enduring ethical reflection.13 This line of argument is based on an overly selective, reductive, and ultimately unconvincing assessment of Niebuhr’s work.

The virtues of the social critic 243 Granted, Niebuhr is a very easy figure to read selectively. He focused relentlessly on his immediate social context, as even his most academically oriented works make clear. In part because of his fixation with the issue at hand, Niebuhr often didn’t bother to explain the presuppositions with which he was working. H. Richard Niebuhr once compared his brother Reinhold’s thought to “a great iceberg in which three-fourths or more is beneath the surface.”14 Niebuhr’s presentist focus often left readers to infer the contours of the iceberg for themselves. To infer well requires substantial background in Niebuhr’s work more broadly and familiarity with his sociopolitical context and intended audience. But as various contributors have argued, there is considerable theological substance to the iceberg, and much that would make for fruitful analysis from a virtue ethics perspective. In this connection, Niebuhr’s method is worth examining further, particularly his tendency to frame a given ethical issue in recognizably Aristotelian fashion. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously depicted virtue as a mean between two vicious extremes. Niebuhr regularly framed his arguments in these similar terms. Granted, Niebuhr was a good deal more skeptical about the human capacity to embody virtue than others who make use of the Aristotelian framework. While Niebuhr conceded that individuals could be virtuous, translating individual virtue into moral group behavior was a fraught endeavor, as the title of Moral Man and Immoral Society makes clear. And throughout his career, Niebuhr focused primarily on the behavior of groups – hence why so much of what he wrote comes under the umbrella of social criticism. Nonetheless, Niebuhr routinely portrayed the ideal to which a group should aspire as a mean between two extremes. Governments, for instance, were most effective when they avoided tyranny on the one hand and chaos on the other. Democracies were an ideal form of government because they struck a balance between the need for freedom with the need for order. Good democratic theory avoided succumbing to sentimentality on the one hand and cynicism on the other.15 Scylla and Charybdis To delineate the mean between dangerous extremes, Niebuhr invoked the Homeric imagery of Scylla and Charybdis. As he wrote in one of his first articles: “There is a Scylla and Charybdis in almost every undertaking, two opposite dangers, two extremes, between which one must sail and both of which one must avoid if the undertaking is to be successful.”16 Ronald Stone has noted that the later Niebuhr would use this imagery to emphasize “the need for moderation in political choices.”17 Though the impulse to elaborate arguments that charted a middle course between two problematic alternatives is at least tacitly at play in his social criticism more broadly, it manifests particularly clearly in the context of democratic politics. For Niebuhr, the social import of democracy lay precisely in its ability to ameliorate the Scylla and Charybdis dilemma. In its Homeric form, the

244  Jeremy Sabella imagery describes two monsters on either side of a narrow strait that preyed on passing sailors. Keeping a safe distance from one monster placed one within reach of the other. When the legendary warrior-king Odysseus had to navigate between the monsters, he chose to contend with the one that would cause less damage. But even the great Odysseus could not escape unscathed. Democracies were structured to navigate the tensions that routinely threaten the social order better than other systems of government. A well calibrated democratic system of checks and balances mitigates the Scylla and Charybdis dilemmas of competing social groups by providing a framework for channeling the forces of self-interest, rather than ignoring or attempting to eliminate them as other forms of government tend to do. Though checks and balances make it possible to ameliorate group conflicts, the underlying causes of conflict never completely go away. Contests between a given society’s various factions must, to paraphrase Niebuhr, be coaxed into a tolerable harmony. One might depict the job of the social critic as that of discerning which outcomes are possible in light of the countervailing interests vying for power in the democratic system and steering the various actors to a workable mean. If checks and balances help guide the “frail bark of social justice,” it is the social critic who cajoles the boat’s unruly passengers into cooperating such that they are able to navigate the strait in one piece. Implicit in Niebuhr’s analysis is that, while a functional system of checks and balances is necessary to a relatively healthy democracy, it is not sufficient. Checks and balances help create and maintain a baseline set of conditions under which a flourishing society is possible. Yet it is ultimately up to participants in civic life to engage one another in a way that leads to flourishing. This brings us to another crucial function of the social critic: helping others to discern the ideals to which they should aspire and motivating them to pursue these ideals. In executing this role, the social critic must have the rhetorical deftness to persuade their intended audience. Yet mere persuasion is not enough: the social critic must use their rhetorical powers to form, spur, and protect the social conscience. They thus take on a dual task of pointing out misuses of power that threaten democratic balance and arousing the conscience in pursuit of worthy ends. Thinking of Niebuhr as performing this task helps make sense of the eclectic nature of his output. Niebuhr’s outlook changed substantially over time. Gary Dorrien argues that Niebuhr “essentially changed his politics every 10 years.”18 Though these changes may seem haphazard at first encounter, they appear more coherent when we think of Niebuhr as seeking to cajole a dynamic society into rejecting the seductive power of extreme positions in favor of a sustainable and healthy mean. Executing this task well often requires the critic to match the intensity of the group. This helps account for why the critic might take forceful positions that seem extreme if we neglect to take into account what sort of rhetorical strategies are necessary to spur social groups to change course.

The virtues of the social critic 245 An image from English essayist and critic G.K. Chesterton is instructive here. In his classic work Orthodoxy, Chesterton likens the Catholic Church to a chariot that, despite appearing to careen dangerously or even carelessly through history, has cut precisely the path that has allowed it to avoid the pitfalls of heresy: It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic . . . the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.19 Niebuhr was too circumspect in his assessment of the powers of reason and too pessimistic about the effects of sin on human life to think that a government, church, or indeed any human institution could enshrine timeless truth in the authoritative set of pronouncements and practices that the term “orthodoxy” connotes for Chesterton. Where Chesterton saw magnificent counterpoise, Niebuhr might espy the constant risk of running off course or flipping over. That said, the image of a careening chariot, “reeling but erect,” aptly describes Niebuhr’s view of democratic systems of government. The system of checks and balances frees them to adjust to the dizzyingly rapid changes to which modern societies are prone. Yet this very flexibility makes them vulnerable to capricious impulses that overtake social groups. The social critic warns social groups of the perils that threaten a healthy balance and spurs them to take surer paths forward. Apparent inconsistencies in the social critic’s approach are often the product of responding to rapidly changing circumstances. And so it was with Niebuhr, who counseled pacifism following World War I, interventionism at the onset of World War II, and deployed strikingly different rhetorical strategies during the Great Depression than he did when the U.S. had embraced the welfare state and was at the pinnacle of world power in the 1950s. Social criticism in action Effective social criticism keeps in view both the possibilities and pitfalls that a society confronts at a given moment. This requires the social critic to exercise care in how they frame and contextualize that which they are analyzing. It is tempting to narrate a given event either as evidence of the inevitable upward trajectory of human progress, or as confirmation of how far we have fallen from former glory. Yet framing issues in one way or the other tends to blunt social analysis. Narratives of progress can blind the critic to the very dysfunctions that they are supposed to expose and render them complicit in sanctioning or obscuring these dysfunctions. Narratives of decline can dispose the critic to overlook potential sources of hope and transformation that they ought to point out and use to motivate others to

246  Jeremy Sabella work for the betterment of society. To maintain perspective on the possibilities and limits of a given moment, critics must avoid the blindness that these narrative forms can induce. In short, narratives of progress and decline are the potential Scylla and Charybdis of the social critic. This is not to say that the social critic can’t make use of these narratives. The danger lies in the tendency to see them as mutually exclusive. For Niebuhr, they were simultaneously at work in any given event. The effective social critic teases out what to narrate as progress and what to narrate as decline without becoming captive to either narrative form. Doing this well requires an understanding of history that can accommodate both. A principal image that Niebuhr uses to capture this perspective is that of the tower of Babel. At the peak of their powers, nations, empires, and civilizations tend to think of themselves as representing the pinnacle of human progress. The vast sweep of history, however, suggests otherwise. It teaches us that nations and civilizations eventually crumble no matter how impressive their accomplishments. Conversely, the collapse of nations and civilizations can give the impression that they will never rise again. Yet history teaches us that new and powerful social configurations can arise at unexpected times and places. In a collection of sermonic essays entitled Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr argued for viewing the rise and fall of civilizations as repeating the pattern of the biblical account of the Tower of Babel.20 In this story, human beings attempted to build a tower that reached to the heavens. God disrupted this project by confusing the languages, rendering people unable to understand each other. They subsequently scatter over the face of the earth. On one level, the story serves the etiological function of explaining the diversity of human languages; for Niebuhr, it also captures a basic dynamic at work in history. Humans build civilizations because they possess extraordinary creativity and vision. The ambition that pushes us to collaborate and build, however, also makes us prone to mutual suspicion and distrust. Consequently, civilization building contains the seeds of its own undoing. Yet when these edifices collapse, new possibilities for social projects emerge. And the creative impulses of the human spirit are such that we cannot help but seize on these opportunities. Rather than a straightforward narrative of progress or decline, human history is an entangled web of rises and collapses. Whatever progress is made in history is vulnerable to setbacks, and apparent historical failures can give rise to surprising forms of progress. The Niebuhrian social critic is aware of this pattern. Thus, they are sensitive to the corrosive dynamics at work in society’s most ringing successes and able to uncover sources of hope and creativity unleashed at times of apparent failure. Rejecting overarching narratives of progress and decline thus frees them to discern the dynamics of progress and decline perpetually at work at any given moment, which in turn makes them more effective at discerning the balances society needs to strike. Niebuhr models this technique in his classic work on democratic theory, the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, published in 1944.

The virtues of the social critic 247 Though the tide of World War II had turned in the allies’ favor by the time Niebuhr had finished the manuscript, it was unclear just what sort of world order would emerge once the conflict was over. Nor was it self-evident that democracy was the best form of government for the postwar world. Niebuhr took it upon himself to make the case for democratic forms of government that would inspire the “Vital Center” liberalism that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. In his analysis, Niebuhr stakes out the extremes that a workable democratic theory strives to avoid: anarchy and despotism; complacency and despair; a “too-consistent optimism” and a “too consistent pessimism.”21 The democratic system provides mechanisms for holding the concerns that can push us toward these extremes in counterpoise. From one perspective, it might seem like freedom and order are opposed to one another: the rules that provide structure to society curtail individual freedom, and the pursuit of individual freedom weakens the social fabric. When well calibrated, however, checks and balances play the interests of the individual and the interests of social groups off of one another in a manner that allows order and freedom to coexist. Democratic checks and balances thus help us “beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.”22 They blunt the forces that cause us to oscillate between despotism and anarchy, thereby coaxing us into a “tolerable harmony.”23 To accomplish this, however, democratic checks and balances must be rooted in an understanding of two things: the intractable nature and destructive potential of human self-interest, and the fragile, existentially taxing character of democratic life. By rejecting tyranny, democratic citizens entrust the levers of political power to one another. This has the advantage of mitigating unhealthy concentrations of power. It also means that participants in the democratic system can hold each other accountable. This arrangement requires commitment to engaging one’s fellow citizens, leaving us vulnerable to frustration and disillusionment at times when we seem unable to move beyond parochial self-interest for the sake of the body politic. A key task of the social critic is to remind us why we’ve committed to democracy to begin with and help us find the resolve to remain engaged. In good Niebuhrian language, the social critic helps us become “wise children of light.” Throughout The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr is witheringly critical of the “foolish children of light” who presupposed the inevitability of human progress, and thus, remained shrouded in the “fog of sentimentality.”24 His targets include obvious figures, such as Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Locke. They also include some not-so-obvious ones such as Karl Marx, who despite the pessimistic strains in his thought retained the utopian optimism of a child of light. Yet Niebuhr is even harder on those whose embrace of power politics brought them too close to the “abyss of cynicism.”25 Figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther lost sight

248  Jeremy Sabella of human creativity and dynamism and the ways that societies can foster and channel those impulses.26 In what must have read as understatement in 1944, Niebuhr writes, “Clearly it has become necessary for the children of light to borrow some of the wisdom of the children of darkness.” In so doing they become wise. Yet they must “be careful not to borrow too much” so that they remain children of light.27 The social critic must make this wisdom available to the foolish and caution the wise of its dangers. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness masterfully showcases how to offer constructive social criticism while rejecting overarching narratives of progress or decline. All the more remarkable is that Niebuhr managed to articulate this balance at a moment in history particularly conducive to despair. Out of the rubble of a shattered world order, Niebuhr was able to appreciate human creativity, articulate a vision for how to move forward, and communicate trust in our ability to rebuild. The social critic not only sounds the alarm; they also offer words of hope. Which approach they adopt depends on the needs of the moment. And Niebuhr offered his fair share of hope. In March of 1941, Niebuhr wrote a piece entitled “Fighting Chance for a Sick Society” speculating on how world politics would play out should Hitler be defeated.28 For those accustomed to Niebuhr’s pronouncements of doom and gloom, this might have seemed like an oddly optimistic thought experiment. But Niebuhr was committed to staving off despair. A February 1942 article entitled “The Jews After the War” made a full-throated case for creating a Jewish homeland, this time presupposing allied victory.29 While there were positive signs for Allied forces at this stage of the conflict, the conflict’s outcome was far from certain. Yet this project struck Niebuhr as so important that he started laying the conceptual groundwork two years before D-Day. This reveals an overlooked yet crucial dimension to Niebuhr’s work as a social critic: he hedged against being overly pessimistic as well as being overly optimistic. The fact that so many of his writings strike a pessimistic tone reflects more on the psyche of his audience than on his conceptual framework. In times of success, we Americans are especially prone to excessive and baseless optimism. It is the thankless job of our social critics to push against this tendency, as Niebuhr did so often. When this optimism is punctured and the illusions underpinning it are exposed, we can spiral quite rapidly into despair. In such moments, we need our social critics to bring our ideals back into our sights. Hence why world war elicited Niebuhr’s most hopeful work. Once we understand him in the vein of a social critic committed to helping us find the mean between extremes, his penchant for words of caution in times of success and hope in times of disaster begins to make sense.

The dispositions of the social critic Having described Niebuhr’s conceptual framework, I now turn toward the dispositions that help us account for how he operated within it. It is

The virtues of the social critic 249 tempting to perceive someone as brilliant and prolific as Niebuhr as an inimitable genius. But this would be a mistake. While few of us can match his sheer output, we can analyze and emulate his dispositions. In the process, we learn a lot about what it means to be a social critic, particularly in the American context. First, we learn from Niebuhr that the social critic must be capable of receiving criticism. Niebuhr responded to events as they unfolded. This mode of engagement is risky, as it lacks the benefit of hindsight. Consequently, Niebuhr was often wrong in his assessments. Niebuhr’s second book, Reflections on the End of an Era (1934), presumed the imminent collapse of the capitalist system and Western civilization. He was also initially quite suspicious of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the viability of his New Deal programs. Looking back, Niebuhr confessed embarrassment at how slow he was to see certain trends develop.30 Such mistakes in judgment are practically inevitable for the social critic. In their efforts to shape conversations as they develop, they sometimes miss the forest for the trees. Yet part of why Niebuhr was able to be an effective social critic year after year was that he was willing to learn from his mistakes. Niebuhr’s theological turn was in part a response to his brother H. Richard pushing him to be more theologically rigorous following the publication of Moral Man.31 Healan Gaston has argued that Reinhold looked to H. Richard to help him pinpoint mistakes in judgment and make the necessary corrections.32 He also depended heavily on the critical eye of his wife Ursula. He thanks her in the preface to Reflections on the End of an Era, noting that her “criticisms are responsible for the elimination of many laws in words and thoughts in the manuscript of this book.”33 Elisabeth Sifton suggests that Ursula “engaged with my father on theological issues right from the start,” and that influence was just as profound on Moral Man.34 Rebekah Miles has argued that, following Reinhold’s stroke in 1952, Ursula operated as a virtual co-author and should have been credited as such.35 One wonders how prominent a role Ursula played in Reinhold’s 1969 article, “Toward Intra-Christian Endeavors,” which in addition to demonstrating Niebuhr’s ability to receive criticism, suggests another, related trait: the ability to be self-critical.36 Niebuhr published this piece in the midst of the Vietnam War. In it, he retracted his stinging criticism of Karl Barth for advocating a neutralist position on the Soviet Invasion of Hungary in 1957. At the time he had taken umbrage to how Barth’s reference to the “fleshpots of Germany and America” appeared to collapse any meaningful moral distinction between communist and democratic forms of government. Yet Vietnam caused him to reconsider: I must now ruefully change that decade-ago opinion of mine in regard to Barth’s neutralism. While I do not share his sneer at the “fleshpots of Germany and America,” I must admit that our wealth makes our religious anticommunism particularly odious.

250  Jeremy Sabella Not that Barth was neutral on the invasion itself. Rather, he was responding to Christian reaction to the invasion, and particularly, Catholic opposition to the invasion on the grounds of natural law. For Barth, natural law arguments were the outgrowth of placing one’s faith in something other than God. Niebuhr, however, thought that Barth’s position provided a dangerous pretext for shirking social responsibility. Although Niebuhr did not retract this criticism, he lamented the manner in which he stated it: I wrote, rather pretentiously, about the “Scylla” of [Barth’s] neo-­ Reformation neutralism and the “Charybdis” of Catholic anticommunism. I observed proudly that fortunately we had a third alternative, one which avoided both neutralism and consistent partisanship. But I did not bother to define this desirable alternative.37 Niebuhr, in other words, had neglected to offer constructive tools to balance out his critique. Thus, it had done more harm than good. He also repented of the “high-handed stance” against Catholicism implied in his argument, noting that the Second Vatican Council “unleashed new forces in the Roman Catholic Church” that “made my earlier arguments against Catholicism too sweeping.” Niebuhr left his readers with sage advice for engaging social criticism, particularly when it is couched in theological terms: “One must be suspicious of all these theologians, whether Barth, Niebuhr or someone else. The reader therefore must be particularly careful in judging these religiously inspired opinions, particularly when we forget [the Apostle] Paul’s reservation ‘Thus say I, not the Lord.’ ”38 For the social critic, this receptivity to criticism and ability to be selfcritical must be paired with one more related trait: the willingness to change one’s mind. Revising one’s public stance can exact a high toll. David Brooks observes, “When you change your mind in public and if you’re a public figure and a public intellectual, your friends hate you and your enemies hate you more.” Making such changes thus risks “alienating everyone all at once.”39 Yet for the social critic operating in a postindustrial democratic context, the ability and willingness to pivot in public is essential. Beginning in the late 1930s, Niebuhr participated in three installments of A Christian Century series entitled “How My Mind Has Changed.” In his 1939 entry, Niebuhr chronicled how the rise of Nazism shaped his transition from pacifism in 1930 to a realist outlook by decade’s end. In his second entry from 1960, Niebuhr admitted to being a “liberal at heart” despite his “broadsides against liberalism” in the 1930s, which in retrospect were “indiscriminate.”40 It is in this piece that he depicts Barth and Catholicism in the terms that he would retract in his “Intra Christian Endeavors” article, which marked his third and final contribution. Changing one’s public stance requires a certain measure of vulnerability, and it can seem especially risky in our hyper-partisan social media age. Yet the willingness to do so is an essential trait. A dizzyingly dynamic world

The virtues of the social critic 251 requires nimble critics who can adjust without compromising the integrity of their role. Niebuhr was able to pivot as deftly as he did precisely because he was working out of a clear conceptual framework. In Niebuhr’s case, the framework was rooted in a set of theological presuppositions that accounted for the glory and misery of the human condition. While effective social critics need not share his presumptions, they will require a conceptual framework that can accommodate rapid shifts. Speaking publicly is one thing; getting substantial swaths of the public to pay attention is another matter. Why was Niebuhr able to cultivate a following while other insightful observers were not? Pondering this question highlights another trait of the social critic: being adept at reading one’s audience. Niebuhr routinely addressed a wide array of audiences, from church groups and seminary students to soldiers in training, civic leaders, farmers, union activists, and policy makers. He altered the imagery, language, and delivery of his message accordingly. He was a prolific author in part because he would publish on a given topic in as many outlets as he could, tailoring the argument to his audience each time. In the process he mastered various rhetorical forms: the formality of the academic article, the urgency of a partisan publication, the hortatory tone of the sermon. Indeed, as influential as his writings have been, those who knew him personally – including his wife Ursula and daughter Elisabeth – claim that he was even more compelling with the spoken word than with the written word.41 To cut through the din of the social media age, the social critic must engage several audiences at once. Like a sheepdog running to and fro to keep the flock moving in the right direction, the effective social critic constantly shifts tone and approach to mobilize multiple groups toward a common goal.42 Reading Niebuhr with these diverse audiences in mind imparts a new level of appreciation for his skill as a communicator. And finally, the social critic must be able to absorb and synthesize information from disparate sources. Niebuhr worked at the intersection of many disciplines, none of which he mastered. For all his honorary degrees, his formal schooling never included doctoral work. Yet he managed to shape American life in ways that few others have ever managed. As John C. Bennett observed, Niebuhr “had given the scholars a great deal to write about” precisely because he was such a gifted generalist.43 Daniel Rice notes that “Niebuhr’s forte was that he possessed a remarkable, even astounding capacity for intellectual synthesis and could go to the heart of an issue as well as see wide patterns of relationships.” This combination of “both a sweeping and a penetrating intellect” is what made him so good at social commentary.44 He gleaned the best insights from experts in their field, used these insights to shed light on social problems and issues, and combined them in a way that intellectually curious non-specialists could understand and appreciate. This synthetic skill is even more vital today. The sheer volume of information available in the Internet age is overwhelming. For many, it feels paralyzing. The social critic must, like Niebuhr, have the ability to get to the heart of the

252  Jeremy Sabella issue and help people make sense of an immensely complicated world. To do this, they must both cultivate a breadth of knowledge and develop the ability to weave that knowledge together. To be a social critic in a Niebuhrian vein, one must be committed to the generalist task, have a well-honed ability to synthesize information, and amid the deluge of data in the information age, possess good instincts for what is worth our shared attention.

Conclusion In a letter praising Reinhold’s sermonic essays in Beyond Tragedy, H. Richard described them as articulating the “best theology that has appeared in America in a generation or two.” Despite this high estimate, H. Richard still had his quibbles: “I don’t like the sharpness of some of your antithesis. But what’s the odds! Each man speaks in his own tongue and you are understood because you speak of real things.”45 This commitment to speak of “real things” made Niebuhr a superb social critic. Focusing relentlessly on making sense of, critiquing, and improving human relations propelled him to the ranks of the most influential thinkers in American history. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, Niebuhr is “so much in the drinking water that it is very hard to avoid thinking the way he has taught you to think, even if you don’t know that it is Niebuhr that taught you to think that.”46 People often ask, “Where is Reinhold Niebuhr today?” The reality is that Niebuhr himself couldn’t accomplish now what he did in his time. The cultural prestige of mainline Protestantism has eroded too far and the media landscape become too decentralized for a preacher-professor with a nuanced approach to social problems to reach such a vast audience. Yet like Niebuhr, we can still speak of “real things” in terms that nourish the spirit and stir the social conscience. We can do this by rejecting the false fever-dream clarity of Manichean binaries in favor of modes of thinking that accommodate the glory and misery of the human experience. We can do this by training ourselves to be receptive to criticism, able to engage in self-scrutiny, and willing to change our mind. And we can do this by drawing on broad cultural engagement to convey depth of insight. If we are diligent in cultivating these virtues of the social critic, we can help guide “the frail bark of social justice” through the manifold manifestations of Scylla and Charybdis of our age.47

Notes 1 See Robert C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002), ix. 2 Larry Rasmussen, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), ix. 3 Daniel Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), xiv. 4 An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, directed by Martin Doblmeier (First Run Features, 2017), DVD.

The virtues of the social critic 253 5 Reinhold Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (New York, NY: Library of America, 2015), 4. 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr ed. D.B. Robertson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957). 7 Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works, 5. 8 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 102. 9 Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1996), 95. 10 Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 98. 11 Niebuhr, Major Works, 4. 12 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Theology and Political Thought in the Western World,” Major Works, 869. Niebuhr published this article in 1957 in the context of the Cold War era and its concerns. 13 See John Milbank, “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge: Wiley Blackwell, 1997), 233–54; Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: the Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), 87–140. 14 Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1956), 97. 15 See The Children of Light and Children of Darkness, in Niebuhr, Major Works, 362. 16 See Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making (Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 231. 17 Ronald H. Stone, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 36. 18 See Jeremy L. Sabella, An American Conscience (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 138. 19 G.K. Chesterton, Heretics/Orthodoxy (New York, NY: Classic Books America, 2009), 252. 20 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Tower of Babel,” in Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 25–46. 21 Niebuhr, Major Works, 355. 22 Ibid., 378. 23 Ibid., 395. 24 Ibid., 450. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 380. 27 Ibid., 451. 28 Ibid., 624–28. 29 Ibid., 639–50. 30 See “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1956). 31 Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1996), 145–46. 32 “ ‘A Bad Kind of Magic’: The Niebuhr Brothers on ‘Utilitarian Christianity’ and the Defense of Democracy,” Harvard Theological Review, 107:1 (2014): 1–30. 33 Reinhold Niebuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), x. 34 Sabella, American Conscience, 99. 35 Rebekah Miles, “Uncredited: Was Ursula Niebuhr Reinhold’s Coauthor?” Christian Century, 129:2 (January 25, 2012): 30–33. 36 “Toward New Intra-Christian Endeavors,” Christian Century (December 31, 1969): 1662–67. 37 “Intra-Christian Endeavors,” 1663.

254  Jeremy Sabella 38 Ibid., 1662. 39 Sabella, American Conscience, 138. 40 “The Quality of our Lives,” Christian Century (May 11, 1960): 568–72. 41 Sabella, American Conscience, 44. 42 My thanks to Kevin Carnahan for suggesting the sheepdog image. 43 Quoted in Daniel Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), xix. 44 Ibid. 45 Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 184. 46 Sabella, American Conscience, 117. 47 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny, 268.

Contributor bios

Kevin Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO. He is the Co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and author of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War (Lexington Books, 2010) and From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality (Routledge, 2017). He lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife and two daughters. Mark Douglas is Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA, where he teaches a wide variety of classes and directs the Master’s of Divinity degree program. He is also the founding editor of @ this point: theological reflections on church and culture, the seminary’s online journal. He is the author of Confessing Christ in the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), Believing Aloud: Reflections on Being Religious in the Public Sphere (Cascade, 2010), and Christian Pacifism for the Environmental Age (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His current work explores connections between violence and climate change at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Christopher Dowdy is Vice-President of Academic Affairs at Paul Quinn College. His research focuses on redress for historical injustices. He is the author of several articles on lynching memory and mercy, and he built the website “Dallas Untold,” a multi-archival exploration of public memory at a downtown Dallas lynching site. R. Ward Holder is a historical and political theologian, and Professor of Theology at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. He writes on the Reformations, biblical interpretation, and the manner in which religious convictions shape modern politics and political theory. Among other works, he has authored John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin’s First Commentaries (Brill, 2006), and has edited A Companion to Paul in the Reformation (Brill, 2009) and John Calvin in Context (Cambridge, 2019). Among his political theological efforts he has co-authored The Irony of Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Reinhold

256  Contributor bios Niebuhr, and the Problem of Christian Statecraft (Ashgate, 2012), coedited The American Election 2012: Contexts and Consequences (Palgrave 2014), and co-authored Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice: Christian Realism and Democracy in America in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington, 2019). His essays have appeared in Christian Century, Church History, Politics and Religion, and Society. His current work focuses on the intersection of faith and politics and history. Tom James is Pastor of Eastminster United Presbyterian Church in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of In Face of Reality: The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman (Pickwick, 2011) and co-author of A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good (Routledge, 2015). Martha ter Kuile is Minister at Bloor Street United Church in Toronto, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation proposed a Christian Realist virtue ethics constructed from the theological anthropology of Reinhold Niebuhr and elements of the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition, emphasizing secular philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Robin W. Lovin is Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics emeritus at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge, 1995) and Christian Realism and the New Realities (Cambridge, 2008) and a former President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Jodie L. Lyon is Senior Lecturer in Religion at the University of Georgia where she teaches courses on sexual ethics, feminist theology, and the problem of evil. Her publications include an essay on Niebuhr’s hamartiology entitled “Pride and the Symptoms of Sin” in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and entries on “sin” and “work” in the Common English Bible: Women’s Study Bible. Daniel Malotky is the Lucy H. Robertson Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Greensboro College, where he also serves as the Dean of the School of Humanities. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at The University of Chicago Divinity School, specializing in Religious Ethics. He studies the intersection of faith, ethics, and politics, as evidenced by his book, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Paralysis, Violence, and Pragmatism (Lexington Books, 2012). He is currently working on a supplementary text for introductory courses in ethics and he is leading the launch of a new master’s level program at the college in Theology, Ethics and Culture. Charles Mathewes is the Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (2007) and A Theology of Public Life (2008), both with Cambridge University Press; Understanding Religious Ethics (WileyBlackwell, 2010); and The Republic of Grace (Eerdmans, 2010). Among

Contributor bios 257 other edited volumes, he is the Senior Editor for a forthcoming fourvolume collection on Comparative Religious Ethics: The Major Works for Routledge Publishers. He is currently co-directing a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, on “Religion and its Publics.” Daniel A. Morris is Assistant Professor in the philosophy program at Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 2012, he taught at Augustana College for five years. He has published essays in Soundings, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, and The Journal of Religion. His first book, Virtue and Irony in American Democracy: Revisiting Dewey and Niebuhr (Lexington Books, 2015), argues that John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr endorse very similar ideas of democratic virtue, despite their contrasting worldviews. At Norwich, he teaches classes in ethics and religion. Scott Paeth is Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He is the author or editor of several books, including Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology and Social Theory in the Work of Jurgen Moltmann (Routledge, 2008), Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse (Eerdmans, 2009), Shaping Public Theology: Selections from the Writings of Max L. Stackhouse (Eerdmans, 2014), Philosophy: A Short Visual Introduction (Fortress, 2015), Religious Perspectives on Business Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), and The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians (Westminster, 2013). He writes on issues of religion and public life, philosophical theology, and Christian social ethics. Jeremy Sabella is a lecturer in religion at Dartmouth College. He was lead consultant for the award-winning PBS documentary An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story (2017) and author of the eponymous companion book (Eerdmans, 2017). He has published in Christian Century, Political Theology, and Religions. His most recent article, “Postures of Piety and Protest,” examines kneeling in the NFL as a civil religious act. David True is Associate Professor at Wilson College and Co-editor of the journal Political Theology. He has published articles and book chapters on religious and secular fundamentalism, just war theory, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and he has written for a popular audience in such venues as Religion Dispatches, the Christian Science Monitor, Politico, and Political Theology Today.

Index

Anscombe, G.E.M. 6, 8, 20, 101, 119, 173 Aquinas, Thomas 12, 49, 101 Aristotle 10, 11, 21, 24, 28, 52, 54 – 5, 61, 101, 117, 120, 166, 169, 182, 184, 189, 213, 226, 228, 229, 243 Augustine 8, 24, 25, 34, 35, 49, 109, 125, 151, 188, 192, 226 Barth, Karl 2, 37, 40, 167, 172, 249 – 50 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 148, 150, 152, 156 Brunner, Emil 15, 63, 68 – 9, 70, 100, 150 consequentialism 1 – 9, 20, 165, 174, 199, 208 contrition 10, 14 – 15, 27, 28, 61, 71, 138, 139, 144 – 63 De La Torre, Miguel 46, 124, 195 faith 12, 13, 15, 24, 26, 27, 28, 33, 35 – 40, 43 – 5, 49, 56, 66 – 81, 83, 85, 88 – 90, 94, 101 – 3, 112, 118, 136, 142, 151, 165, 166, 167, 169, 173, 174, 176, 188, 212, 231, 250 feminism 14, 58, 64, 100, 111, 113, 116 – 29, 132 – 3, 157, 209 Fletcher, Joseph 3, 7 forgiveness 3 – 4, 27 – 8, 29, 12, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 49, 55, 61, 65, 70, 79, 94, 99, 112, 142 – 3, 147, 149, 152 – 4, 160, 163, 188, 193 Gregory, Eric 1, 151, 162 Hauerwas, Stanley 1, 9, 13, 83 – 5, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97, 101, 167, 252 Hegel, G.W.F. 9, 21, 26, 50, 52, 72, 233 Hemmingway, Ernest 16, 224, 230, 235

Herdt, Jennifer 49, 63 honesty 13, 14, 55, 60, 82 – 97, 121, 146, 158, 212, 240 hope 11, 12, 15, 24, 27, 28, 33 – 47, 58, 79, 102, 103, 109 – 10, 112, 137, 141, 142, 147, 150, 151, 154, 156, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174 – 6, 188, 239, 245, 246, 248 humility 28, 61 – 2, 74, 75, 84, 93, 95, 101, 118, 121, 132 – 43, 145, 152 – 4, 169, 173, 193, 195, 197, 208 – 9, 228, 231 irony i, 12, 13, 19 – 32, 41, 43, 63, 78, 101, 102, 110, 137, 226 – 32, 234, 235 James, William 8 justice 1, 6, 10, 15, 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 48, 49, 52, 56, 57, 61 – 2, 74 – 6, 77, 94 – 5, 99 – 108, 110, 111, 119, 125 – 9, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144 – 8, 149, 150, 152, 155, 161, 162, 165 – 81, 182 – 200, 201, 227, 228, 232, 236, 244, 252 Kierkegaard, Søren 8 – 9, 13, 22, 71 – 2, 80, 85, 88 liturgy 4, 10, 14 – 15, 144, 148 – 9, 151, 152 love (agape, self-sacrificial love) 4, 12, 14, 15, 27, 33, 33, 35 – 40, 41, 44 – 5, 52 – 4, 55, 60, 61, 68, 76 – 7, 79, 84, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98 – 114, 116, 117 – 19, 122 – 5, 126, 127, 133 – 4, 136, 136, 139 – 40, 142 – 3, 149 – 54, 161, 162, 165, 166, 169, 170, 175, 176, 186, 188, 190, 193, 202 – 3, 229, 236; see also mutuality (mutual love)

Index  259 Luther, Martin 24, 50 – 1, 101 – 2, 247 Lutheran 14, 50, 101 – 2, 104, 112, 149, 161 MacIntyre, Alasdair 5 – 6, 8, 9, 20, 21, 92, 101, 119, 162 Marxism 5 – 6, 8, 33 – 5, 40, 50, 170, 195, 196, 203 – 4, 226, 247 Meilaender, Gilbert 50 – 1, 101 mutuality (mutual love) 14, 99, 103, 104, 106 – 8, 111, 113, 115 – 31, 150, 153 – 4, 27, 186, 193 myth 13, 82 – 97, 108, 109, 189 narrative 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 70, 74, 75, 82, 84, 88, 91 – 3, 97, 151, 189, 205, 207, 245 – 6, 248 Niebuhr, H. Richard 13, 31, 66 – 9, 70, 243, 249, 252 Nussbaum, Martha 11, 16, 20, 21, 30, 48 – 9, 51 – 65, 221, 224 – 6, 229, 233 paradox i, 4, 8, 26, 43, 60, 70, 71, 72, 73, 78, 82 – 97, 102, 109, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 187, 195, 209 paradoxical virtue 11, 13, 43, 72, 73, 78, 91 – 5, 98, 101, 102, 103 – 6, 110, 126, 190 – 1, 195, 198, 242 Pincoffs, Edmund 7, 8 Plato (Platonism) 20, 21, 23, 53, 54, 60, 61, 182, 184, 189, 212, 225 – 6 practice 4, 10, 14 – 15, 21, 54, 102, 103, 105, 106, 144, 148, 149, 152 – 5, 156, 176, 190, 201, 202, 210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 245 prayer 15, 144, 148, 149 – 55, 161, 162 pride 3, 4, 10, 14, 34, 35, 38, 40, 42, 46, 49, 50, 57, 61, 64, 71, 74, 77, 85, 101, 113, 118, 122, 132 – 43, 145, 146, 163, 186, 192, 194, 199, 209, 218, 228, 231

prudence 28, 35, 37, 38, 43, 189, 201 – 19, 228, 229, 237 racism 10, 15, 116, 124 – 5, 128, 144 – 64, 195 – 7 Ramsey, Paul 1, 3, 6 – 7, 9, 96, 100, 162 Red Queen virtue 11, 14, 104, 10 Saiving, Valarie 100, 121 – 5, 126 – 7, 133, 160 – 1, 179 Saroyan, William 16, 224, 235 – 6 self-sacrifice 14, 99 – 100, 103 – 6, 113, 116, 118 – 20, 123, 124, 126, 128, 133, 175 sexual ethics 2, 15 – 16, 141, 209 – 16, 218 sin 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 14, 26, 36, 37, 42, 50, 55 – 7, 58, 61, 64, 65, 71, 80, 103, 116, 118 – 19, 121 – 9, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 147, 151, 153, 154, 159, 162, 166, 169, 170, 171, 183, 186 – 96, 199, 209, 210, 212, 218, 226, 227, 231, 245 Steinbeck, John 16, 223, 224, 229, 232, 235 Tessman, Lisa 11 Tillich, Paul 13, 66, 67 – 9, 100 tragedy 11, 16, 21, 27, 29, 30, 51 – 5, 63, 64, 70, 97, 102, 117, 173, 185, 221, 224 – 7, 229 Vietnam War 15, 168, 176, 202, 204 – 9, 214, 231, 249 virtue as a mean 16, 28, 93 – 4, 144, 152, 155, 195, 213, 232, 239, 243 – 4, 248 World War II 4, 34, 40, 41, 152, 168, 191, 198, 245, 247, 248