Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition: ‘The Eye of Love’ 9780567672773, 9780567672803, 9780567672780

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Preface
1 An Ignatian Approach to Reading the Spiritual Classics
2 ‘A Clear and Perfect Estate’: Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul
3 Compassion and Competence in the Service of Others: A Jesuit Contribution to Catholic Learning
The context
Jesuit documents
The Spiritual Exercises
The Foundation and Principle
The Contemplation for Achieving Love
Discernment of Spirits
The Constitutions, Part IV
The training of Jesuits
The problem of property
The programme
The Ratio Studiorum
The transformative effect of education
The universal humanities curriculum
Practical pedagogy
Exploring Jesuit education today
The strategic vision of Jesuit education
The operational vision of Jesuit education
Conclusion
4 Faith, Reason and Science: Towards a Renewed Christian Humanism?
The eclipse of the person
The loss of the art of living
Possible objections
Some practical consequences
5 The Practical Concept of God
Introduction
From theoretical to practical reason
The paradox of rational agency and the question of God
Conclusion
6 Philosophy, Theology and Nature
Introduction
Theology, prayer and two types of natural theology
Engaging with God and talking about God
Theology, philosophy and myth
Conclusions
7 A Secular Age?
Introduction
Charles Taylor’s starting point in A Secular Age
From a monological to a dialogical age
New ways of conceiving the rationality of religious beliefs and practices
The persistence of monological frameworks
Towards an age beyond theism and atheism
8 Contemporary Jesuit Epistemological Interests
Humanism: Alessandro Valignano SJ versus Pope Benedict XIV
Vatican II: Signs of the times
Vatican II: Stable truth, developing teaching
Jesuits before Vatican II: New paths to theology
Jesuit missions: Atheism
Justice and interdisciplinary issues
Clashing epistemologies
Culture and theology
Looking to the future
9 Eastern Christianity and Jesuit Scholarship on Arabic and Islam: Modern History and Contemporary Theological Reflections
10 Autonomy, Dignity, Human Rights: Correcting a Popular Error
Human rights and human nature
Recognizing a common humanity
Griffin on reforming human rights
Human nature, dignity and human rights
Not a source of criteria for testing individuals
Conclusion
11 Liberal and Authoritarian Approaches to Raising Good Citizens
12 Stewardship as Welcome and Respect for the Dignity of the Vulnerable: An Essay in Bioethics
The body and soul of the human person
Neighbourliness as stewardship and care for the vulnerable
Two – or even three – different concepts of human dignity
13 Dialogue in a Pluralist Context: Theological Ethics and the New Interest in Happiness
The ‘how to be happy’ handbooks
Richard Layard and happiness economics
Martin Seligman and positive psychology
Julia Annas and eudaimonistic virtue ethics
Theological ethics and dialogue about happiness in a pluralist context
Ethical dialogue in a pluralist culture
References
1 An Ignatian Approach to Reading the Spiritual Classics
2 ‘A Clear and Perfect Estate’: Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul
3 Compassion and Competence in the Service of Others: A Jesuit Contribution to Catholic Learning
4 Faith, Reason and Science: Towards a Renewed Christian Humanism?
5 The Practical Concept of God
6 Philosophy, Theology and Nature
7 A Secular Age?
8 Contemporary Jesuit Epistemological Interests
9 Eastern Christianity and Jesuit Scholarship on Arabic and Islam: Modern History and Contemporary Theological Reflections
10 Autonomy, Dignity, Human Rights: Correcting a Popular Error
11 Liberal and Authoritarian Approaches to Raising Good Citizens
12 Stewardship as Welcome and Respect for the Dignity of the Vulnerable: An Essay in Bioethics
13 Dialogue in a Pluralist Context: Theological Ethics and the New Interest in Happiness
Index

Citation preview

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Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition

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Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition ‘The Eye of Love’ Edited by Anna Abram, Peter Gallagher and Michael Kirwan

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Anna Abram, Peter Gallagher and Michael Kirwan, 2017 Anna Abram, Peter Gallagher and Michael Kirwan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.



ISBN: HB: 978-​0 -​5 676-​7277-​3 ePDF: 978-​0 -​5 676-​7278-​0 ePub: 978-​0 -​5 676-​7279-​7 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image © Vision of Diego Laine by Matthias Krager, Library of the Jesuit Curia in Rome Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword by Editors Preface Rowan Williams 1 An Ignatian Approach to Reading the Spiritual Classics Edward Howells 2 ‘A Clear and Perfect Estate’: Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul Gemma Simmonds CJ 3 Compassion and Competence in the Service of Others: A Jesuit Contribution to Catholic Learning David Tuohy SJ 4 Faith, Reason and Science: Towards a Renewed Christian Humanism? Louis Caruana SJ 5 The Practical Concept of God Terrance Walsh SJ 6 Philosophy, Theology and Nature Fiona Ellis 7 A Secular Age? Anthony J. Carroll 8 Contemporary Jesuit Epistemological Interests James G. Murphy SJ 9 Eastern Christianity and Jesuit Scholarship on Arabic and Islam: Modern History and Contemporary Theological Reflections Anthony O’Mahony 10 Autonomy, Dignity, Human Rights: Correcting a Popular Error Patrick Riordan SJ 11 Liberal and Authoritarian Approaches to Raising Good Citizens Stephen Law 12 Stewardship as Welcome and Respect for the Dignity of the Vulnerable: An Essay in Bioethics Agneta Sutton

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1 15 31 53 65 89 117 139

159 187 203 219

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13 Dialogue in a Pluralist Context: Theological Ethics and the New Interest in Happiness Nicholas Austin SJ References Index

235 253 279

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Illustrations Figures 3.1  Relationships in the process of the Spiritual Exercises and in education

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3.2  Five components of the learning process in Jesuit education

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Tables 3.1  A  summary of the focus of different sections of the Ratio Studiorum 3.2  Parallels between different aspects of The Spiritual Exercises and education

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Contributors Editors of the volume Dr Anna Abram, head of Pastoral and Social Studies, Heythrop College Dr Peter Gallagher SJ, head of Philosophy, Heythrop College Dr Michael Kirwan SJ, director of Heythrop Institute of Religion and Society, Heythrop College

Preface Dr Rowan Williams, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

Contributors to the Volume Nicholas Austin SJ is lecturer in Theological Ethics, Heythrop College. He works in the area of Thomistic Tradition, Virtue Ethics, and Ignatian Spirituality. Anthony J. Carroll is senior lecturer in Philosophy, Heythrop College. He recently co-​edited (with Katia Lenehan) Spiritual Foundations and Chinese Culture: A Philosophical Approach (2016), The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington, DC and (with Richard Norman) Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide (2017). Louis Caruana SJ is dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was reader in philosophy at Heythrop and has long been an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory. In his books and articles he explores the philosophical and theological questions raised by what is called ‘the scientific mentality’.

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Fiona Ellis is reader in Philosophy and director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion, Heythrop College. Her publications include:  God, Value and Nature (2014) and Concepts and Reality in the History of Philosophy: Tracing a Philosophical Error from Locke to Bradley (2005). She is currently editing New Models of Religious Understanding (2017). Edward Howells is senior lecturer in Theology/​ Christian Spirituality, Heythrop College. He works in the area of historical theology, mysticism and spirituality. His past and forthcoming publications include: John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (2002), Sources of Transformation: Revitalizing Christian Spirituality (2010, co-​edited with Peter Tyler), The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology (2018, co-​edited with Mark McIntosh) and A Short History of Christian Spirituality (2017). Stephen Law is senior lecturer in Philosophy, Heythrop College. He works in the area of Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, and Wittgenstein. His publications include:  The War For Children's Minds (2006), The Great Philosophers (2007, an edited collection), Israel, Palestine and Terror (2008) and Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (2011). James Murphy SJ of Loyola University, Chicago, published a monograph, War’s Ends in 2014. His other publications range over related topics on the ethics of war and neutrality, and Irish nationalism. Among the more notable is ‘Easter Ethics’, in G. Doherty and D. Keogh, eds, 1916: The Long Revolution (2007). He is also interested in the application of ethical theory to public policy debates and Catholic moral thought in a wide range of areas. Anthony O’Mahony is reader in Theology, Heythrop College. He works in the area of Christianity in the Middle East; Eastern Catholic Theology and Ecclesiology; Christian-​Muslim relations; Christian-​Jewish relations and the modern religious and political history of Jerusalem. His forthcoming monographs include:  The Life and Thought of Louis Massignon:  Between France, Jerusalem and the Middle East:  A  Study in Relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam (2017) and Christianity in the Middle East (2017). Patrick Riordan SJ of the Irish province teaches political philosophy at Heythrop College. His latest book is Philippine Common Goods: A Good Life

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for All (2016). Other publications include Global Ethics and Global Common Goods (2015). He has also published articles on Human Dignity, Natural Law, Business Ethics, and Just War theory in the context of terrorism. Gemma Simmonds CJ, senior lecturer in Theology and Christian Spirituality and director of Religious Life Institute, Heythrop College works in the area of Historical Theology, Pastoral Theology, Religious Life, and Spirituality. Her publications include: Glimpses of the Divine: The Art and Inspiration of Sieger Koder (2010), Keeping Faith in Practice: Aspects of Catholic Pastoral Theology (2010, co-​edited with James Sweeney and David Lonsdale), A Future Full of Hope (2012, an edited volume). Agneta Suttonis visiting lecturer in Bioethics, Heythrop College. Her publications include:  Ecology and Stewardship:  What Catholics Believe about the Environment, (2012) and Christian Bioethics; A Guide for the Perplexed, (2008). David Tuohy SJ, an educationalist and member of the Irish Province, is author of Denominational Education and Politics:  Ireland in the European Context (2013). He was project director of Le Chéile, a trust set up by twelve religious congregations for their schools. He has published widely in the area of teacher and leader development. Terrance Walsh SJ was a lecturer in Philosophy, Heythrop College, and is currently professor of Philosophy at Gregorian University Rome.

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Foreword The contributors to this volume offer perspectives on theology and philosophy from a distinctive intellectual tradition. Their concerns and interests derive from the earliest phase of ‘modernity’ and continue to be crucially relevant to the academy in the present day. Since its foundation by St Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus has had a startling and unique spiritual, cultural and intellectual influence. Through their distinctive educational system, Jesuits sought to order learning humanistically, ‘for the greater glory of God’. Their collective achievement in natural science, political thought, music, theatre and architecture is without parallel. In short, the Jesuit tradition has shaped our understanding of what it is to be modern. Central to the Jesuit synthesis is the conviction that theology and philosophy  –​the quest for divine truth and the love of human wisdom  –​can and should be oriented towards one another in a way that is mutually enriching and empowering. The scholars represented in this volume are associated with Heythrop College, a Jesuit academic foundation which dates its original foundation to 1614, though since 1970 it has found a home in the University of London. The 400th anniversary of the college in 2014 has provided an opportunity to celebrate this heritage and to think about how it is to be handed on into the future. Specifically, we are asking how the ‘Jesuit genius’ may still have something to say to the contemporary academy and to the world of today. These essays seek to explore and celebrate the continued relevance of this Jesuit tradition. They demonstrate how the integrating vision of the earliest Jesuits –​thinking at the cusp of medieval and early modern Europe –​finds new expression in the ‘postmodern’ conversations of today:  dialogue with cultures of belief and unbelief, with the great faith traditions, and with the world of the poor and the excluded. The world of today is in the grip of what is variously described as ‘late’, ‘accelerated’, ‘hyper-​’ or ‘post-​’ modernity, depending on taste. It is not surprising, therefore, that exploring the Jesuit tradition across 400 years unveils both contrasts and continuities. What has been distilled from that tradition

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is a resource: for Christian faith’s dialogue with culture, with the other world faiths, and with the world of the poor and excluded. Here we have a unique and potent combination:  a deeply held conviction about divinely revealed truth nevertheless sits alongside an openness to others in their own, often contrasting search for truth and meaning. Such a synthesis is vulnerable, however, in Western academia, where market forces threaten the viability of departments of philosophy and theology, and the humanities more generally. This publication awakens us to what is at stake in the debate about the humanities: a precarious wisdom which will be lost if market forces have their way. New, more inclusive configurations of theology and philosophy are essential, if reductionist ideologies of education in the West are to be successfully challenged. This volume includes contributions to this ‘new renaissance’ on topics such as faith and spirituality, science and reason, secularism, naturalism, humanism and Jesuit education. Its subtitle comes from the Jesuit mission statement: ‘Ours is a service of faith and of the radical implications of faith in a world where it is becoming easier to settle for something less than faith and less than justice. We recognize, along with many of our contemporaries, that without faith, without the eye of love, the human world seems too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist’.1 Each of the thirteen essays centres around the essential dimensions of the Jesuit mission: the service of gospel faith, the engagement with culture, the encounter with other religions and the promotion of justice. They explore sources and narratives. Historical analyses of Ignatian sources (Edward Howells and Gemma Simmonds, Chapters  1 and 2) are a prelude to other studies on texts and practices. David Tuohy (Chapter 3) writes on compassion and competence as key characteristics of the Jesuit contribution to learning. In the following five chapters Louis Caruana, Terrance Walsh, Fiona Ellis, Anthony Carroll and James Murphy discuss the challenge to dominant perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and theology. The final five essays (by Anthony O’Mahony, Patrick Riordan, Stephen Law, Agneta Sutton and Nicholas Austin) engage with contemporary issues in the sphere of interreligious dialogue, bioethics, citizenship and human rights. General Congregation 34, Decree 2: https://​w ww.gonzaga.edu/​about/​Mission/​docs/​GC34Decree2. pdf., p.34 (accessed 1 December 2016).

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It would seem to be the case that the Jesuit ‘genius’ is often appreciated more readily by outsiders than by Jesuits themselves. In a wonderful passage in Johann Goethe’s Italian Journey, the poet gives an account of a visit to the Jesuit College at Regensburg, where he was clearly impressed by the performance of the students’ annual play: ‘Their performance reminded me once again of the worldly wisdom of the Jesuits. They rejected nothing which might produce an effect, and they knew how to use it with love and care. Their wisdom was no coldly impersonal calculation; they did everything with a gusto, a sympathy and personal pleasure in the doing, such as living itself gives.’ Goethe notes a distinctive and curious combination of knowing artifice –​one might even say ‘manipulation’ –​alongside an unfeigned, participative delight in the performance. Here is the Jesuits’ ‘worldly wisdom’, self-​conscious in its application but distilled nonetheless from ‘living itself’, or one might say, ‘the usage of living’ or Gebrauch des Lebens.2 Something of the same spirit is picked up by Rowan Williams in the ­preface to this volume when he praises the Jesuit instinct for educating, side-​by-​side, those training for the priesthood and those who had no such aspiration. God’s wisdom and love flow, as it were, de arriba, from above soaking the entire world, with the climatic moment being the ecstasy of union with God in the Contemplation for Attaining Love, the concluding prayer of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. Here once again, the Jesuit act of trust, which allows the Jesuit to function at all, is required: ‘without the eye of love, the human world seems too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist’. The editors would like to thank Fr Peter Brook SJ for the design of the cover and Ms Emily Ross for her assistance with editing this volume. The editors

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. and intro. W.  H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, in Selected Works, ed. Nicholas Boyle (New  York, London and Toronto:  Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 390.

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Preface1 Dr Rowan Williams Magdalene College, Cambridge There are three fundamental and distinctive elements in the Jesuit approach to education. Reading the Constitutions, the first aspect that strikes me is how education for the ‘model Jesuit’ is seen as a very simple and very natural extension of the process of formation. The life of the community which shapes brothers in a certain way towards a certain end is what remains at the heart and the foundation of any enterprise that goes beyond the life of the Society of Jesus as such. As editors and translators have pointed out, the word ‘scholaris’ is used in the Constitutions both for Jesuit scholastics and for students in general; and the translator for the Classics of Western Spirituality edition2 clearly feels the need to make some distinctions in the translation which, while helpful, rather obscures the fact that there is something of a real continuity being taken for granted which is lost if you use two different words; and so that is the first principle which I think is worth reflecting on. Education, and not least university education, is the extension of a process of formation in the community; it naturally spills over from that process of learning to be in community. But it is this basic principle which I think makes sense of a second fundamental element in the Jesuit approach from the start. There is a great deal of emphasis from those early days of the Society on the provision of education without expense or with minimal expense to those ‘external’ to the community who are being educated. When colleges are set up, as Ignatius himself says in his letter to Antonio de Araoz, ‘parents are relieved of the expense of having teachers to instruct their children in letters This is an edited version of a presentation ‘Liberal Education: The Jesuit Response to a Theological Imperative’ by Dr Rowan Williams, delivered at a conference ‘For the Greater Glory of God and the More Universal Good’:  A  Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Foundation of Heythrop College and of the Jesuit Educational Tradition’ on 20 June 2014, at Senate House, University of London. Editors are grateful to Dr Williams for his permission to include this text in the present volume. 2 Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss SJ (New York/​ Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1991); subsequent references are to this edition. 1

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and virtue’ and thus ‘fulfil their duty in conscience regarding their children’s formation’. ‘Persons who would have difficulty finding even for pay teachers to whom they could entrust their children, will find them in these colleges with complete security.’3 Thus the provision of education is, you might say, not a commodity but a ministry. Hence regarding it as a profit-​making enterprise cannot be anywhere near the heart of what it is about; it is not even a ‘contracted’ service, it is part of the evangelical mission of the community to extend its own reflection and its own development freely and without charge to others. A third fundamental element, significant but not perhaps so theologically basic as what we have just been talking about, is a keen sense of the need to balance a set of universal standards and goals with an awareness of local priorities as affecting the detail of practice. Ignatius himself observes (it may seem obvious but it still needs saying) that what you eat, what you wear and when you get up are going to look rather different in different climates and environments; the timetable of the day, even the way in which you structure a particular course of study, is going to depend on quite a lot of factors which are local and not universal and uniform, so that in addition to being a ministry, a process of formation, it is a process of formation grounded in a constant recovery of deep attention to the particulars of the social and temporal situation. Formation, ministry, attention –​these are arguably the three abidingly significant principles in setting Ignatius’s vision –​I prefer not to say ‘philosophy’ –​of education. Why not ‘philosophy’ of education? Because I believe Ignatius has a theology of educating, and that’s a little different, in ways that I hope may become clear in the rest of what I have to say. To go back for a moment to that first principle about formation, this rests on an assumption that the ultimate point of education is that we should be able to live as God purposes us to live, that we realize our ultimate end. Education is either about becoming what we are finally meant to be or it is about nothing; and this theological principle resonates throughout the Constitutions and throughout Ignatius’s letters on the subject. Our formation is formation in humanity, the three-​dimensional humanity which God has created in God’s own image. This of course means that whatever happens within the education of the community is material for the ultimate end. For example, relations Ignatius of Loyola, p. 365.

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between teacher and student and the character of those relations are not accidental or indifferent. Getting this right is an intrinsic part of educating, because what’s in view is formation in community towards an ultimate human end which is life in justice, in love, in community. Hence Ignatius’s attention to the way in which teachers and older brethren take responsibility for the spiritual maturity and discipline of others, not just to keep order but because that is a part of an intrinsic, integral picture of how a community grows and what it is for. This idea that relations between teacher and taught are intrinsic to the educational process is one which needs underlining, because it hasn’t always been taken for granted. And this, of course, leads me to suspect that the Jesuit institution as envisaged by Ignatius and the first generation of Jesuit educators is always going to be a ‘school of the Lord’s service’; very much like Benedict’s monastery, which is described in the Benedictine Rule in exactly those terms: a school of service because it is the nature of the mutual relationships which does the real educating and the real forming. So, the Jesuit educational institution is one in which shared responsibility and shared involvement in growth in humanity towards God’s purposes for humanity are at the centre of what is envisaged. But we can go a little further than that and pick up what is, by common consent, a very significant but slightly unexpected feature of what Ignatius and others have to say about education. The whole approach of the Constitutions and the letters takes it for granted that all kinds of study are ultimately part of what will fulfil our ultimate end. In other words, being a good engineer, lawyer or linguist can be part of fulfilling the image of God in you. It’s not just a natural skill, which is neither here nor there; it is part of exercising that dimension of the image of God which has to do with your intellect, your capacity to see clearly, to reason, to plan, to hope intelligently; and Ignatius is clear that both humane letters and the natural sciences are part of that. Studying these subjects with attention, with excellence, with focus and concentration is not an end in itself; but doing these things well is intrinsic to laying the ground for theology. This, of course, cuts two ways. On the one hand, all these rather diverse areas of human intellectual excellence are believed to have something to do with growth into an adult, intelligent, responsible participation in the divine life –​‘theology’ in its fullest sense. On the other hand, theology itself is shown to be involved inextricably with intellectual

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excellence; it cannot cut itself off from the whole process of human intellectual enquiry. The worst thing we can possibly do for either the academic disciplines in general or theology in particular would be to drive a wedge between these things so that they have nothing to do with each other. So we find in the Constitutions that ‘since the arts or natural sciences dispose the intellectual powers for theology, and are useful for the perfect understanding and use of it, and also by their own nature help toward the same ends, they should be treated with fitting diligence’.4 Once again the arts and the natural sciences give some e­ xercise –​not just five-​finger exercise either –​to a mind which is beginning to open itself up to theology, so that in a sense the very subject matter of humane letters and sciences has to do with laying the groundwork for theology. Put it in very simple terms, thinking theologically is not some isolated, sanitized, protected form of thinking; it is thinking, good thinking. And how do you learn good thinking? By good teaching about a whole variety of things. And the ‘risk’, Ignatius seems to imply, is that there is something about good thinking which, like it or not, sooner or later leaves the door open into theology. It has to do with living out what God expects from God’s human creatures. So, excellence in these various intellectual disciplines is not going to be an end in itself, but the ground for theology. Doing all these things superlatively well, with as much attention and diligence as humanly possible, becomes part of preparing the possibility of theology  –​which in turn of course, for Ignatius, is to do with preparing the ground for mission. So the task of the teacher in the Jesuit institution is twofold. As we have seen, it involves the nurture of common spiritual life but it also involves a kind of instruction that leaves open paths to the theological future. This is quite a challenge: it certainly doesn’t mean bolting on some theological extras to every single course, trying to be pious while you are doing your chemistry. Ignatius would have said –​if we can guess on the basis of some of his related remarks –​that being pious while doing your chemistry is one way of not doing good chemistry and that the proper way of exercising your piety is to be a good chemist. So it is not about an extra element added on, not about edifying remarks around the edges, but about penetrating to that level of depth, complexity and excitement in your intellectual activity Ignatius of Loyola, 12, n. 450, p. 299.

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which (whether you fully realize it or not) is exposing your mind to theology. It is understanding something about how extraordinary the intellectual life is –​and you never know just what might surprise you as providing raw material for the intellectual life. The contemporary atheist or agnostic scientist from central casting might well feel that this was a little unexpected, but I don’t think Ignatius would have felt disposed to apologize at all. It would be perfectly fair to say that the more your mind is accustomed to the richness and complexity that intellectual life delivers, the more you are –​know it or not, like it or not –​being disposed to something larger than simply that particular discipline. So we have a picture of the double task of the teacher –​nurture, formation, but also teaching the kind of depth, the kind of animating complexity, which will so excite the vision of what human, mental life and spiritual, imaginative life are about that something begins to open up which is more than just any one of the disciplines that are addressed in the education programme. To put it like that does allow us to say that even in the dramatically different environment of the twenty-​first century, some of these principles are still readily understandable. Any institution these days, whether it calls itself Christian or not, Jesuit or not, is going to be unimaginably more diverse than any group that Ignatius could have imagined; and yet that dual task of the teacher, formation in community and in responsibility combined with commitment to open-​ended and deep intellectual endeavour, this remains a vision and an ideal that is not in the least dated. We might pick up a remark that Ignatius makes in that same letter to Antonio de Araoz which I quoted earlier, when he speaks of how the foundation of a Jesuit college will provide lots of candidates for important public jobs. ‘From among those who are at present merely students, in time some will emerge to play diverse roles –​some to preach and carry on the care of souls, others to the government of the land and the administration of justice, and others to other responsible occupations. In short, since the children of today become the adults of tomorrow, their good formation in life and learning will benefit many others.’5 The implication of this, which I think is well worth reflecting on, is that a future in public life of some kind, teaching, government and so on, actually requires these foundations of intellectual depth; Ignatius of Loyola, p. 365

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it is not a disadvantage for a judge or a teacher or a politician to have an intellectual hinterland. On the contrary, it is a massive disadvantage not to have an intellectual hinterland. We may draw the moral as we wish for our own context, but the point is that for these public ministries and public services, Ignatius simply assumes that it is good to be able to think. And ultimately this means that the lawyer, the politician, the teacher and those who exercise other responsible positions have to have some element in their work, some element in their awareness, relating to their ‘last end’, to that final horizon that has to do with what it is like to be human in the presence and the purpose of God. No one can, ultimately, do a satisfactory job as teacher, politician or lawyer without some awareness of what human beings are for. This cluster of ideas, very deeply grounded in these remarks of Ignatius, surely offer one of the most substantial challenges which the Ignatian vision can pose to both education and politics today. It’s intriguing that in recent years we have seen more and more books about our social crises and our international tangles rather wistfully, saying that what we haven’t got is a credible and coherent doctrine of what is good for human beings as such and that without that we will constantly be condemned to a kind of hamster-​wheel-​like circularity –​short-​term problem-​solving without any robust awareness of what a good human life looks like. That’s expressed most clearly in the excellent recent book by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? which attempts to retrieve the Aristotelian sense of the good life as key to understanding the financial and social crises we currently face.6 In short, the active and responsible citizen, perhaps most visible in law or government or teaching but far more widely spread, needs a vision of what humanity is for; and if that vision is somewhere in the background, then the connection between intellectual life, socially committed engagements and religious faith becomes a lot easier to see and defend. When that connection fractures, it’s not entirely surprising if various kinds of nonsense come to prevail, in Church and society alike (not to mention the academy). As we saw earlier, education in Ignatius’s view is not a commodity, not even a contract, it is the overflow, the extension, of the process of formation. The Ignatian college is, before anything else, a cell of the body of Christ, and E. Skidelsky and R. Skidelsky, How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life (London: Penguin Books, 2013).

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like all cells of the body of Christ it educates and enlarges by participation, not just by instruction at a distance. You cannot really do Ignatian education primarily online (with due acknowledgement to the immense and transforming importance of online access and outreach –​but it needs relation-​building, however sophisticated its techniques). As I  have said already, education by participation doesn’t mean that the university or college as a cell of the body of Christ is a place of ubiquitous and obtrusive piety. Ignatius is nothing if not realistic about the limited time the devotional exercises should take up in the life of the student (though I should perhaps add that what he thinks is a limited time for devotional exercise would be for most of us quite generous). The point he is making is that, as we saw earlier, the theological or spiritual dimension is not an extra or a competitor; doing the intellectual work properly is intrinsic to the devotional life. Concentrate on what you now have to do, that is study or teach, and do so within the framework of an intentional community whose entire vision, whose global vision, you might say, is bound up with the quality of a common life in which you are learning to be a human being with your ultimate end in view. It was not a Jesuit but a Benedictine headmaster who famously said in response to a question in the mid-​twentieth century about the purpose of his school that he intended to teach his boys to die. Perhaps that’s putting it rather more starkly than some of the early Jesuit material does; yet there is something in that which is worth saying. The community’s intention is to create the likeness of Christ, to create sacrificial service; it is to explode and remove from the scene all models of commodification and contract in the process of sharing that human good which is education. And this, I believe, is the crucial point in what this tradition has to say to us at the moment. What this entire model of education proposes is something which requires us to resist diverse sorts of narrowing of the educational enterprise, the narrowing which doesn’t allow us to think of what is humanly good, the narrowing which doesn’t allow us to think of the depth at which the intellect becomes excited and engaged, the narrowing which removes the educational process from the creative interaction, the necessary friction if you like, of human relationship. And we all know how easy it is in the short-​term, financially anxious social climate we inhabit to assume that education should be more like these narrowed versions than the Ignatian model. Appropriating and making contemporary this Ignatian

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picture is something which potentially has enormous critical edge in the kind of society we live in. It has to do really with what we think the intellectual life is, how seriously we think of ourselves, how we grasp our own humanity as an intellectual enterprise. The word ‘intellectual’ terrifies a lot of people, or perhaps provokes a mockery to conceal terror. Paul Johnson some years ago wrote a book called Intellectuals which was mostly about misbehaviour in the bedrooms of famous and clever people.7 Not difficult; but we need to do a little bit better than that. The intellect, the human capacity to welcome the other intelligently into one’s own identity and be welcomed in and by the other, the emptying and fulfilling, which is historically part of how theologians see the life of intellect –​this is simply an aspect of our humanity, not a luxury, not an eccentricity; and if we take seriously this kind of vision, part of the task we take away from a celebration like this is the task of rehabilitating the intellectual. Ignatius encourages us to do this by suggesting that the more excited you get about the various disciplines in the life of the mind, the more open the life of your mind is likely to be to its Maker; which means that, whatever else is said about intellectual or academic study, it is not trivial, not marginal, but part of the enterprise of spiritual maturation and discipleship. Going back to another very basic principle, this is not for Ignatius something for a few clerical specialists. The very notion of the life of a Jesuit college, as it were, overflowing to draw others in, external students, lay and clerical, reminds us that part of the vision that permeates Ignatius’s writings is of an educated and well-​equipped laity. He has some very interesting things to say in his letter to Pelletier about how much it matters that lay people are able to give a reason for their faith and argue effectively with sceptics, heretics and enemies of the faith.8 The use of the intellect is, once again, seen as intrinsic to faithfulness and to the effective following of Christ; and an educated laity is essential for the well-​being of the Church. One can perhaps overdo the novelty of this principle in the sixteenth century: there had been educated laity for a millennium and a half in the Christian Church. In the Eastern Christian world, there had never been the kind of break there was in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire in the preparation and education of professional lay people in public office. But what Ignatius does is to put this firmly and explicitly Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). See Ignatius of Loyola, pp. 356–​61.

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at the foundation of his theology of educating. Christian people need to be stretched, they need to be excited and engaged about their thinking capacity, and this is for the good of the Church and for the good of the society they serve: for the good of the Church, because it means that people will not dumbly fail to respond to the challenges of faith that will arise; for the good of the society they serve because it provides the intellectual hinterland which we thought about earlier on. So these reflections are designed to try and draw out just a little how the Ignatian vision of education, not least university education, has its roots in a basic theological question: how do we live in the light of our ultimate end? How do we become more deeply human in the ways God wants us to be and has made us capable of being? How also do we join up the different bits of our mental, spiritual, imaginative lives? How do we see the excitement and the fulfilment of all these areas of our humanity feeding into the great stream of theological encounter with God? Ignatius believed that every aspect of the ministry of the Society of Jesus had to do, sooner or later, with realizing the image of God in human beings and this perhaps is what holds together every single policy, every single initiative, of the Society that he founded. What is fresh and challenging from our perspective is to see how this plays itself out in thinking about the life of the mind, the discipleship of the mind, in a way which opens up critical questions for Church and society and allows us to rethink what it is that we need in public figures and responsible citizens, to see the need for ‘hinterland’ in such persons. How do we vivify all this with the same scope of critical challenge for society today? The anniversary that we have been celebrating in the life of Heythrop College reminds us that this particular vision of education has been around for quite a long time and has been served and embodied faithfully and creatively in Heythrop by any number of hugely distinguished scholars, thinkers, theologians, writers. We know, in other words, that this can be done, that it has what we are now encouraged to call sustainability built into it. We know this in the light of my third initial principle: this is an institution capable of flexibility, rethinking itself, enlarging itself, in exactly the ways that Ignatius wanted to see in diverse contexts. And in Heythrop’s most recent developments, we have seen abundantly how the notion of an overflow of formation has lain behind so many new styles and new possibilities of learning. Heythrop remains deeply committed to an educated laity

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for the sake of the well-​being of the Church (and I would add in brackets, unsurprisingly, the churches). Heythrop remains deeply committed to the notion that enlarging the capacity of lay people enlarges the well-​being of the society you are in. It is taken for granted as Ignatius takes it for granted that the laity are not passive partners in the work of the body of Christ or consumers of a theology cooked in somewhat remote kitchens by specialists who don’t otherwise talk to them. If institutions of theological and general education are able to nourish this kind of deep attention, this quality of relationship and of interaction between disciplines and between persons, then I  think that the anniversary we celebrate today represents some very good news for the Church and the society we are in. I believe that those who have joined together to affirm that celebration in these last couple of days believe this is indeed what Heythrop has done and is doing, and by the grace of God will do. And in conclusion, it means that our challenge is to become constantly and repeatedly, a learning Church, a Church which is committed always to being questioned –​not just questioning but being questioned by that which calls it into being. And if indeed we are a learning Church, perhaps we may make a different kind of contribution to being a learning society, that is, a society which is constantly open to being questioned, not confident that the fashion of the day is the right answer, growing together in understanding of a humanity which –​if it is indeed in the image of the invisible God –​is as properly inexhaustible and exhilarating as God himself. That is the theological vision by which Heythrop is animated; long may it continue.

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An Ignatian Approach to Reading the Spiritual Classics Edward Howells

Since Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, published in English in 1995,1 there has been growing interest in the notion of the ‘spiritual exercise’ as a way to understand pre-​modern philosophical texts. Hadot suggests that these texts should be read primarily as teaching not ‘dogma’ or ‘theses’ but ‘ways’ or ‘exercises’, by means of which the reader is transformed, ethically and spiritually.2 In his book, After Augustine: the Meditative Reader and the Text, Brian Stock traces this approach through Augustine and texts of the medieval period. He says, ‘it would be fair to say that Christian thinkers in late antiquity and the Middle Ages shared the search for wisdom with the ancients. They cultivated the interior life. They engaged in a variety of spiritual exercises that emphasized self-​control and meditation’.3 Many of the texts that we call ‘spiritual classics’ today are in this category. Implicitly or explicitly, they contain a demand to engage actively in certain tasks for their appropriation, towards personal transformation. To think of these texts in terms of ‘spiritual exercises’ is a useful way to pinpoint this element of active engagement. In this chapter, I would like to propose a way of approaching the reading of such texts using Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as a model. Hadot mentions Ignatius’s Exercises, regarding them as just one example of the approach that he finds typical of ancient philosophy.4 My initial suggestion is that the common name by which we refer to such texts today is as Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995). 2 Arnold I. Davidson, ‘Introduction’, in Hadot, p. 18, citing an earlier (1960) article by Hadot. 3 Brian Stock, After Augustine: the Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 14. 4 Hadot, 126–​7. 1

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‘spiritual classics’.5 I do not intend to discuss how to define a ‘classic’ text, though I am informed by David Tracy’s treatment;6 and the question of precisely which texts count as spiritual classics, and which do not, I  am also putting to one side. My focus, rather, is on how the notion of spiritual exercises can be expanded to guide the reading of the texts that we call spiritual classics today, and with what benefits. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises provides unusual detail concerning its own self-​appropriation, that is, detail about what a spiritual exercise is and how it works. What would it mean to apply Ignatius’s notion of spiritual exercises to the task of reading and understanding spiritual classic texts in general? This is not to deny that there are significant differences of teaching among the various spiritual classics: I am not seeking to impose a single Ignatian model of spirituality on other, quite disparate spiritual teachings. Rather, I am concerned with what goes on in the approach to such teachings, in how they are engaged and appropriated in the first place. The test of the approach will be whether it can be shown to clarify and deepen the reading of spiritual classic texts, rather than distorting them.7 Among the texts published as spiritual classics today, Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises is unusual, in spelling out what it means to read actively, putting personal appropriation at the centre. You cannot read the Spiritual Exercises without realizing that what you do as a reader is vital to the interpretation. The text is addressed to spiritual directors, for use with individuals who wish to follow the exercises, in the context of a retreat. The exercitant’s role in appropriating and assimilating the material of the Spiritual Exercises is central. One could think of the analogy of a musical score. The only purpose of the score is for playing. The text is wholly directed towards performance. As a set of notes and directions on the page, it cannot be mistaken for the experience The ‘Classics of Western Spirituality’ series, published by Paulist Press (Mahwah, New York), is a good example. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination:  Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (London: SCM Press, 1981), ­chapter 3, ‘The Classic’, pp. 99–​153. 7 I am not the first to ask this kind of a question. David Lonsdale and Michael Paul Gallagher, for instance, have applied the notion of Ignatian discernment, in different ways, to the question of how to read texts, or in Gallagher’s case, cinema (David Lonsdale, ‘“TOLLE, LEGE”: Reading and Discernment as a Source of Personal Transformation’, in Sources of Transformation: Revitalising Christian Spirituality (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 41–​56; Michael Paul Gallagher, ‘Teologia, Arte, Discernimento e Cinema’, La Civilità Cattolica no.2 (1995): 391). Here, however, I am concerned not so much with Ignatian discernment per se as with the manner in which a reader engages in reading, regarding the role of personal appropriation in the process of interpretation. 5

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of playing and hearing the music which results. In contrast, in the case of most spiritual classics, the text is not just a ‘score’ in this way, but also offers examples of how the music is to be played and what it sounds like, by means of creative constructions of experience, in images, visions, autobiographical accounts and so on. For instance, in Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine recounts the experience that he had at Ostia with his mother: ‘While we spoke of Wisdom . . . for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then, with a sigh, leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we returned to the sound of our speech.’8 Readers might imagine what it would be like to experience something similar for themselves, but no kind of action or self-​ appropriation is required, and a reader today would not assume that there was anything here to be practised, only a story about someone else to be understood. But what would happen if one approached the text more like Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises –​as a text which requires active appropriation, for personal transformation?9 My suggestion is that Augustine and other spiritual classics can be fruitfully read in this way, and that the interpretation is improved by doing so.10 The reason for seeking a reading in terms of spiritual exercises is not just to bring readers today closer to the attitude of the original readers, as suggested by Hadot and Stock. It is to articulate something that is otherwise missed, which is especially true of the theological meaning of such texts. To engage in this manner directly serves an understanding of the theology. For instance, a common spiritual movement in these texts is from an external type of imitation of Christ to one approximating more closely to the intimate personal sharing of the Father with the Son. Especially late medieval Christian spiritual texts were concerned with this movement ‘into the Trinity’, to a personal union which puts the reader in the place of the Son in relation to the Father, to Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-​Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), IX, 10, p. 197. Ignatius’s Exercises is part of the development of a ‘manualist’ tradition in the late medieval period, where the tasks of the spiritual life were set out in the form of a manual, rather than in the more extended literary form found in earlier texts, for instance, Augustine’s Confessions or Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs. Ironically, this has the effect of separating the notion of spiritual ‘exercises’ from other notions of spirituality, putting a divide between theory and practice, which is precisely what Ignatius’s text seeks to avoid, and what Hadot’s adoption of the term is designed to redress. 10 This approach is supported by a number of studies emphasizing the ‘performative’ character of these texts, for example, on the mystical traditions: Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–​13. 8 9

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attain the goal of ‘union with God’.11 Then, in union with God, the individual is expected to self-​implicate further, to the extent of feeling the intimacy of God’s immediate presence personally, and to pursue this movement out into the world, in virtuous action. Thus, the theology of participation is a practical one, involving the reader actively. If the text is read merely as an impersonal address, these movements cannot be adequately detected.12 Academic readers might object that, in universities, we are not concerned with the reader’s spiritual growth and can only observe these spiritual movements indirectly. That is true, but it is possible to recognize that the tasks of interpretation are strongly affected by the call for personal appropriation, when this is understood as central to the text. Further, to engage with a text in personal terms need not be regarded as contrary to critical interpretation. For these texts, being personally engaged helps to reveal structures of transformation that are invisible to a less involved reader, to which academic analysis and criticism can also be fruitfully directed.13 How did Ignatius understand the notion of the spiritual exercise? At the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, he says that he includes all the activities of ‘examining one’s conscience, of meditating, contemplating, praying vocally or mentally’ that are aimed at ‘preparing and disposing one’s soul to rid herself of all disordered attachments, so that once rid of them one might seek and find the divine will in regard to the disposition of one’s life for the good of one’s soul’.14 In Western Christianity, this was a development of Augustine’s anthropological treatment of the Trinity in his De Trinitate, in which mystical writers, especially in the late medieval period, extended Augustine’s notion of the soul’s capacity to grow in awareness of the divine life within the Trinity, as a journey of deepening indwelling of the Trinity, in personal terms: for instance, in William of St Thierry, and in visionary form in Beguine writers such as Hadewijch, and in Mechthild of Magdeburg, also in Meister Eckhart, Ruusbroec, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. 12 A point emerges in recent discussion of the nature of Augustine’s On the Trinity, particularly the question of the relationship between the Books 1–​7, which treat doctrine in impersonal terms, and the personal, inner investigation of the Trinity in anthropological terms in Books 8–​15. http://​w ww.newadvent.org/​fathers/​1301.htm. Commentators suggest Books 8–​15 should be read as spiritual exercises which deepen the doctrinal points expounded in Books 1–​7 by implicating the reader personally (e.g. Mark A. McIntosh, Divine Teaching:  An Introduction to Christian Theology [Oxford:  Blackwell, 2008], p.  140; Matthew Levering, ‘Friendship and Trinitarian Theology:  Response to Karen Kilby’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 [2007]: 39–​54; Edward Howells, ‘Appropriating the Divine Presence: Reading Augustine’s On the Trinity as a Transformative Text’, Spiritus 11 [2011]: 201–​223). 13 Edward Howells, ‘Personal Experience and Critical Distance in the Interpretation of Spiritual Texts: Do They Conflict?’ The Way 53, 4 (2014): 7–​16. 14 Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, in Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, ed. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 1, p. 283 (hereafter abbreviated as ‘Exx.’). 11

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Negatively, the goal of the exercises is to remove ‘disordered attachments’ which stand in the way of a correct perception of God’s will. Positively, they are to find ‘the divine will in regard to the disposition of one’s life’, which means the individual’s part in the divine will, which is also the path that is understood as for the greatest ‘good of one’s soul’. In terms of the content of the exercises, Ignatius shows a preference for imaginative contemplation. The individual is asked to contemplate scenes mostly from the gospels. Each exercise has a standard form, beginning with a short preparatory prayer and then what Ignatius calls the ‘composition’ of the scene or place in which the action in scripture takes place. This involves imagining not just the scene but one’s own response it. For instance, for the scene of the Nativity, Ignatius suggests the following: ‘making myself into a poor and unworthy little servant, I watch them [the figures in the scene], and contemplate them, and serve them in their needs as if I  were present, with all possible submission and reverence; and afterwards I  reflect within myself to derive some profit’.15 The final phrase, ‘to reflect and derive profit’ is frequently repeated and entails seeking what Ignatius calls ‘not so much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but rather the intimate feeling and relishing of things’.16 Not just discursive thought but an affective response should be made. At this point, Ignatius says that I should ‘ask for what I want’ in relation to God, that is, articulating this personal movement of desire as my own. This leads to the final stage of the contemplation, the colloquy, which is a direct conversation with Jesus (or his mother Mary, or God the Father or all three in turn) where, as Ignatius says, one can speak ‘as one friend speaks with another, or a servant with a master, at times asking for some favour, at other times accusing oneself of something badly done, or telling the other about one’s concerns and asking for advice about them’.17 The high point of the contemplation, therefore, is a two-​way, direct address between God and the soul, and the foregoing steps are set up deliberately with this goal in mind.18 The contemplation ends with a short prayer, usually the Our Father. Joseph Veale points out that each individual exercise of imaginative contemplation is a microcosm of the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises as a Exx., 114, p. 306. Exx., 2, p. 283. Exx., 54, p. 296. 18 Exx., 15. 15 16

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whole.19 In each exercise the narrative of scripture (or sometimes a narrative based on doctrine, such as the sending of the incarnation) is used to provoke the individual’s response. In the same way, the whole of the Exercises is divided into four weeks which follow the narrative of salvation history, from the sending of the incarnation to Jesus’s resurrection. Personal reflection on sin is the focus of Week 1, followed by Jesus’s ministry in Week 2, his passion and death in Week 3 and finally resurrection in Week 4.20 The process of individual contemplations is designed to enable the larger process of reading individual experience and circumstances into the narrative of God’s dealings with humanity, from incarnation to resurrection.21 On the one hand, the use of the imagination encourages a creative insertion of personal circumstances, putting the individual reader at the heart of the process, while on the other hand, the repeated reference to the divine narrative, greater than the individual, keeps the focus on the divine initiative, to which the individual responds. Two narratives are being brought together: an external narrative of God’s dealings with humanity and an internal narrative of imaginative and affective response designed to situate the individual at the heart of the process, for the sake of personal transformation. Ignatius’s anthropology allows for a positive correlation between these two narratives:  the divine initiative is capable of being identified with my own personal desire, provided careful attention is given to the task of discernment. This means that theological meaning can be construed in terms of the task of personal appropriation: how I understand the divine narrative is the meaning of that narrative in my case. To make the story of scripture into my own story is not to manipulate it away from its ‘original meaning’ or to be seen as a step which is inferior to an impersonal investigation of the meaning, but is simply a deeper reading of the same meaning. The counterbalance to this positive assessment of human capacities and of the process of personal appropriation, which takes account of failure and sin, is to be found in Ignatius’s emphasis on the notion of spiritual poverty. Again, this is introduced within the exercises, in terms of personal appropriation. One attains spiritual poverty by Joseph Veale, ‘The Dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises’, The Way Supplement 52 (1985):  3–​18 (p. 8). 20 Exx., 4. 21 Veale, p. 18; Gilles Cusson, Biblical Theology and the Spiritual Exercises (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1988), p. 42. 19

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desiring a state of ‘indifference’ or detachment in relation to the divine will,22 by focussing on Jesus’s poverty (in the contemplations) at key points in his life, such as in his nativity23 and supremely in the Passion,24 and by asking to share in his poverty as the means to serve him best.25 Spiritual poverty allows a correct discernment of the divine will, which avoids pride and deception. In typically late medieval terms, this poverty is also the fulcrum of the love of God, as a complete self-​gift which is shared mutually between the individual and Christ, on the kenotic model. It is the culmination of the Exercises, called the ‘contemplation to attain love’.26 At this shared point of total self-​gift, individual human freedom and divine freedom meet, united within a self that is shared with Christ. From this brief outline of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, it is possible to extract some principles for interpretation which bring out the tasks required for personal appropriation. I have drawn five points from the Exercises, which aim both to be true to the dynamic of the Exercises and to be phrased in sufficiently general terms also to be applicable to non-​Ignatian spiritual texts. An assessment of the value of these points for reading other spiritual classic texts will follow. The first principle is to locate the reader within the bounds of the text, that is, to make clear that the task of interpretation will involve the reader actively, in a personal appropriation. Ignatius begins the Exercises with several annotations to this effect. He describes the central activity as one of conversation between the creature and the creator, with the individual exercises and the director only there to facilitate this engagement.27 The director’s role is to tailor the progress of contemplations according to the individual’s requirements, with this primary emphasis in mind.28 The weeks are to be taken one at time, saying nothing about what lies ahead, so that the individual’s ongoing personal appropriation remains in focus.29 In the imaginative contemplations, the emphasis, as we have seen, is on quickly reaching a moment where the elements of the text furnish a direct address between the reader and God. Exx., 23. Exx., 116. Exx., 195–​7. 25 Exx., 144, 157, 167. 26 Exx., 230–​7, esp. 231, 234. 27 Exx., 15. 28 Exx., 2, 6, 8–​10, 17–​19. 29 Exx., 11. 22 23

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Ignatius asks the exercitant to address ‘my Lord’, ‘what I want’, ‘what I want to say’ to my Lord, and to enter into free conversation with God, as the means to progress.30 The reader cannot merely observe, but must at least imagine what would happen if one engaged actively in the way that Ignatius suggests. Second, the aim of the reading is to join the reader’s personal narrative to the master narrative. The way that Ignatius’s text is set up continually works at the interplay between the two narratives, my personal narrative and the mission of Christ. The imaginative contemplations of scripture, the progress of the Exercises from incarnation to resurrection and the additional help of the director, keep both elements in play. It is not the case that spiritual exercises entail only what is on the side of the exercitant, for instance, by providing devotional techniques. The task is a theological one, of bringing the divine narrative and the reader’s experience together. So the ‘theology of the Exercises’ is not something different from the practice of the exercises themselves:  the exercises are theological. To understand the Exercises is to recognize not just what the practical tasks are that they ask the individual to do, but how these tasks work to join the reader to a larger theological process. Third, the reading aims to develop a skill in the reader. In the case of the Exercises, the skill is of learning to see and act on an immediate knowledge of God’s presence, so that the resulting action is appropriately matched to both the circumstances and the individual’s talents. Two skills can be identified: first, among the various desires and thoughts that an individual commonly experiences, to sift those in keeping with God’s voice or presence reliably from those against; and second, to follow this movement into effective individual action, among a number of different possible actions. Ignatius builds this process towards what is called the ‘Election’ in the middle of the Exercises, which is a major life choice such as a vocation or a marriage.31 But he carefully resists any statement of preference for this or that outcome or decision: the burden is kept on the individual’s own process of discernment.32 This is where spiritual poverty is most applicable, because it opens the reader to a horizon beyond any one course of action, by remaining detached in relation to any particular outcome.33 The ‘discernment of spirits’, that is, In many places throughout the text, see the directions for the various individual contemplations. Exx., 169–​89. Exx., 15. 33 Exx., 149–​57 (meditation on the three classes of persons). 30 31

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discerning the will of God from that of opposing forces, is the main skill to be learned from the Exercises, and not just for the Election, but for all spiritual progress. In terms of the interpretation of the text, this means that the reader should not look primarily for a message or teaching of an impersonal kind, but for something more akin to a skill that can be learned and for an understanding of how this skill is to be employed in the spiritual life and towards what personal goal. Fourth, following from the first three points, the text is to be understood in terms of a ‘movement’ or ‘dynamic’, rather than in static terms.34 Readers generally try to understand theological texts in terms of their building blocks: the main concepts, the theory that lies behind the text or the experience, perhaps in terms of the author’s biography, that it is trying to express. But here, the text demands to be understood in terms of how it moves the reader from a to b, and in how it sets up this movement and sustains it from beginning to end. That is to say, the text is about the reader’s transformation, to which other elements are secondary. Ignatius begins by asking the exercitant to find a place of liberty where their spiritual movements can be observed freely rather than while experiencing demands which push them in a certain direction.35 This is the prelude to seeking a divine movement that is otherwise invisible. Then, in relation to the imaginative contemplations, the exercitant examines where the various internal movements lead, while retaining an ongoing ‘indifference’ or poverty as to the outcome, as already mentioned. The process of discernment channels this progress, until one learns the skill of discerning and following the divine will reliably. Without a notion of the dynamics of the text and how the text works in terms of its ongoing process in relation to the reader, the central point is missed. However much one knows about Ignatius and his thought, the Exercises must be understood dynamically, as a process moving the exercitant through a certain pattern of personal growth, while other aspects of the text, such as the understanding of contemplation and the human person, are secondary to this. Finally, the notion of the reader as ‘self ’ is strongly implicated. Ignatius begins the Exercises with the reader’s desire. Desire for what? The self of the Exercises is one who, at root, desires ‘the end for which they [humans] are ‘There was a time when people spoke of the logic of the Exercises . . . It is now more common to speak of their dynamic’ (Veale, p. 3). 35 Exx., 20–​3. 34

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created’, which is ‘to praise, reverence and serve God Our Lord, and by doing so to save his or her soul’.36 The self is theologically relational, and in an active sense it is orientated towards intimate relationship with and service of God as its deepest goal (however much this is hidden from view and obscured by sin). The movement of the text is from a self initially conceived of as autonomous and resistant to God to one dependent on and open to the divine initiative, a self that has internalized this relationship to the extent of understanding it as the self, not as an adjunct. If the reader is central to the interpretation of the text, as is now clear, it follows that the reader of this text must at least be able to imagine a self that depends for its own being on another, in a way that renders it radically incomplete. The self of the Exercises is one that needs the text for its own understanding, because the self is discovering itself by means of the text’s dynamic. The text, then, becomes part of the self in this reading, as a means for articulating and understanding the self. To what extent are these principles of interpretation of value in reading other spiritual classic texts? I shall assess their application by considering a single example, that of John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel. Though it comes from a similar Catholic context and a period of spiritual reform, I  choose this text because it is very different from Ignatius’s Exercises. It is more like Augustine’s Confessions, in that it can easily be read as a text about someone else’s experience, rather than in the manner of exercises for the reader’s transformation. Since the Ascent of Mount Carmel is based on John’s lyric poem ‘One dark night (En una noche oscura)’, and is written in the form of a commentary on the poem, there is no obvious guidance as to how the reader should appropriate it personally. Indeed, the experience of the ‘dark night of the soul’ is assumed by most readers to be a rarefied one, beyond their own experience, encountered only by advanced contemplatives. Alternatively, other readers are inclined to the opposite extreme of identifying their personal experience as a ‘dark night’ quite uncritically. In either case, the text is read as telling of a single type of experience that the reader either does or does not have, rather than requiring a deliberate and careful personal appropriation. To approach John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel in the manner of Ignatian spiritual exercises produces a very different result. I am not Exx., 23, p. 289.

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suggesting that the text should be read as an Ignatian imaginative contemplation. That would be to read it against the grain, and John rules out imaginative contemplation as a method at key points.37 There is a long history of Ignatian–​Carmelite exchanges and tensions to attest to the fact that, as spiritual teachings, the two texts do not say the same thing.38 But it is possible to look beyond these differences to the broader issue of how the reader is engaged and transformed by the text. To start with, instead of reading John’s lengthy descriptions of the dark nights as pointing to a single defining experience, the first Ignatian principle, of putting the reader at the heart of the interpretation, points to a different kind of engagement. The metaphors of the dark night can then be approached as a means by which John attracts the reader’s attention to wider questions of spiritual growth. The dark night experience has a performative function, in relation to the reader, of pointing to the phenomenon, within any process of spiritual growth, of moments of disorientation and sense of loss. In the Prologue to the Ascent of Mount Carmel, John says that his interest is in how one should respond to this inner darkness: his purpose is therapeutic and for the reader’s benefit.39 He goes on to link the dark night experience to Jesus’s cry of dereliction from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’: this, he says, was the point at which God brought about the union of the human race with Himself.40 John reasons that our own experiences of inner darkness are capable of linking us to the divine movement from death to resurrection, through this moment of shared suffering. Darkness, in other words, has a rhetorical or didactic John regards a disinclination to fix the imagination on particular objects and a resistance to the use of ‘discursive exercises’ as a vital point of transition in spiritual growth, indicating a move to a more immediate awareness of the presence of God (Ascent 2.13:4–​6). Later, in union, John allows that one can have this immediate awareness without rejecting the use of the imagination. But to begin with, he sees an antagonism, which would rule out the use of Ignatian imaginative contemplation at this point of spiritual growth. In contrast, Ignatius recommends the use of imaginative contemplation throughout the spiritual journey, regarding the desire to stop as a temptation to be resisted (Exx., 12), though he thinks room should be given for different personal needs and speeds of progress, as already noted, and he sees the contemplations as becoming more simple as one progresses to later stages; he also values other ways of praying in addition (Exx., 238–​60, on three ways of praying). 38 There is no single study, but the theme is well treated, in the French context, in Henri Brémond, A Literary History of Religious Thought in Frances from the Wars of Religion down to Our Own Times (London:  Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1928–​1936). Brémond’s own biases should be borne in mind:  see, for example, Dominique Salin, ‘Methods for Sancho Panza: Henri Brémond and the Interpretation of the Ignatian Exercises’, The Way Supplement 103 (2002): 66–​76. 39 Ascent, Prologue, esp. 4–​7. 40 Ascent 2.7:11. 37

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purpose, alerting readers to their own involvement with the Christ story. Beyond the experience itself, the aim is to open them to new possibilities for growth. In terms of the hermeneutic that I am suggesting here, the metaphor of darkness performs the second Ignatian principle, of joining the reader’s personal narrative to the master narrative of God’s journey from incarnation to resurrection. John’s narrative of dark nights first sets the reader in motion, by drawing attention to personal experiences of darkness on the spiritual journey, and then seeks to move the reader forward, by linking these experiences to participation in a greater journey of transformation on the pattern of Jesus’s death and resurrection. In the Prologue to the Ascent, John says that he wants the reader to learn how to follow spiritual movements that originate from the spirit of perfection and how to avoid those from the spirit of imperfection.41 This points to the third Ignatian principle, of developing a skill in the reader, in this case the skill of recognizing which spiritual movements lead to growth and which detract from it. After the initial identification of darkness with the reader’s experiences of loss and disorientation on the spiritual path, John gives darkness a more positive assessment. He suggests that it can foster detachment from attitudes of possessiveness in favour of a movement of self-​gift in relation to God.42 Its role here is similar to Ignatius’s emphasis on spiritual poverty: to allow the divine movement to be followed without resistance from opposing forces within the self. Then, in the final stage of union, darkness is identified with an unfettered gift of oneself to God, now understood as being met by the complete self-​gift of God in return, in spiritual marriage. At this point, darkness is paradoxically the same as light, as the ‘nothing’ of self-​gift is met by the ‘all’ of the divine being, shared mutually and equally.43 Seeing the role of darkness in John’s text in this way, in terms of the development of a skill in the reader of discerning the divine presence, has other benefits in the interpretation. For instance, it explains why there is no single definition of the dark night in the text. John applies the metaphor of darkness to every stage of the spiritual journey, including not just purgation but illumination and union Ascent Prologue, 7. Ascent 1.13–​14. 43 The state of union is not reached in the Ascent, but it is set out as the goal (2.5; 3.13:5) and described most fully in the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love (e.g. Canticle 22). On the reciprocal nature of union, see esp. Flame 3:79. 41

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too.44 Darkness, rather than being a single experience, is best understood as a marker by which readers can gauge their progress at successive stages of the journey. It is a transformative tool.45 Further, this approach is also consistent with the fourth and fifth Ignatian principles: darkness is a dynamic term for spurring growth, not a static concept with a single description; and in the end it is concerned with the reader’s transformation, moving the self to a point of mutuality in relation to God, in place of its initial isolation, giving it a transformed perspective on all things.46 The Ascent of Mount Carmel is not a manual like Ignatius’s Exercises, with clear directions for the reader as to how to engage the self by means of spiritual exercises. But if one reads it using the five principles that I have taken from Ignatius, the text not only makes good sense but otherwise obscure features become clear. The reading is deepened, providing a perspective around which the various elements of the text can be drawn together satisfactorily. In what sense is this an Ignatian reading? I have interpreted John of the Cross using principles from Ignatius’s Exercises which certainly affect the reading. But these principles only make explicit an understanding of the active role of the reader that is already implicit in John’s text. Far from distorting the meaning, the text is illuminated in a way that is consistent with its deepest currents. Ignatius’s Exercises serve to reveal assumptions that are already present, rather than importing Ignatian teachings. It might be objected that the Ignatian principles that I have outlined here are so general as to evacuate the term ‘Ignatian’. Could they equally have been taken from Pierre Hadot or any hermeneutical theory that puts the reader in an active and central role?47 The key difference is that an Ignatian approach

Ascent 1.2. Further evidence of this reading of darkness as developing a skill of discernment in the reader is to be found in the various tests that John provides for readers to gauge where they are in the process (Ascent 2.13; repeated in another form in the Dark Night, at Night 1.9); and in observing how he develops other key metaphors, like darkness, as means of negotiating difficult points of transition. The metaphor of the ‘wound of love’, for instance, which John takes from the Song of Songs, enables the reader to manage feelings which are double-​edged, on the one hand painful and constricting, like a real wound, while on the other hand opening to something greater, and to be identified with love, like the wounds of Christ (see the development of this image in the Spiritual Canticle, especially Stanzas 1–​13). 46 This high point of union is described, for instance, in Flame 4. 47 An example in recent hermeneutical theory is Stanley Fish’s notion of ‘reader-​response theory’ in relation to ‘interpretive communities’ (Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980]). David Tracy finds resonances in much recent hermeneutical theory, in relation to the kind of 44 45

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does not merely delineate such principles but shows how they are already present in the objects that it examines. In this case, ‘Ignatian’ refers to the active role that Ignatius’s Exercises can play in making explicit principles that are already implicit but largely hidden in other classic texts. The difficulty is that these hermeneutical principles are not made explicit in other texts as they are in Ignatius’s Exercises, so that they are hard to recognize and to understand, particularly for readers today, for whom the premodern methods of active personal appropriation are unfamiliar. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are unusual in that they bring these principles to light, while also belonging to the long tradition of spiritual texts that were understood to function in this way.48 They have the capacity to reveal what is assumed within this tradition, from the inside. Are there limits to the application? This approach applies primarily to premodern texts. Hadot sees the rise of the universities in the thirteenth century as the beginning of a divide between philosophy as a ‘theoretical and abstract activity’ and its former role as a ‘way of life’, after which this way of writing and reading texts became progressively less common.49 Ignatius’s Exercises and John of the Cross’s writings came near the end of this tradition.50 But the texts that we call ‘spiritual classics’ today, including those written in modernity, seem to be exceptions to this rule: they continue to be read for personal transformation and for what they say about a way of life. There is an element of circularity here. We call them spiritual classics because they retain this premodern characteristic of inviting the reader’s participation in a way that is transformative.51 This means that the Ignatian principles that I have outlined are also applicable beyond the premodern context and, I suggest, to the whole category of writings that we call spiritual classics today.

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interpretation demanded by ‘classics’, notably in Gadamer and Ricoeur (See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism [London: SCM Press, 1981, pp. 115–24]). Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises are an expression of a tradition of spiritual texts going back to the Greco-​Roman period (Hadot, p. 82), and Stock finds examples extending into the early modern period (Stock, pp. 114ff). Hadot, p. 270. See fn. 48. This returns the discussion to Tracy’s understanding of the ‘classic’ on this point: Tracy regards this personally transformative engagement of the reader as central to the notion of the ‘classic’ (Tracy, p. 114).

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‘A Clear and Perfect Estate’ Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul Gemma Simmonds CJ

Five years before Heythrop was founded in 1614, an obscure Englishwoman exiled overseas began a quiet and unintended revolution that would shake the church of her day and prove a milestone in the history of women. Catholicism was under state persecution at that time and those seeking religious life had to do so in exile. Mary Ward and a group of companions left England in 1609 to begin living religious life together, without any particular idea of which rule to follow. Their only options lay within the enclosed monastic orders, the Council of Trent having ruled the uncloistered life for women unacceptable. Mary already had two unsuccessful forays into the monastic life under her belt, so the group relied rather on their experience of apostolic ministry as laywomen in the Catholic underground and their encounters with the Ignatian tradition of spirituality and apostolic outreach via itinerant Jesuits sheltered by their families. Feeling called to continue this ministry as consecrated religious within a church that had little room for such an idea, Mary Ward and her companions set about running educational works and living a penitential life in community until such time as God should make clear how they were to proceed. In 1611 she received what she believed was a direct inspiration from God to take the Jesuit Constitutions and way of life as their model. It was clear to her that they were being asked to undertake something simultaneously ‘to the greater glory of God’ and entirely unacceptable to the Jesuits themselves and indeed to the wider church and society. The story of their long struggle to win approval for women to undertake apostolic work as unenclosed

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religious within the church is told elsewhere.1 The focus of this study is a subsequent inspiration received by Mary Ward, called the ‘Vision of the Just Soul’. It clearly has the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises within its ancestry and became the foundational spiritual rationale for all that was to follow. It has a historical and ecclesial particularity for members of the religious institutes that trace their foundation back to Mary Ward, but it also has a more general application to those inspired by the Ignatian spiritual tradition to a life of union with God expressed in service. As such it seems a good place to engage in reflection on this union and service at the time of Heythrop’s 400th anniversary. On All Saints Day in 1615 Mary wrote to her Jesuit spiritual director, Roger Lee, about an insight she had received while making the Spiritual Exercises. It offered her an understanding of the state of soul of a person who has, as Ignatius puts it at the beginning of the Exercises, become free from disordered tendencies (or desires or affections, depending on the translation).2 It seems a clear and perfect estate to be had in this life, and such a one as is altogether needful for those that should well discharge the duties of this Institute . . . It is not like the state of the saints, whose holiness chiefly appears in that union with God which maketh them out of themselves. The felicity of this estate, for as much as I can express, was a singular freedom from all that could make one adhere to earthly things, with an entire application and apt disposition to all good works. Something happened also discovering that freedom that such a soul should have had to refer all to God . . . I seemed in my understanding to see a soul thus composed but far more fair than I can express it. Yet then occurred, and so still continues in my mind, that those in Paradise before the first fall were in this estate. It seemed to me then, and that hope remains still, that our Lord let me see it to invite me that way and because he would give me grace in time to arrive to such an estate, at least in some degree. That word ‘Justice’, and those in former times that were called just persons, works of justice, done in innocence, and that we be such as we appear and appear such as we are: these things often since occurred to my mind with See Gemma Simmonds, ‘Women Jesuits?’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 120–​35. 2 Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 1. Throughout this study references are taken from David L. Fleming, Draw Me into Your Friendship: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading of the Spiritual Exercises (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996). 1

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a liking for them. I have thought moreover on this occasion, that perhaps this course of ours would continue to the end of the world, because it came to that in which we first began.3

It is, from the outset, an understanding of holiness rooted in the ordinary stuff of human experience. There are no ecstasies here, or grand abstractions from the everyday but, if anything, a deeper entry into all that makes people most fully human. One of its fruits is transparency and an ability to show to the outside world what they are within, free from defensiveness or artifice of any kind. This degree of freedom requires a courage based on knowing oneself to be known, loved and forgiven by God. The process by which a person can become this free is outlined by Ignatius in the first week of the Spiritual Exercises. The freedom itself lies at the heart of the virtue of indifference to which Ignatius refers in the ‘Principle and Foundation’ in Exercise 23. This indifference has nothing to do with not caring how things are, but balances caring passionately about the fulfilment of God’s creative purposes within one’s life and within the world, with being able to allow the details to be ordered by divine providence. Fleming’s modern rendering of the Principle and Foundation runs, God who loved us creates us and wants to share life with us forever. Our love response takes shape in our praise and honour and service of the God of our life. All the things in this world are also created because of God’s love and they become a context of gifts, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily. As a result, we show reverence for all the gifts of creation and collaborate with God in using them so that by being good stewards we develop as loving persons in our care for God’s world and its development. But if we abuse any of these gifts of creation or, on the contrary, take them as the centre of our lives, we break our relationship with God and hinder our growth as loving persons. In every day life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some responsibility. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential

Gillian Orchard, ed., Till God Will: Mary Ward through her Writings (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), pp. 40–​41.

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of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God. Our one desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.4

This Ignatian understanding of freedom is rooted in a self-​understanding expressed in self-​realization, as opposed to a self-​refusal, with regard to God. The relation of human beings to their divine origin is utterly different from the causal and functional relations of dependence that pertain within other realms of their experience, where origin binds rather than sets free. Its fruit is a capacity for love expressed in action.5 We see in both texts a vision of the human person as the culmination of God’s creative impulse, oriented towards a life in harmony with all of creation as the context in which a human life is lived to the full. Mary Ward’s words in the Vision of the Just Soul might appear to express a naïve concept of prelapsarian human perfection, but they rather describe a harmony between the divine creative purpose and the graced human capacity for its fulfilment, based on a union with God that finds its truest expression in the carrying out of that purpose. In that respect they echo the teaching of St Augustine concerning human freedom. In Augustine’s view, human beings are oriented by their nature to union and collaboration with the God who created them, but this is thwarted by the disorientation of sin. The greatest freedom that a human can exercise is, by divine grace, to become most fully the person they were created to be, and therefore to say a wholehearted ‘yes’ to God’s creative intention. Mary Ward’s notion of a return to or restoration of God’s primary intention is found in Augustine’s Confessions, ‘you have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’.6 Ignatius, like his student contemporary John Calvin, came into contact with a thoroughly Augustinian theology in the University of Paris. Underlying the first Week of the Spiritual Exercises, with its cosmic vision of sin and salvation and its invitation to the exercitant to experience being a loved and forgiven sinner, is the notion that human beings become truly free when the slavery to sin and death is done away with and they encounter the joyful possibility of living as God created them to do. Augustine sees this as the original Fleming, Draw Me into Your Friendship, p. 27 [spelling anglicized]. See Karl Rahner, Grace in Freedom (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 211–​15. 6 Augustine, Confessions, 1:1. 4 5

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state of Adam and Eve in the garden, who received the gift to know and do God’s will, but who also had the capacity to turn away from the good in a perversion of free will into the idolatry of self-​reliance.7 For Augustine the fall constitutes a reversal or disruption of the natural order that goes on to remove that capacity to discern good and evil from the first humans and all their descendants. Only a direct encounter with God’s grace can mend this.8 The inner restlessness described by Augustine in his Confessions is calmed by the integration of human desires and divine grace. This Augustinian framework is apparent in the Ignatian Exercises and in Mary Ward’s own understanding of the relationship between human and divine willing. It re-​emerges in a later retreat meditation of hers on a further text from the Exercises, ‘The Fall of our First Parents’. Here she reflects on ‘the delicacy of that estate where sense obeyed reason and reason the divine will, where was neither darkness of understanding nor inclination to evil, whose work was the will of their master and whose satisfaction was that their God was pleased with them’. She seems less certain at this stage, four years after the Vision of the Just Soul, that such a state can easily be reached, asking, ‘O God, cannot this estate be had in this life? So much as it may be imparted to any, bestow, my Jesus, on her whom thou hast made thus, and to do those things.’ She shows a realistic assessment of the human capacity for confusion and distortion of God’s designs, but also a certain serenity regarding the outcome, ‘I know, my God, that darkness of understanding and a propensity to sin will still remain, at least in some measure, but these things are in themselves sufferings, not sin.’9 The concept of holiness operative in the Vision of the Just Soul is deeply rooted in human reality while at the same time predicated on ‘a singular freedom’ from all idolatrous tendencies. It is a freedom that leads eventually to a total openness to God’s service without creating false hierarchies of value. It has clear resonances with the Principle and Foundation’s resolution not to fix one’s desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. It might seem perverse for anyone actually to fix their Henry Bettenson, ed., The Later Christian Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 194–​5, 206–​9. 8 Ibid., pp. 195–​7. 9 Orchard, Till God Will, p. 41. There are echoes, here, of Julian of Norwich on sin, though we do not know if Mary Ward ever read or heard of her. 7

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desires on sickness or failure, but a determinedly penitential mindset, based on the belief that the more it hurts the holier it must be, might be led to such a decision in the mistaken belief that this style of asceticism is most pleasing to God. This simultaneously pre-​empts God’s own possible designs and fails to see the asceticism of the ordinary. Following Ignatius, Mary Ward, in her own approach to penance, shows a robust understanding of how the virtue of accepting and embracing the reality of lived experience may provide greater sources of genuine penance and kenosis than any amount of dramatic gestures.10 Janet Martin Soskice maps out these contrasting concepts of holiness in her article ‘Love and Attention’ in Michael McGhee’s Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life.11 In it she discusses the idea that whatever commands our attention and love identifies both who we are and what we should be, so that it is our response to ‘the other attended to with love’ that enables us to become fully moral and human. She outlines the understanding, in the ‘received spirituality’ of the Catholic tradition, of the spiritual person or spiritual life grounded in ‘long periods of quiet, focused reflections, dark churches and dignified liturgies . . . time spent in contemplative prayer, guided or solitary retreats, and sometimes . . . painful wrestlings with God . . . above all [involving] solitude and collectedness’.12 She contrasts this with the concrete banalities of young motherhood, revolving around wiping noses, bottoms or anything else leaky, multitasking within the household and generally being too exhausted for anything involving seeking God’s face. She speaks of the emergence, in the Christian spiritual tradition, of a hierarchy of values which ‘privileges the detached life over . . . the demands and turmoils of ordinary domestic life’, such a life as generally lived, in classical antiquity, by women, children and slaves. While she concedes that there is a focus in most monastic rules on finding God in simple manual tasks, this is because such tasks leave the mind free to contemplate. ‘What we want is a monk who finds God while cooking a meal while one child is clamouring for a drink, another needs a bottom wiped, and a baby throws up over his shoulder.’13 See ibid., pp. 106–​7, 109. Michael McGhee, ed., Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 59–​72. 12 Ibid., p. 61. 13 Ibid., pp. 66, 71. 10 11

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Soskice’s intention here is not to canonize nappy changing any more than to canonize solitary contemplation as privileged activities leading automatically to sanctity. It is the love and attention we expend on persons, causes or activities that identifies our deepest values. We know from elsewhere in her writings that Mary Ward was reluctant to engage with ecstatic experience in her spiritual life, preferring the Ignatian ideal of finding God in all things. But in fact what she describes as ‘singular freedom’ is something like the ecstasy of which Pope Benedict XVI speaks in his encyclical on love, Deus Caritas Est, ‘love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-​looking self towards its liberation through self-​giving, and thus towards authentic self-​ discovery and indeed the discovery of God’.14 Soskice questions the assumption that ecstasy can be had only by moving beyond the ordinary world of screaming babies. Not everyone is naturally attuned to living among nappies, however, and for some people spiritual fulfilment precisely may be found in a more solitary existence. Mary Ward goes back to the idea of being the person we were created to be, so paying love and attention according to our own rooted temperament, but thereby expressing that openness and generosity that are essential prerequisites for a life of discipleship. God’s entry into human history in Jesus ‘baptises’, as it were, all human history, so that every aspect of our human life becomes the place where God meets us. If whatever commands our attention and love identifies both who we are and what we should be, and the particularity of our lives commands God’s attention, then there can be no meaningful hierarchy of spiritual value in the service that we undertake for God. The encounter with God is not reserved to the extraordinary, or, to coin Mary Ward’s phrase, to ‘that which maketh them out of themselves’ in terms of what is different from banal social reality, but in what is precisely most human. This concept of a world ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, in which embracing reality rather than fleeing from it into some rarefied sanctuary, is the spiritual goal, is threaded through the whole of the Ignatian Exercises, especially those dealing with the call to service such as the call of Christ the King and the Meditation on the Two Standards. The Contemplation 14

Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 6

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for Obtaining Love, coming as it does in the Fourth Week, bookends the Exercises, along with the First Principle and Foundation, with a whole trajectory of personal conversion through contemplation of Christ in service and suffering in between.15 It manifests a freedom regarding God’s creative purposes in the exercitant’s life that is the expression of all the moral and spiritual transformation that has gone before. In the prayer ‘Take, Lord, and Receive’ the exercitant has come to Mary Ward’s ‘freedom to refer all to God’, offering God ‘all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will’.16 This is not an abdication of human autonomy and responsibility but a return to the source of their liberation and empowerment precisely within the creative dynamism of God, where they originate and belong. There are further Augustinian resonances here since he identifies memory, understanding and will as the three characteristics of the Trinity shared by humanity as bearers of the imago Dei. So a ressourcement, as it were, of the human person makes it possible for us to enter into and be restored to our freest selves by the creative, redemptive and sanctifying power of the Trinity. This is what makes us fit to carry out any and every service for God in the world. It does not require that we embrace a world-​denying sanctity or remove ourselves from reality but that we should be transparent in our engagement with ‘works of justice, done in innocence’ in which strength lies in being such as we appear and appearing such as we are. This understanding of human freedom and the guiding focus of our graced attention lies within the opening paragraph of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes: ‘The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men [sic] of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.’17 In the specific context of the Vision of the Just Soul, Mary Ward may have had in mind the particular struggle for transparency that beset the women of her age. Unable to get beyond the construct of womanhood that the patriarchal perspectives of the time imposed on them, her sisters both in religious life and more generally in gender were accustomed to accepting judgments Sp. Exx. 230–​237 Augustine, De Trinitate, 3:15. Gaudium et Spes, 1.  http://​w ww.vatican.va/​a rchive/​hist_​councils/​ii_​vatican_​council/​documents/​vat-​ii_​const_​19651207_ ​gaudium-​et-​spes_​en.html. See also para. 17.

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similar to that expressed by a Jesuit contemporary that, ‘fervour will decay and when all is done, they are but women’. Mary offered a spirited counter-​argument that, ‘there is no such difference between men and women; yet women, may they not do great matters, as we have seen by example of many saints who have done great things?’18 The capacity for engaging with ‘all good works’ was denied to women by those blinkered by the social construct of womanhood imposed by society and church. No amount of learning could enable people to see through this construct theoretically without having experience to the contrary. The priest who remarked that he was glad not to be a woman because women could not comprehend God occasioned a wry smile from her rather than a furious refutation, but she was under no ­illusion that what she was hearing was wrong; ‘I could have answered him by the experience I have of the contrary. I could have been sorry for his want of ­judgment. I mean not his want of judgment, for he is a man of very good judgment –​his want is in experience.’19 In the Vision of the Just Soul, Mary looks back to the original condition of human beings, oriented towards full cooperation with God’s creative initiative. Later she specifically cites the union of will and reason, but she might also cite the equal extent to which male and female are made in the image and likeness of God and are capable of this cooperation. It is the union of will and reason that gives them the ‘entire application and apt disposition to all good works’, but it is the restoration of this equality and a recognition of it in church and society that would make it possible for women to act on their application and disposition. Her musing that ‘perhaps this course of ours would continue to the end of the world, because it came to that in which we first began’ might seem to reflect a remarkably inflated valuing of her foundation of the ‘Jesuitesses’ as guaranteed survival for eternity. In the face of the diminishing state of religious life today in many parts of the world, this would seem to carry a certain grim irony. But ‘this course of ours’ is not so much a reference to the founding of one particular order as a reference to the rebalancing of gender valuing so that women’s capacity to be agents for good within the world is acknowledged and allowed to flourish. Without such a rebalancing there can be no ‘singular freedom’ because, however much their Orchard, Till God Will, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58.

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interior freedom, women must find a context in which such freedom can be exercised in the outer world. That is what lies behind the claim in the Vision of the Just Soul. ‘This course of ours’ is not only a particular type of religious life, but a whole way of proceeding, whereby women’s capacity to act fully as disciples of Christ is recognized. There is, of course, no single recognizable generic category of ‘women’, as such. The experience and needs of a wealthy, educated, white, professional European have little in common with those of an illiterate peasant living in a refugee camp, even though both are female. In this respect neither Mary Ward in her time nor we in ours can speak in globalizing terms of women and women’s experience. But the 2008 UNIFEM report on The Progress of the World’s Women reminds us of the situation in which many women find themselves some four hundred years on from Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul.20 The Millennium Development Goals agreed to by the United Nations in 2000 contain a commitment to achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. In many countries, even where the law prohibits it, women’s rights continue to go unfulfilled. Women’s disadvantage is based on their subordinate status in relation to men as decision-​makers and power-​holders. In many contexts women’s voices and choices are silenced by the assumption that male needs and preferences are the norm, so that the way women experience the world, and their desires and choices are ignored, their ability to assert or exercise their rights restricted. Women may be denied educational opportunities, access to public services, political representation and rights in work and in law. Their claim to land or financial independence may be disputed by authoritative men within or outside their household. Women who have been victims of violence often encounter a judicial system which is effectively more sympathetic to the perpetrator than the victim. The obstacles faced by women in many parts of the world in gaining equal access to public services are generally obvious. Because of the way in which their society is organized women may not have the time, money, education or mobility needed to access them. The most obvious way in which services matter to women is that they support their rights to health, education and 20

http://​w ww.unifem.org/​progress/​2008/​publication.html is the data source referred to passim within this section of the study.

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a decent life. Since many poor women have no other options, if services are designed and delivered with men rather than women in mind, it reinforces their dependence on men and limits their opportunities. If they have to pay for health or education, poor girls and women lose out, as poor households commonly reserve the available money for medical care and schooling for men and boys. It was part of Mary Ward’s genius to understand that investing in the care and education of women is an investment in the future of an entire nation. Behind her struggle to find a place within the church which reflected women’s vocation and women’s experience, behind her determination to offer education to girls across Europe, lies a conviction that if women are to do great things, they must be given the tools to realize their potential and make them apt for all good works. Mary Ward pioneered a form of religious life for women in the church which in turn became the blueprint for many subsequent congregations. These groups of women, in the name of Christ, have often spearheaded social and educational movements which have enabled women to take a fuller and more equal part in public and private life. Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate reminds us of the necessary ‘link between life ethics and social ethics’, pointing to the inherent contradiction in societies where, on the one hand, the dignity of the person is upheld while ‘ways in which human life is devalued and violated’ are tolerated.21 There are, however, many ways in which the life of women and girls is devalued and violated worldwide, and many perceive the church as being a source of such devaluing. Mary Ward was an important part of the historical momentum which eventually led to the theoretical and actual liberation of women. She urged her sisters to love and live in ‘verity’ –​the truth of God which is not determined by concepts of gender difference. Her understanding of the equal, yet complementary status of women is the key to her pioneering vision whose fruits within church and society are visible today. She refused to accept a situation in which reality was defined and described through the dominance of male experience and perceptions. Then and now, such an understanding of reality not only excludes the concerns specific to women, but also fails to take seriously their experience as a category for interpreting reality itself. Four hundred years later, this silencing of women and women’s experience 21

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 15.

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continues to be a form of disempowerment with which women struggle in many contexts. For Mary Ward the power to speak was linked with the power to demand justice in terms of self-​determination. Her conviction that women are called to ‘do great things’ for God, to be educators and educated, to be apostles and communicators of faith, was a revolution not just in terms of the church but in terms of an entire culture. She understood that the exclusion of women’s voices and women’s experiences from public discourse lay at the heart of their oppression within society and was contrary to the mind of God. As a young woman Mary Ward had not entirely avoided absorbing the judgment, common within the church of her time, that ‘women did not know how to do good except to themselves’, though she resented even then this negative assessment of women’s capabilities.22 It would take the disappointment of her early dreams of monastic life and the apostolic experiences of her ministry in London before she learned to trust her instincts unreservedly and to believe that women could indeed do great things. In Mary Ward’s instructions to her sisters, the capacity to do good comes not from any human talent but from God’s unmerited grace. The ‘will to do well’ and the capacity to act effectively for good is not a matter of gender or natural aptitude. In that respect, ‘there is no such difference between men and women’.23 The tendency to fall into error and sin is not gender-​related either. Women are not naturally weak any more than men are naturally strong. In her view the enemy of fervour is not gender but the pervasive human attraction to idolatry and false goods. Even education and knowledge themselves can become idols, if sought for their own sake rather than for the end of all knowledge, which is God.24 This perception is echoed in Caritas in Veritate, ‘truth, and the love which it reveals, cannot be produced: they can only be received as a gift. Their ultimate source is not, and cannot be, mankind, but only God, who is himself Truth and Love’.25 If Mary Ward warned against false emotions, it was based on her resistance to making an idol out of consolation rather than on the conviction that such idolatry is characteristic of her gender.26 In contradiction to a belief of Orchard, Till God Will, p.9. Ursula Dirmeier, Mary Ward und ihre Gründung:  die Quellentexte bis 1645 (Münster, Aschendorf, 2007), §1, p. 364. 24 Ibid, pp. 363–​4 25 Caritas in Veritate, 2. 26 Dirmeier, Mary Ward, pp. 358–​9. 22 23

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her time that God was principally to be found in extraordinary graces and experiences, she valued the ordinary and the domestic as a proper context for growth in holiness and human fulfilment.27 Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara, writing about women and spirituality, speaks of the way in which the daily domestic life of many women has been dismissed and disregarded, as if it could never be the context for spiritual reflection.28 But the millions of women who live this ‘little’ life know its worth, as did Mary Ward, who reminded her sisters that the heart of their vocation and of their encounter with the incarnate God lay in doing ordinary things well. Fear and a lack of confidence engendered by the trivialization of women’s perspective and experience leads many to consider that they count for little. UNIFEM’s report on the progress of the world’s women states that female empowerment ‘is not a stand-​a lone goal. It is the driver of efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, reduce  child and maternal mortality, and fight against major diseases like HIV/​AIDS and malaria. Women’s empowerment is also a driver of sound environmental management and is, finally, essential for ensuring that development aid reaches the poorest’.29 A more balanced and mutually respectful and responsible relationship between the genders ultimately benefits men as much as women. It has the potential to create domestic and social solidarity and prosperity and to liberate both genders from roles that are toxic and demeaning. Mulieris Dignitatem reminds us that sin is the rejection of God as Creator in relationship with humanity, a rejection of the mutual relationship between men and women, and a breakdown in relationship with the natural world. The first sin is a joint responsibility of men and women, so that the likeness of God is now obscured rather than erased. The domination of man over woman in Genesis 3.16 amounts to a sinful violation of the equality of man and woman.30 Mary sees the state described in the Vision of the Just Soul as a return to humanity’s original justice, sincerity and innocence. She understands it as particularly given to her sisters as women, since they have been deprived, by Ibid., p. 359. Ivone Gebara, ‘Women and Spirituality:  a Latin American Perspective’, The Way 38 (1988): 240–​51. 29 http://​w ww.unifem.org/​progress/​2008/​publication.html, p. 117. 30 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, 9–​10. 27

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reason of gender, of the opportunities for learning and wisdom given to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus. Through this freedom, justice and sincerity they should ‘gain at God’s hand true wisdom and [the] ability to perform all such other things as the perfection of this Institute exacts of us’.31 A vital element of the Christian vision of human flourishing consists in an understanding of God’s original plan for what it is to be human. Union with God and the vocation to human flourishing are not about becoming superhuman but about entering more fully into what being human means. Ignatius maps this out in the Contemplation for Obtaining Love in the Spiritual Exercises. Although she experienced and interpreted it in terms appropriate to her own era, Mary Ward’s Vision of the Just Soul likewise contains a remarkably modern view of the integration of humanity and all nature. It offers a blueprint for what can be lived, taught and shared in various ways about the goal of the human vocation. It links the rediscovery of graced creation with a whole and grace-​filled human living. In this it echoes the Pauline vision, described in the epistle to the Romans, of the whole of creation freed from the inexorable bondage to futility engendered by human brokenness, and liberated, as humanity itself is, through the resurrection of Christ and the power of the Spirit.32 It is an integrated and holistic vision which speaks powerfully to many women who are, by reason of the role they play in society, particularly close to nature itself. The empowerment of women has close connections with a respectful attitude towards the environment seen in terms of stewardship, living in harmony with the rest of the God-​given, natural world. The impact of environmental degradation and climate change is falling increasingly heavily on poor women, as the unsustainable lifestyles of the affluent undermine the supply and quality of natural resources. The Vision of the Just Soul offers an alternative to the idolatry of consumption in the possibility of cooperation with God’s creative purposes. In this lies an answer to this drama of our times. This alternative view of humanity’s relationship with nature is taken up further in Caritas in Veritate, the book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations:  in a Dirmeier, Mary Ward, 1, pp. 290–​1 (spelling modernized). Rom. 8:18–​39.

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word, integral human development . . . the vocation to development on the part of individuals and peoples is not based simply on human choice, but is an intrinsic part of a plan that is prior to us and constitutes for all of us a duty to be freely accepted. That which is prior to us and constitutes us –​ subsistent Love and Truth –​shows us what goodness is, and in what our true happiness consists.33

The ‘singular freedom’ and ‘entire application and apt disposition to all good works’ seen by Mary Ward are the graces offered in a particular way to women in a church and a world that continue to be dominated by patriarchal constructs of humanity. But they also offer, in the tradition of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, a vision of human flourishing where a realization of the vision in the letter to the Galatians is possible, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor slave nor free nor male nor female but only new life in Christ in which all can be restored to their original nature as lovers of truth and workers of justice.34

Caritas in Veritate, 51–​2 . Gal. 3:28.

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Compassion and Competence in the Service of Others A Jesuit Contribution to Catholic Learning David Tuohy SJ

The focus of this publication, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Heythrop’s foundation, is the question ‘Can theology and philosophy continue to be of service to the human family in the twenty-​first century?’ and the specific nature of the Jesuit contribution to these disciplines. An underlying issue in this reflection is the role of Jesuit-​run or Jesuit-​inspired institutions in promoting this contribution. In this essay, I reflect on the foundation of the schools and colleges of the Society of Jesus. I briefly examine the context in which they developed and then examine three baseline documents that outline Jesuit intentions in education, which I characterize as compassion, competence and service. In the third part of the essay, I reflect on how these values still contribute to the Jesuit educational endeavour today.

The context The sixteenth century saw major changes in the political, geographical and religious context of Europe. In 1492, the New World was ‘discovered’ by Columbus, and this reflected an energy for European exploration, conquest and colonization. Portugal expanded its influence to the east, setting up colonies in Asia and Africa along the Indian Ocean. Spain on the other hand focused on the Pacific Ocean, linking Asia, the Americas and Europe. This drive to colonization also evoked a strong sense of missionary activity within the Church.

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On a political level, the concept of a universal Holy Roman Empire broke down. In 1517, Martin Luther published his ninety-​five theses, changing the religious ‘status quo’. The feudal kings began to consolidate their kingdoms and many used religion as a key to establishing the identity of the emerging sovereign ‘states’, eventually leading to the Peace of Augsburg and the banner ‘cuius regio, cuius religio’. A powerful Ottoman Empire developed in the Middle East challenging the Eurocentric world view. The printing press had been invented in 1450 and played a major role in the spread of ideas, especially with the translation of the bible into vernacular languages. This was also the time of Da Vinci, who was active as an artist and scientist up to his death in 1519; work on St Peter’s Basilica began in 1504; Michelangelo worked on the Sistine chapel between 1508 and 1512. In 1543, Copernicus published his treatise that the earth orbits the sun; the beginning of a scientific revolution. In education, Renaissance humanism sought to increase the scope, content and significance of the classical curriculum in education, adding history, language and poetry to the seven liberal arts to make up studia humanitatis (the humanities). It put aside abstruse speculation on truths about God and focused on human achievement. This humanism forged a new link between the divine and the human. Humanity was seen as the summit, the very purpose, of God’s creation, actively involved in developing the new world. Some of that spirit can be captured in two quotations from Galileo: first, ‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them’,1 and second, ‘Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes –​I mean the universe –​but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written’.2 Humanist education aimed to help people embrace knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible. It focused on all branches of knowledge, physical development, social accomplishment and the arts. It aimed to produce ‘rounded’ men and women who could speak and write with eloquence and clarity, engage with civic society and persuade others to virtuous and Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) quoted in Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History (1988) by Perry McAdow Rodgers, p. 53. 2 The Assayer (1623), quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (2003) by Edwin Arthur Burtt, p. 75. 1

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prudent actions. In the expanding world of the time, the focus was on being knowledgeable about and competent in new developments. More important, however, was the sense of dignity of the human person and the key role of character in making an appropriate response to these developments. The educated Renaissance person was to have empathy and compassion with the ideal classical values as well as knowledge of the emerging discoveries of the age and how these could be of service to human development. The early Jesuits were shaped by their immersion in this culture. It imbued them with a strong sense of adventure and of service to others. It helped mould their characters and their world view. Ignatius Loyola came late to education, having sought a career as a soldier. In his autobiography, he described his conversion experience as a time when God dealt with him ‘as a schoolmaster treats a child he is teaching’.3 Soon after his conversion, he realized the necessity of personal competence to go with his compassion for others and his desire to be of service to them. His experience as a ‘mature student’ in the grammar schools of his day was not very good. It was only when he eventually reached Paris that he found some sort of order and system to what and how he was being taught. Paris was where he met the first companions who later founded the Jesuits, all of them well-​educated graduates who hoped to make a difference in the world. The positive experience of the humanist curriculum became the cornerstone of their schools and colleges.

Jesuit documents Three main documents stand out as foundational and illustrative of the corporate approach to the work of education. ●●

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The Spiritual Exercises (1522–​4) predate the founding of the Jesuits and provide the basic insight into Jesuit spirituality, the criteria that led them to decide to take on schools and the values that informed their approach to students and education. The Constitutions were approved in 1554. These were written by Ignatius, and they reflect the growth and adaptation that had occurred in the twenty years since the first companions had formed the Society. Part IV of these Constitutions outlines the rules and regulations pertaining

O’Callaghan, J. (trans) The Autobiography of St Ignatius Loyola (New York: Fordham, 1992), p. 37

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to the Colleges, with particular emphasis on the education of Jesuit scholastics. At the time of writing, Ignatius had approved the opening of approximately forty Colleges. The Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu (1599) (The Order and Method of Studies in the Society of Jesus) was written forty-​three years after Ignatius’s death and published under the fifth Superior General, Claudio Aquaviva. It is the final version of three such documents which sought to codify the Jesuit approach to education. Undertaken as a form of Action Research and a quality assurance exercise, The Ratio reflects on the experience of over fifty years of involvement with schools in different countries. At the time it was published, there were over 200 Colleges being run by Jesuits. The Ratio guided Jesuit education for nearly 200 years, until the suppression in 1773, when there were 845 Jesuit educational institutions all over the world.

The context of education 200  years after the restoration of the Society in 1814 is very different from the early ventures, and the Ratio Studiorum is no longer the base reference document for Jesuit education. However, education remains a key Jesuit apostolate and the approach retains many of the values espoused in these foundation documents. Today, there are 3,750 educational institutions run by Jesuits, enrolling approximately 2.5  million students. There are approximately 130,000 faculty members, about 4000 (3 per cent) of whom are Jesuits.

The Spiritual Exercises The Spiritual Exercises contain the basic world view of Ignatius, his understanding of the human relationship with God in the world, how God deals with the individual and how the individual is invited to respond to God. Ignatius gave the Exercises to others for at least fifteen years before he was ordained and some of those he met became the ‘companions’ who formed the Society of Jesus. The Exercises is divided into four ‘Weeks’ of varying lengths, each with its own theme:  the human condition (sin), the life of Jesus, the Passion of Jesus and the Resurrection of Jesus. Progress through these weeks is based on a particular approach to the individual and can be adapted according to their responses. The connection between The Exercises and education can

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be seen particularly in the two ‘book-​end’ considerations, the ‘Foundation and Principle’ and the ‘Contemplation for Achieving Love’, which reveal the humanism that inspired Ignatius’s expectations of the schools. Also, during the Exercises, individuals are introduced to various practices, the most important of which is the Discernment of Spirits, which again reveals a world view in which the person plays an active and a creative role in creation.

The Foundation and Principle4 Humanity is seen as the culmination of God’s creation, and everything has been created to help us achieve the purpose for which we have been created; to praise, reverence and serve God, thereby saving our souls. We fulfil that purpose by coming to a greater understanding and appreciation of God’s creation. This means freeing ourselves from particular personal preferences or inclinations so that we regulate our lives to choose things in so far as they are useful and abstain from what hinders our purpose. The Exercises aim to develop our consciousness and sensitivity to this call. The first consideration is meant to inspire a commitment to becoming a competent disciple of Jesus, the details of which are explored later.

The Contemplation for Achieving Love5 This is the final consideration of the Spiritual Exercises. The prelude considers that love is shown more in deeds than in words and that it is all-​embracing and inclusive. Four considerations are then offered, and the individual is asked to consider the proper response. ●●

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God has loved me and given me so much, and wishes to share more with me, even His own life. God is present in all aspects of creation –​matter, plants, animals and humanity. In particular, His presence brings life, consciousness and intelligence. These are particularly present in the human person, who is made in the image and likeness of God. God is at work in his creation, creating and keeping it in being. God’s work is seen in my personal life, in my gifts, in my sense of justice, kindliness, charity and mercy.

Ganss, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, §23. Ibid., §230–​7.

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The focus is on responding to the experience of life with compassion and a commitment to service. This world view is highly affirming of creation and of the activity of humanity in that world. It has been characterized as ‘seeing God in all things’. This is not contemplation in the Platonic sense. It is a contemplation that inspires action, to work to build up creation and serve one’s neighbour. The key to this in practical terms was the Discernment of Spirits.

Discernment of Spirits6 The interiority of the Spiritual Exercises encourages individuals to become sensitive to the pattern of thoughts, imaginings, emotions, inclinations, desires, feelings, repulsions and attractions in their experience; to reflect on them and understand where they come from and where they lead. Ignatius distinguishes two main patterns, each associated with different levels of spiritual maturity. In the first, we are attracted to what is bad for us because it is seen as pleasurable and nice. However, we find that these pleasures are illusory and passing. They do not bring satisfaction, and on reflection we experience regret and remorse. The challenge for the individual is to distinguish between passing personal preferences and lasting values, and to commit oneself to living according to values. In the second stage of maturity, we are more likely to be discouraged from acting for the good because of self-​doubt or lack of confidence or perhaps by being oversensitive to others. This undermines our sense of peace. It allows us to settle for mediocrity, whereas true happiness is found in the fullness of love and service. The movement of the Spiritual Exercises is twofold: inward for the individual, and then outward in the desire to help others. It affirms the centrality of individual personal experience. It is positive towards creation and culture and sees the call of the gospel as being to help others. The competence developed during The Exercises relates to identifying the different ‘spirits’ at work and choosing action that gives life. The work of education was to compliment this competence.

The Constitutions, Part IV The early companions were all mature men. The primary focus of the new Order was missionary: the ability to move around to different places, without Ibid., §314–​66.

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any encumbrances. They had no intention of getting involved in schooling as an apostolate. The commitment to education arose in dealing with three issues that emerged early in the development of the Society of Jesus.

The training of Jesuits Initially, Ignatius decided to accept into the Society only mature people who were already well educated. However, the large numbers of people who were attracted to the Society included many young people of great energy and enthusiasm. Ignatius addressed this issue in the Preamble to Part IV of the Constitutions: The aim and end of this Society is, by travelling through the various regions of the world . . . to preach, hear confessions and use all the other means it can with the grace of God to help souls. Consequently it has seemed necessary to us, or at least highly expedient, that those who will enter the Society should be persons of good life and sufficient learning for the aforementioned work. But in comparison with others, those who are both good and learned are few; and even among those few, most of them already seek rest from their previous labours . . . Therefore . . . we have thought it wise to proceed by another path. That is, our procedure will be to admit young men who because of their good habits of life and ability give hope that they will become both virtuous and learned in order to labour in the vineyard of Christ our Lord.7

Initially, his aim was that the young men, after a suitable novitiate where they were cultivated, tried and tested for their spiritual zeal, would study in local universities, and be taught by others, as he had been. He set up houses for ‘scholastics’ in cities near established universities. However, the quality and consistency of education available proved unsatisfactory, and gradually Jesuit priests were assigned to help those in studies to make faster progress. The first venture into education was to meet an internal need for developing competent young Jesuits for their work of service.

The problem of property Setting up schools required property and brought with it new responsibilities. For continuity sake, it also meant that teachers would be committed to a Ganss, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, §308.

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single institution for a period of time. This reality was very different from the initial vision of a group of itinerant preachers. Ignatius solved this problem by insisting that all colleges and universities be established by ‘endowments’ set up by local benefactors or patrons. Often these were nobles in a district who wanted to support the Jesuits and their training. In other cases, local feudal or municipal authorities wished to have high-​class schools in their areas. The first chapter of Part IV of the Constitutions deals with the gratitude and respect that is to be shown to such founders and benefactors. Other chapters deal with the procedures for accepting such Colleges, conditions that were permissible and those that were not. The details need not concern us here other than to state that a condition that local students be allowed to enter these colleges was quite acceptable to Ignatius. He reasoned that if the endowment of the school was such that it provided for the physical infrastructure and for the support of Jesuit teachers then there was an apostolic opportunity to take ‘extern’ students. He worked on the premise that ‘what was freely received should be freely given’.8 The Colleges therefore were free for anyone who had the desire and the ability to benefit from the programme. If a proper number of scholastics should not be present in its colleges, it will not be contrary to our Institute . . . to admit other poor students . . . provided they are subjects of such fitness as to give hope that they will turn out to be good workers in the vineyard of Christ our Lord, because of their ability or basic knowledge of letters, good habits of conduct, suitable age and other qualities which appear in them for the divine service, which alone is sought in the case of those who are members of the Society and of those who are externs.9

Ignatius had an expectation that all students would have a compassionate engagement with their studies, leading to the service of others.

The programme A key element of Ignatius’s approach to the training of Jesuits was to encourage the value of study. To this end, he wanted to ensure that Jesuit community life in the colleges promoted devotion to studies. He therefore organized Ganss, The Spiritual Exercises, §281. Ganss, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, §338.

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other spiritual duties, prayers, devotions, mortifications and the norms of a monastic life with study as a priority. Those impediments which distract from study should be removed, both those arising from devotions and mortifications, which are too numerous or without proper order, and also those springing from their cares and exterior occupations whether in duties inside the house or outside it in conversations, confessions and other activities with one’s fellowmen, insofar as it is possible in our Lord to excuse oneself from them.10

When ‘external’ students came to Jesuit schools, the expectation was that their day would be similar to that of a Jesuit scholastic. They studied the same subjects, participated in the same academic exercises and also in the extracurricular life of the Colleges, which included spiritual duties. The curriculum envisaged for the schools was clearly based on the humanist approach, with a strong emphasis on Latin and Greek as the main languages: ‘our intention would be that ordinarily there should be taught in the colleges –​humane letters, languages and Christian doctrine; and if it should be necessary instruction should be given about cases of conscience’.11 In most schools there were Academies and Sodalities to promote the integration of learning and piety: ‘very special care should be taken that those who come to the universities of the Society to obtain knowledge should acquire along with it good and Christian moral habits’.12 However, there was a ‘freedom of religion’ accorded to the extern students:  ‘Those who can be easily constrained should be obliged to what has been said about confession, Mass, the sermon, Christian doctrine and declamation. The others should be persuaded gently and not be forced to it nor expelled from the schools for not complying, provided that dissoluteness or scandal to others is not observed in them.’13 The assumption was that the immersion in poetry, drama, oratory and history not only produced eloquence in those studying (competence) but also inspired them to noble and uplifting ideals (compassion). If properly taught, students became better persons, imbued with the ideal of service to the

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12

Ibid., §362. Ibid., §394. Ibid., §481. Ibid., §482.

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common good in imitation of the great heroes being studied. This gave the schools a universal appeal, especially in middle-​and upper-​class circles of the time. From the beginning, Ignatius was conscious of (1) education as being the formation of the person; (2) the humanities as the means of formation; (3) the importance of the local context with the emphasis on language and (4) the link with Christian and moral development. From Ignatius’s time, especially in the Constitutions, there was a clear orientation towards education as an apostolate. It is claimed that the Jesuits became the first major teaching order, a claim that needs to be put in context given the history of the monastery schools and the contribution of the Dominicans and Franciscans to the medieval universities. What is meant by this claim is that the Jesuits were different from what went before in that: ●●

●●

●●

●●

They designated the staffing and management of schools as a priority ministry. They set about creating such institutions and assumed responsibility for their continuance. They sought to develop a common system in all their schools. The institutions were not primarily for the training of clergy but for young men who envisaged a worldly career.

No group in the Church or in society at large had ever undertaken an enterprise on such a grand scale. In particular, the focus on standardizing the approach to education developed after Ignatius’s death, in the publication of the Ratio Studiorum.

The Ratio Studiorum The Ratio Studiorum was the official guidebook for the running of Jesuit schools and universities, and it reflected the shared experience of nearly fifty years of running schools and trying to discern what worked best. It developed in three stages. In 1586 a committee of six Jesuits from various parts of Europe produced a trial document which was sent to different provinces and invited comments from the teachers. Reflection on these reactions led to a 1591 document which gave detailed rules and methods. It was proposed that these be followed in all Jesuit schools for a period of three years and all

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Table 3.1  A summary of the focus of different sections of the Ratio Studiorum Administrators

Teachers (general and specific subjects) Students Activities

• Responsibility of provincials and rectors to plan and provide for Colleges • Responsibilities for selection, supervision and development of both teachers and students •  Behaviour and relationship with students • Content, books, order, method for individual subjects •  Behaviour and conduct, means of progress •  Academies and Sodalities •  Exams, prizes etc.

schools report on the outcome. The final official document was created in 1599, distilling the wisdom of the reports: The Ratio Studiorum is about a system and its organization. It links different elements of the organization into a coherent approach. It is organized as thirty sets of rules and regulations governing the apostolate of education in the Society of Jesus (table 3.1). These rules outline the programme for different years, for specific classes and for extracurricular activities. They give details about what books and authors should be studied (and those that should be avoided), and in what order. They describe how the school year should be structured, what the school day should look like and how class activities should be designed. They give directions on holding examinations, class activities such as repetitions, disputations and competitions. They outline approaches to students in terms of keeping them active and engaged; of motivating them through prizes or punishment. They also give guidelines on the conditions under which students should be admitted or dismissed from the colleges. For administrators, there are also detailed directives on the training, induction, supervision and promotion of teachers. Obligations are imposed on Jesuit provincials and rectors to provide for the material and manpower needs of the Colleges. Three lenses reveal the spirit that animates the prescriptions in the document: ●●

●●

●●

The conviction that education is linked to the fullness of human development, including the faith dimension of that development. The development of a uniform system across many different cultures, and the general acceptance of the Humanities programme. The promotion of a method of teaching and study that went beyond the mere memorisation of texts and the accumulation of information.

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The transformative effect of education The humanist movement proposed a general transformative view of education. It saw a direct relationship between ‘good literature’ and personal virtue. In particular, such literature related learning to ethical decision-​making and public service and was closely linked to the formation of character. In the Jesuit world, practical and pragmatic considerations were also added. Polanco, the first secretary of the Society, wrote about the practical values for Jesuits, which can be adapted for different professions: The study of the humanities helps in the understanding of Scripture, is a traditional propaedeutic to philosophy, provides a pedagogically sound entrance into other subjects, enables a person to express his thoughts better, fosters the skills in communication that Jesuit ministries require, and develops the facility in different languages that the international character of the Society demands.14

Education was something to be shared with others and was clearly an instrument in the wider aims of the Jesuits, to lead others to God. Some quotations from the Ratio help to illustrate this: ‘the purpose of the Society in conducting colleges and universities is two-​fold: first, she wants to equip her members with a good liberal education and with other skills required in her ministry, and second she wants to provide them with an opportunity to share with students in the classroom the fruits of their training’15; ‘those who attend our schools will, to the greater glory of God, make the greatest possible progress in development of character, literary skills, and learning’16; ‘That our students may advance in uprightness of life as well as in the liberal arts’.17 Jesuit education sought to offer breath (knowledge and compassion), depth (competence and excellence) and an orientation to the service of others.

The universal humanities curriculum The Constitutions proposed a first-​rate education for Jesuits themselves. However, engagement with schools meant that the Jesuits were trained to teach what they had learned, and therefore to appropriate the material in a 17 14

15 16

Letter from Polanco to Lainez, 1547, quoted in O’Malley, The First Jesuits, p. 210. The Ratio Studiorum, Rules for the Rector, no. 1. Ibid. Ibid.

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practical way. This brought a new kind of engagement with culture beyond the traditional clerical subjects of philosophy and theology. The early Jesuits wrote textbooks on grammar, rhetoric, Latin and Greek classics. They wrote about mathematics, astronomy, physics and biology. They ran observatories and laboratories, composed music and operas and produced plays and ballets. They built and decorated many Baroque churches. Jesuits also showed themselves to be flexible and accommodating in their approach to evangelization. They did not always insist on bringing the ‘Roman’ classics to the mission field, but entered into a dialogue with the indigenous groups they met. A clear example of this was Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit scientist who promoted the links between Christian and Confucian values, and learned to converse with the Chinese nobility of the time.18 Similarly, de Nobilli and de Britto sought to allow Hindu converts retain some of their practices in the liturgy known as the Malabar rites, until this was eventually condemned by Rome. The film The Mission also celebrates a Jesuit adaptation to local needs in the Reductions in South America. Although rooted in a European Renaissance mode, the Jesuit approach was infused with a compassion that saw God’s presence in all cultures. The humanist or ‘Latin’ school reflected middle-​and upper-​class interests, and reflected the origins of the first Jesuits themselves. This contrasted with the ‘Vernacular School’, which taught the basic skills necessary for trade, commerce and civil service of the emerging states.

Practical pedagogy The methods proposed in the Ratio Studiorum are a compendium of the best teaching methods of the day and reflect issues to do with the curriculum itself, the availability (or rather the lack) of books and texts and the desired outcomes of clear thinking and eloquence. A number of comparisons have been made between the methods of the Spiritual Exercises and the methods proposed for education, which show a consistency in how Jesuits thought about personal formation. In both, there is a relationship between the ‘giver’ and ‘receiver’. The Spiritual Exercises focus directly on a relationship with God and education on an appreciation of the truth (­figure 3.1). The triangles of relationships allow for Cronin, V. The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and His Mission to China (London: Harvill Press, 1999).

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God

Retreatgiver

Truth

Retreatant

Teacher

Student

Figure 3.1  Relationships in the process of the Spiritual Exercises and in education.

an exploration of parallels (table 3.2). In each, the individual is directed to an appreciation of God, the world around them, the nature of their own gifts, the needs of others and the proper response of service to them. The Ratio Studiorum promotes a vision that is profoundly Christian. It sees education as a means of evangelizing and supporting others on their journey to God. Read with the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions, it reveals a practical application of the Jesuit commitment to the formation of people of wide knowledge and deep compassion, who brought a commitment to excellence and competence to their service of others. This vision remains relevant today.

Exploring Jesuit education today It is sometimes useful to explore similarities and differences in different cultural contexts. Just as there was geographic expansion in the sixteenth century, there is an expansion of our world in terms of knowledge and technology inspired by a sense of colonization, not by nations of one another, but by ideologies in the marketplace of ideas. As Benedict XVI said to the Jesuits at the General Congregation in 2008: The new people, who do not know the Lord or who do not know him well so that they cannot recognise him as the Saviour, are distant today not so much from the geographical as rather from the cultural viewpoint. It is not oceans or immense distances that challenge the heralds of the gospel but the boundaries resulting from an erroneous or superficial vision of God and man that stand between faith and human knowledge, faith and ­modern science, faith and the commitment to justice.19 19

Allocution of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, 21 February 2008, paragraph 3. Published in Society of Jesus, Decrees and Documents of the 35th General Congregation. London: British Province and the Way Books, 2008.

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Table 3.2  Parallels between different aspects of The Spiritual Exercises and education Spiritual Exercises Teacher Subject Organization Methods

Context

Engagement

Results in action

Education

Acts as a companion Acts as a guide and mentor, and guide and allows ensuring progress along the the individual freedom right path at a correct pace The focus is Jesus as the The focus is ‘humanity’ at its best ‘hero’ as the hero, which can then be connected to a lived faith Organized into four Organized into different subjects ‘Weeks’ each with its and years, each with its own own aim and graces aim and outcomes A variety of methods are A variety of methods are available proposed which are which are to be adapted to to be adapted to the ensure the motivation and individual within the engagement of the student overall framework within the framework of the curriculum Additional practices are Particular ways of acting and proposed outside of behaving are proposed as prayer that provide conducive to an atmosphere of an atmosphere that serious study promotes the prayer experience There is active There is active participation participation by the by the individual leading to individual leading to personal appropriation of personal appropriation material. The aim is to cover a of material. A small range of material to stimulate amount of material can the student. Should be able to be ‘savoured’ teach the material to others Focuses on decisions Leads to an appreciation of the on how to live as a virtuous life and a resolution to disciple of Jesus live accordingly

The medieval notion of the Holy Roman Empire can still be seen today in the concept of the secular global marketplace. The hard-​won identity of individual nation states is now balanced with membership of alliances forging collaboration in an increasingly global economy. In Europe, the EU makes demands for a convergence of many aspects of cultural and economic life and there is constant comparison of national performance along indices developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The concept of the market place also affects the world of ideas. The current pluralism of belief systems is like a market place of ideas where individuals are free to choose or not choose.20 20

This essay was written before the announcement of the Brexit vote.

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Instead of the dominant mono-​culture of Western Christianity, our world is sceptical of any claim for a universal meta-​narrative on the human project. This change has been characterized as a shift from the ‘experience of authority’ to the ‘authority of experience’. The focus is on the concrete experience of each individual, who constructs meaning for herself. This has been fuelled by a revolution in communication technology which gives individuals instant access to developments across cultures. In this culture, ideas have a short shelf-​life, and there is a culture of seeking simple slogan-​driven sound bytes to describe complex human situations. It has been accompanied by an increased emphasis on individual preferences rather than a search for common values. This is sometimes accompanied by radical action in support of such preferences. Our age is also characterized by a humanism that celebrates achievement, scientific discovery and cultural creativity. However, it is a humanism that often excludes God. Instead, the rationalism of science and technology is proposed as the basis for common belief and public policy and faith is seen as an irrational act. The optimism of secular humanism is still confronted with the increased horrors of war, famine, oppression, poverty, social deprivation and abuse of power. In the context of this publication, the question arises as to what contribution a Jesuit approach to education, especially in philosophy and theology, can make to this context. Do the values of compassion, competence and service still have currency? These questions are answered on a strategic level (why teach?) and on an operational level: the ‘what?’, ‘how?’ and ‘where?’ of education. An approach to these questions is outlined in two Jesuit documents: The Characteristics of Jesuit Education (1886) and Jesuit Pedagogy: a Practical Approach (1993).

The strategic vision of Jesuit education Increasingly, education provision at primary and post-​primary level is defined at central government level, and schools are very dependent on external funding. At third level, institutional funding is based on models of economic productivity rather than of academic rigour. What place then has an individual ‘patron’ such as the Jesuits in a society marked by, and seemingly valuing, the idea of competing value systems and ideologies?

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Educational success today is often measured in terms of a standard of living of individuals rather than the quality of life for all. There is a pragmatic emphasis on gaining credentials that are exchanged for bigger and better jobs, rather than of developing skills that can be of service to a community. We see this in economic indicators that pervade OECD and EU comparisons. The Jesuit world view challenges the human capital characterization of education and human anthropology. It promotes the psychological development of the individual and the sociological dimension of the community as equally important issues in human development. The Jesuit approach prepares individuals for significant participation in cultural growth, understanding and critiquing all aspects of life in order to make personal, social, moral, professional and religious decisions. The approach is holistic and sees personal success and service to the community as a both-​and rather than an either-​or option in human development: [T]‌he pursuit of each student’s intellectual development to the full measure of God-​given talents right remains a prominent goal of Jesuit education. Its aim, however, has never been simply to amass a store of information or preparation for a profession, though these are important in themselves and useful to emerging leaders. The ultimate aim of Jesuit education is, rather, that full growth of the person which leads to action, action, especially, that is suffused with the spirit and presence of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Man-​for-​Others. This goal of action, based on sound understanding and enlivened by contemplation, urges students to self-​discipline and initiative, to integrity and accuracy. At the same time, it judges slip-​shod or superficial ways of thinking unworthy of the individual and, more important, dangerous to the world he or she is called to serve.21

For some, this education will be a form of pre-​evangelization, opening them up to a sense of wonder and exploration of God’s creation and the dynamics of human culture. For others, there is an opportunity of evangelization, by sharing a world view that has a loving God as the author of this creation and Jesus as the model of human living. Others still may find in their education a personal growth in discipleship and their relationship with God. For Jesuits, an education that brings good news and affirmation, light, vision 21

Ignatian Pedagogy, §12.

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and freedom is a way of proclaiming the Lord’s favour (Luke 4:4–​21) and is a key response to the mission of the gospel. It has particular relevance to a faith that does justice. It promotes compassion as well as competence, and the focus is on the well-​being of the individual whose human dignity is enhanced by their membership and commitment to living in community with others.

The operational vision of Jesuit education There is a trend in modern education to offer a curriculum based on short ‘electives’ where students ‘mix and match’. The underlying value system is that of an economic model of consumer choice. This creates a rich smorgasbord, but the lack of synthesis can have serious implications for a religious world view. The chief danger is not of any particular doctrine to which the children might be exposed but the unannounced yet powerfully assumed doctrine of exposure as a first principle, as a virtual theology. This is where the doctrine comes in, not at the level of urging this or that belief, but at the more subliminal level at which what is urged is that encountering as many ideas as possible and giving each of them a run for their money is an absolutely good thing. What the children are being indoctrinated in is distrust of any belief that has not been arrived at by the exercise of their unaided reason as it surveys all the alternatives before choosing one freely with no guidance from any external authority.22

Jesuit education seeks to go beyond the breadth of experience and respond to deeper human needs. It enhances breadth with the depth of reflection and the search for value. It aims at personal formation through the gradual and harmonious development of the various powers of memory, imagination, intellect and will. It is the essence of a ‘liberal’ education, where liberal refers to freedom from slavery to ideologies. Jesuit education recognizes the diversity of methods related to different disciplines and at the same time seeks to develop habits and dispositions that apply to all learners. The focus is on the student as learner and promotes active engagement in the learning process (­figure 3.2).

S. Fish, ‘Mission Impossible: Setting the Just Bounds between Church and State’, Columbia Law Review 97 (1997): 2255, 2289–​90.

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Context (who)

Evaluation

Experience

(how well)

(what)

Action

Reflection

(what next)

(why/how)

Figure 3.2  Five components of the learning process in Jesuit education.

The early Jesuits teachers were encouraged to become mentors to their students and to get to know their abilities and guide their development. They were encouraged to develop creative methodologies in their classrooms with organized competitions, simulations of life in Ancient Rome or Greece, making speeches in the Forum, putting on plays and pageants. They had daily, weekly and monthly ‘repetitions’ where they reflected on what they had learned and taught its significance and application to one another in tutorial groups or in debating. Students were often encouraged to focus on what they liked, what excited them, what puzzled them or what turned them off and to find out more about it. They engaged in extracurricular activities such as the Academy (a form of Study Club) that explored extensions to the curriculum and the Sodality, which offered the opportunity to link their learning and piety. The key to Jesuit education remains the person of the teacher, as both a source of information and as a guide. The teacher acts as a model of commitment in their own discipline and also in their approach to reflection and integration of their study into a coherent world view. Paul VI reinforced this role when he spoke of the power of witness in the evangelizing work of the Church: ‘modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses’.23 23

Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, §41. Quoting his own, Address to the Members of the Consilium de Laicis (2 October 1974): Acta Apostolicae Sedis 66 (1974), p. 568.

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In the ideal Jesuit school, teachers balance their engagement with material and their concern for the formation of students –​cura personalis, or care of the individual. The teaching reflects the context of students, making material relevant in order to help students enter into the experience of learning at a deep level. Students are encouraged to reflect on what they have learnt, not only within each subject, but in making interdisciplinary connections. This reflection encourages the search for meaning and excellence. It seeks ways to apply and test knowledge gained by acting on it and evaluating its impact and importance before moving on to yet another experience. Student assessments consist of both measures of achievement and active feedback to promote development. The Jesuit school therefore aims to be a learning community. It is not simply a place where learning takes place with a sense of community as a by-​product for some. Neither does it focus on becoming a community of like-​minded individuals who are comfortable with one another and where the possibility of learning is on offer. Rather, the school is seen as a communal project where community develops through the commitment of the members of the community to one another’s learning. The school provides a formal systematized approach to a positive world view, where there is an emphasis on the dignity of the human person and the fullness of their development. It challenges mere economic models of human value. In what is taught and in how it is taught, there is a focus on helping individuals understand the fullness of life on offer to them and giving them the tools and the discipline to discern how culture and knowledge could be both functional and dysfunctional in promoting the fullness of life and helping them to choose appropriately. This model of learning is closely linked to the process of evangelization. In exploring the link between human development, culture and the gospel, the work of education empowers the search for meaning and the fullness of human existence. It offers a distinctive approach to that search and shares a rich heritage and tradition of insight into the human project. The vision of the human person is holistic and affirming, and the school is organized on the basis of an inclusive welcome to all who engage in that search. The outreach

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of a school, in the impact its graduates have in their lives and work, has the potential of making a major contribution to the Church and to society.

Conclusion The energy and innovation that was apparent in setting up the early Jesuit schools has focused in different ways over the past 400  years. Much of the energy is now absorbed in the process of maintenance and responding to the changed political context of educational provision. The vision remains particularly relevant to our current age and to the work of making the gospel of God’s love intelligible. It is resolutely focused on the formation of the human person, with a distinctive take on the dignity of that person as an individual and as an individual living in community, with responsibility to the common good. This requires of the individual: ●●

●●

●●

A compassion for self and for others in understanding the call to be truly human and free. A competence in analysis of what is good; in making right decisions and in planning to bring that freedom about. A sense of service to others, wishing to share gifts to build up others and finding oneself in doing so.

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Faith, Reason and Science Towards a Renewed Christian Humanism? Louis Caruana SJ

Theology, philosophy and science have been in conversation with each other for centuries. Although the conversation has not always been smooth and agreeable, it has never completely abated and has nearly always been fruitful at least in so far as it helped protagonists of these disciplines recognize and discard deeply seated prejudices. History has repeatedly shown how scientists can be misguided in such debates by an idea of theology that is nothing more than a caricature, a misrepresentation that is often produced and propagated by profiteers who care nothing about the truth. The same thing can be said about theologians being misled by caricatures of science, and about philosophers being misled by caricatures of theology and of science. In fact, caricatures can, and often do, infect all the possible relations between these disciplines, and considerable care is needed to overcome those deep prejudices that emerge and re-​emerge in various forms in the course of history. One may add here that the kind of care needed here is probably not very different from the one required for genuine interreligious dialogue. An institution like Heythrop College, situated at the heart of one of the major cities of the world, and forming part of one of the largest universities in Europe, represents an excellent place for the continuation and the appreciation of such respectful conversation between these disciplines. The College serves as an indispensable locus for a process of continual purification of our faculties of cognition and evaluative judgement, a process whereby the scientific mentality that dominates so much of world affairs can not only remain in touch with humanistic concerns but also be enriched.

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The idea of humanistic concerns is undoubtedly vague. Its root notion of humanism does not seem to have clear boundaries, and any attempt to determine its ancestry as we move back through the centuries will inevitably show considerable variation in emphasis. One way to understand humanism has been to see it as a reaction to Medieval Scholasticism. Humanists of the fourteenth century, keen on retrieving the elegance and spirit of classical literature and the religious and moral views of non-​Christian antiquity, started seeing this kind of scholarship as one that retrieves the entire human cultural output without restrictions. This attitude generated the idea of rebirth or Renaissance: the idea of going beyond the horizon of established orthodoxy to retrieve pre-​Christian values that the establishment had forgotten or wilfully discarded. As such, humanism expresses a cultural view that considers itself built exclusively on what is human, without reference to the Bible. Because of this distance from the established Christian roots of Europe, humanism has tended to align itself with secularism, and this trend has remained strong through the centuries even up to our times. Humanism is today often seen as equivalent not just to secularization but to secularism: in other words, it is often seen not merely as the engine that transforms society from a state where Christian values and institutions have a major role to a state where they do not. It is often seen rather as an ideology or political program that is essentially anti-​religious, intent on taking over the public contribution of the Christian churches to render them insignificant and thereby to eliminate them completely. In spite of this strong anti-​Christian element within humanism, however, we need to recall that, since its origins, there has always been Christian versions of it that have highlighted the compatibility between the Biblical message, the work of the church, and the genuine positive values of antiquity. Petrarch, who spearheaded humanism in fourteenth-​century Italy by inaugurating serious philological and historical criticism, was a religious person. The same can be said of other prominent humanists, such as Erasmus and Thomas More. Even after the sharp rise of modern science, we still find versions of Christian humanism emerging and being accepted as respectable world views that acknowledge humanity’s dignity in its relation to God rather than in opposition to God. The most prominent among these Christian humanists in recent times, one directly linked to the scientific mentality, is

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probably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who out-​humanizes the non-​religious humanists, as it were, by proposing a breathtaking hominization of the entire universe, the culmination of cosmic evolution, the full significance of which is available only through the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Following Teilhard’s example, many current researchers within the debate between faith and science have made other attempts to show how humanism is neither anti-​Christian nor necessarily reductionist nor naturalistic in the philosophical sense. Such attempts at formulating a healthy and fruitful symbiosis of science, faith and philosophy, are certainly interesting and praiseworthy but they still seem to lack something very important. They all seem to have systematically neglected the existential side of human life. Consider the kind of topics that top the list in current discussions: these are nearly always associated with specific scientific discoveries that apparently oblige theologians to update their work. Moral theologians are incessantly concerned about human reproductive science and technology. Theologians of creation are being challenged by the alarming statistics on global ecological instability. Theological anthropologists are struggling to save the soul from the onslaught of neuroscientists. Specialists of the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the doctrine of Original Sin are again at work because of developments in evolutionary anthropology. All these frontier issues, although somewhat diverse, are essentially of the same type. They are all theoretical, in the sense that they are concerned with the need to rework theological explanations. There can be no doubt that such frontier issues are important and that the energy invested in these areas is well directed. Efforts of this kind represent, in fact, the crucial task of rebuilding intellectual bridges between the various parts of our conceptual scheme. They counteract the perennial danger of having humanity slide into irreversible intellectual fragmentation.1 In spite of their importance, however, theoretical frontier issues do not represent the only kind of perspective one can take as regards faith, reason and science. Over and above these theoretical issues, there are other frontier issues that can be called practical. These are often neglected because they do A statement about this, for the context of Jesuit higher education, is Pedro Arrupe, ‘Theological Reflection and Interdisciplinary Research’, in Pedro Arrupe, Jesuit Apostolates Today, ed. J. Aixala (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981), pp. 33–​42 (especially p. 37).

1

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not deal with what scientists or theologians say. They deal rather with what scientists and theologians do. As recent work in the history of the natural sciences shows, it is a mistake to see scientific theories as timeless entities totally detached from the philosophical, theological and cultural environments that constituted the cradle in which they were born. An entire cultural paradigm affects, and is in turn affected by, the discovery and formulation of any given major theory. Moreover, cultural paradigms affect individuals not only in their thinking but also in their doing. And this fact is what gives rise to issues that are of a practical nature –​less concerned with how to describe the world, and more with how to live. Therefore, my project in this paper is to explore this particular, somewhat neglected dimension of the ongoing debate between theology, philosophy and the natural sciences. I will do this by first determining two important areas of this practical dimension and then by considering and eventually blocking some possible objections. I will conclude by drawing some concrete proposals on how to take this discussion further.

The eclipse of the person A new influential paradigm emerged in seventeenth-​century Europe, which came to be called the mechanistic world view. Put simply, this view held that all objects are made up of particles, and all effects are the result of push-​pull, law-​governed forces between these particles. Inaugurated by René Descartes and quantified by eminent men of science like Isaac Newton and Pierre-​ Simon de Laplace, this outlook had a deep impact on how people understood the world and their place in it. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw many Christian philosophers and theologians respond to this paradigm, and much work was dedicated to the frontier issues it provoked. There were important debates on the nature of the human soul, on the clash between determinism and freedom and other similar issues. Since then, science has moved on a great deal, and today’s physics practically disproves the mechanistic world view. This development in science, however, does not mean that today’s scientific paradigm has no serious challenge to offer the theologian and the philosopher.

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Consider, for instance, the impact of Charles Darwin. He discovered that, when organisms have traits that are hereditary, vital for survival, and capable of mutating randomly, those organisms, as a species, will evolve by natural selection. Since the publication of his theory, the form of explanation he used has been extended in various directions beyond the strictly biological realm. Just as Isaac Newton had given rise to a cultural paradigm, known as Newtonianism, so also Darwin has given rise to Darwinism. Many things can be said about this new paradigm, about how it affects psychology, economics, ethics and other areas, but I want to focus on one issue only. I want to illustrate how this paradigm tends to shift global attention away from what happens to the individual person. It does this, I will argue, by drawing attention to aspects that are, with respect to human beings, either microscopic or macroscopic. In other words, because of this world view, people become engrossed in what happens to the gene or what happens to large groups, of which the individual is just a tiny part, and they tend to forget the individual person as such. Let us consider these two opposing trends in some more detail. Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work on the unit of biological heredity, the gene, was of central importance for the merging of evolutionary theory with molecular biology. Because of this successful merging, some popular-​science writers have gone so far as to say that only genes count. Describing genes as having feelings, wants and desires like humans, they have claimed that genes are literally selfish, having elaborate plans on how best to survive at all costs. On this view, human individuals become mere vehicles for genes. Genes use humans to survive –​and that is all there is to life. This view, although apparently fantastic, can affect fundamental cultural trends because its defenders often present it as based on solid science. Genes become more important than people. Your worth is the worth of the genes you carry, nothing more. For centuries, the dignity of the human individual has been the basic concept for understanding justice within social, legal and cultural interaction. Now, all this has to change. In the words of Immanuel Kant, the human individual should never be considered a means to an end. Now, however, science seems to establish, as a matter of brute fact, that the individual is indeed a means –​a means for genes to propagate. Since this is scientific truth, so the story goes, we just have to accept it. The upshot is therefore unavoidable. The

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evolutionary paradigm makes humans lose their importance and dignity. They lose their faces. Surprisingly, this paradigm has also the opposite effect. It undermines the importance of the individual by pulling towards macroscopic considerations. As explained earlier, the scientific theory of evolution involves the study of changes in traits of organisms through long stretches of time. Its focus is on what happens to large groups in the long run; the values that count are average values. Because of the very nature of the theory, therefore, the main focus of attention starts hovering way above the individual. The theory makes us lose interest in what happens to the individual; and this affects culture in general. A new voice tells us, ‘Attend to the individual’s progress and way of life, and you are losing your time; for all you know, that individual’s struggles and achievements will be neutralized, swallowed up, by opposite trends within the group. What you should consider is what is happening to vast numbers taken together. Hence, forget individual care; embark on population studies’. What has been said so far should not, of course, diminish our genuine appreciation of the scientific theory of evolution as such. The evidential support for this theory within its proper domain is as robust as the support of any other accepted theory. Moreover, its heuristic potential and explanatory power are very impressive. Nevertheless, one needs to stress that the cultural paradigm it has generated so far tends to obscure the dignity and importance of the individual person. This cultural trend needs to be addressed and corrected before it sets in and becomes irreversible, before the human person vanishes completely behind gene talk or statistical tables.

The loss of the art of living A second frontier issue arises also not from current science itself but from what current science generates at the cultural level. Recall first how the various scientific disciplines constitute not a democracy but a hierarchy, the top places being occupied by the mathematical sciences, the so-​called hard sciences. This hierarchy, which is allegedly the only guardian of objectivity and truth, has a significant effect on culture. For instance, the fascination with the mathematical sciences drives ethics towards utilitarianism. It drives

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philosophy of mind towards naturalism or scientism. It tends to divide intellectual activity into two clear camps, hard and soft. Science is hard; literature is soft. Reason is hard; emotion is soft. Empirical is hard; idealistic is soft. Analysis is hard; synthesis is soft. Self-​sufficiency is hard; dialogue is soft. Facts are hard; interpretation is soft. Logical is hard; metaphorical is soft. Mechanical is hard; organic is soft. Objective is hard; personal is soft. The combination of all these trends affects the kind of education students receive at university level. Knowledge transfer is given priority. University education fills students’ minds with descriptions of chemicals and processes, with quantities and equations, with dates and definitions. What is highlighted is objective knowledge. What is neglected is personal life. In academia, questions about what a good life is and how to achieve it, and questions about how to do good and avoid evil, have been exiled. Universities have essentially embraced knowledge and rejected wisdom. While knowledge is the result of a group effort, accumulating within society bit by bit, wisdom, on the contrary, is a personal affair. It is a feature of the individual. There is no stack of wisdom. There is no library of wisdom corresponding to our libraries of knowledge. Each person needs to attain wisdom as an individual achievement, perhaps helped by direct example from others. While knowledge is learnt piecemeal, often in the form of distinct propositions, wisdom is a unifying feature of the person, bringing the various elements of one’s knowledge and the various experiences of one’s life together into a coherent whole. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is a habit of life that unites a reflective attitude with practical concerns. With it, individuals have the skill to evaluate complex situations of life and to attain a good life, given their personal possibilities. While knowledge is often associated with quantity, wisdom is often associated with quality of life.2 The consequences of embracing knowledge and rejecting wisdom can be serious. While globalization favours economic development and context-​ independent knowledge transfer, the art of living a good life is being systematically marginalized. And this creates a frontier issue related to education, a frontier issue that is, just like the one mentioned before, not theoretical but I discuss this further in chapter 6 of Caruana, ‘Science and Virtue:  An Essay on the Impact of the Scientific Mentality on Moral Character’ in New Critical Thinking in Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

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practical. The two issues, in fact, are related. The vanishing of the human individual, through exclusive interest in either the microscopic or the macroscopic level, goes hand in hand with the neglect of the individual’s efforts to realize a good life at the personal level. The fact that the two frontier issues are closely related suggests that there could be a common solution, one that depends on reintroducing within university education the teaching of virtue, by which students can grow to see themselves as valuable and responsible individuals within society and can learn how to achieve a good life.

Possible objections Before spelling out this response in some more detail, it is important to foresee at least two possible objections, one mainly philosophical and the other theological. Let us start with the idea of acquiring knowledge for its own sake. According to a venerable tradition in Western philosophy, wisdom is the seeking of truth for its own sake (called by Aristotle, first philosophy, he prote philosophia). This is distinct from another kind of wisdom that is known as practical wisdom (phronesis). Seeking truth for the sake of some project gives priority to the project rather than to the truth being sought. Hence, this kind of seeking truth cannot be the highest. Only if our attention is absorbed completely by the truth can we be on the path of the highest wisdom, and this happens when truth itself is the end of our search. Moreover, through the centuries after Aristotle, seeking truth for its own sake has become associated with theoretical science. Why, then, should we make universities diminish their teaching of objective theory? Real wisdom lies in the transcending of personal interests and personal problems. It does not lie in being preoccupied with oneself. This objection looks compelling. On further analysis, however, it turns out to be quite harmless. We need to recall that to live a good life is not the same thing as engaging in some mundane project. People concerned with living a good life are engaged in the project of bringing to life what theory delivers, quite literally. They are engaged in the incarnation of contemplation. Recall Plato’s myth of the cave. In this story, there is an interesting detail that is often neglected. A prisoner in a dark, underground cavern is liberated, climbs out of the cave and discovers the true light. He does not, however, remain out there,

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relishing the goodness of truth. Plato continues his story by telling us that the enlightened prisoner makes his way back into the cave and tries to tell his fellow prisoners about his discovery.3 The contemplation of the truth, therefore, is incomplete if it does not return and affect the original state we were in before starting. Plato revisits this idea when discussing the nature of the soul. For him, it is evident that wisdom lies in the harmony that the highest part of the soul establishes between all the other parts of the soul, and eventually with all the bodily faculties and tendencies. Wisdom lies essentially in establishing the right kind of order or harmony. Even Aristotle, in fact, acknowledges that the wise person should not lack the skill of living well.4 My proposed response is, in fact, an invitation to return to Plato, at least on this point, and to give the striving for harmony within the self its due importance. As one Stoic philosopher wrote, ‘just as wood is the material of the carpenter, bronze that of the statue maker, so each individual’s own life is the material of the art of living’.5 A second objection might come from theology. My proposal consists in focusing on the individual, rather than on, for instance, large numbers of individuals. An objector might see this point as going against some basic ideas expressed in the Bible. Consider the attitudes that self-​care can generate: attitudes like spiritual egoism, whereby one is totally absorbed by concerns about one’s own salvation, one’s own excellence, and cares nothing about the salvation of others. Self-​care can generate a spirituality of detachment from the world, of disengagement, of disinterestedness, somewhat like the attitude we see represented by the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It can make people turn their faces away from the kenosis of Christ, downplaying the neighbour’s plight and the self-​giving nature of God revealed in Christ, and it can enslave them instead within pathetic, spiritual navel-​gazing. Such consequences are certainly very serious, especially from a Christian point of view. The idea, therefore, of promoting the skill of living cannot be totally right. This objection has indeed some truth in it. Does it, however, really undermine the proposal? To see why it does not, we can start with Our Lord’s injunction in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’6 This Plato, Republic VII, 516e–​517a. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI, 1140a–​1141a. 5 Epictetus, Dissertationes 1.15.2 6 Mt 7:5 (NIV). 3 4

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directive is undoubtedly about the care of the self. One can therefore detect some tension between this point and the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the one hand, Jesus is telling us to polish up our own interior life, to be genuine, and to consider this task our first priority. On the other hand, he is also telling us that a false sense of self-​concern is deadly, in the spiritual sense, especially when it makes us act like the priest or the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. How can this tension be resolved? For the solution, we need to look at Jesus himself. His life teaches us how to be authentic, even perfect as the Father is perfect, and yet not enclosed within ourselves. Concern with one’s self need not be egocentric. When genuine, this concern should flow out, of its very nature, into concrete action in line with the common good. If I care about whether I am a good person or not, I can offer help to my neighbours where and when they really need it. I  will even be able to help them in a deeper, more enduring way –​help them become good persons. If, on the contrary, I do not care about whether I am a good person or not, I would be blind. I would not even see what my neighbours need. Hence, the individual takes priority. The individual’s virtuous life is the source, not the product, of the community’s wellbeing. This is essentially a New Testament idea. In the mystery of Christ, God has revealed His concern with the welfare of the individual. Christ’s salvific act is God’s personal way of involving himself with humanity. He tore the heavens open and came down. In that act, God highlights his shift in concern. In the Old Testament, the main attention was on the salvation of the chosen people as a whole. In the New Testament, the main attention is on Jesus, and on those who personally, individually, express their faith in him. This is what theologians refer to when they speak of the scandal of particularity, which sets Christianity apart.7 And this point adds considerable support to the proposal put forward in this paper.

Some practical consequences This proposal is mainly concerned with students doing their first degree at university. Fortunately, this sector of society is growing. More and more young people have the opportunity of studying for a degree at university; and For example, Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik IV, 1; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, §15.

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first degrees, let us recall, are not primarily the first step towards a career in research. They are, or should be, in large part a preparation for life. When we say that university education should help students grow in wisdom rather than be satisfied with the mere transfer of knowledge, we are in fact calling for a new attitude. We are urging an updated form of Christian Humanism, which addresses a number of issues simultaneously, issues that are often seen as separate.8 First, the proposal is relevant as regards the information explosion. During these last decades, the amount of accessible information to any individual has increased enormously. But the skill to choose between more valuable and less valuable information has not increased at the same rate. The proposal defended in this paper is meant to deal with precisely this lack. Second, sociologists of religion have identified a rising interest in spirituality across the globe –​spirituality in a very broad sense, including, for instance, white magic, psychic powers, universal energy, Ignatian discernment, mystical union with God and other such topics. The proposal defended in this paper is one way of helping young people bring order, a reasoned order, into this uncharted cultural landscape. Third, the care for creation: the individual’s skill to bring order into his or her life includes growth in the right relation towards the environment.9 Order within the life of the individual overflows and becomes order within the life of the community, and, further afield, order in the life of the global village. On a more practical level, immediate action seems to be needed in three main areas. First of all, a point about science itself:  Christians of all kinds need to desist from demonizing science. They need, rather, to be instruments for the rediscovery of the full richness of the scientific experience. They need to give credit where credit is due; to encourage scientists and help them appreciate the dignity of their vocation; to help bring back into the laboratory the historical and ethical dimension of science; and to recall how science is itself the vehicle of a specific kind of virtue, which may be called heuristic courage. Second, the international community needs to rediscover the idea of transcultural virtues, those that are closely associated with basic, human, biological needs. For this important task, different traditions, different viewpoints, should be consulted  –​the more viewpoints there are, the better the result. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §78. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §37.

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Third, Christianity-​inspired institutions of higher education need to rediscover the importance of their students’ affective dimension. Unfortunately, what normally happens is that the students’ emotional development is never considered part of the aim of university education. Therefore, something on this front needs to be introduced. Firsthand experience of different ways of human living, for instance experiencing the life of the poor, can benefit students enormously by provoking an emotional response, which can later be discussed and evaluated. Some study of literature within an overly technical curriculum may also have an important role to play. It could help to offer a virtual world in which students can be guided to understand their emotional response to various possible human situations. The foregoing arguments point towards the following idea: further international collaboration needs to be sustained to determine more clearly the characteristics of wisdom from the viewpoint of various cultures. One may start by determining a list of transcultural virtues, this being done with due sensitivity towards the culture where the inquiry is situated. The virtues being sought here are those associated closely with the basic, biological features of human beings, such as parental care, growing up, dealing with authority, facing the prospect of death and so on. This list can then be used to formulate efficient strategies for the teaching of wisdom as discussed in this paper. The hope is that the international pooling of resources on these issues will show convergence, and that the results will be beneficial for the globalized world of the twenty-​first century. Such a project, in line with the basic inspiration behind the 1599 influential Jesuit educational programme, the Ratio Studiorum, can be the beginning of the compilation of a practical handbook dealing with student character formation and intended for university lecturers in Jesuit institutions worldwide.10

A previous version of this paper was one of the presentations at the international conference entitled ‘Shaping the Future: Networking Jesuit Higher Education for a Globalizing World’, held at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, in April 2010.

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The Practical Concept of God Terrance Walsh SJ

Damn and hell, I can abstract from everything but not from myself; I can’t even forget myself when I sleep.1 The commentators say about this that, ‘correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive.’2

Introduction My life matters to me; its presence presses upon me  –​in the weight of my body, the unease of my mind, its projects, moods and anxieties. Its mattering is mostly unreflective, immediate, urgent, inescapable. I  would like to think that your life matters to me just as much, but that would be patronizing. If there is a legitimate sense to that thought, then it must be achieved through considerable effort by a being that is by nature a self-​centred and self-​regarding life form. Why care so deeply, why do our lives matter when so much goes wrong with them and loss is inevitable? Are we confronting a non-​rational instinct of self-​preservation? Hence we must care. We have no choice  –​a natural necessity from which we escape by thinking ourselves free under a conception of a moral duty to remain in existence. I think the motivation behind this way of thinking and formulating the question of human meaning is, if not entirely forgotten, then at least Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, IA 161 (1836). Franz Kafka, The Trial, ­chapter 9.

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largely disregarded by religion and a good deal of philosophy, especially normative ethics and philosophy of religion. 3 Its point of departure shares methodological kinship with the general form of contemporary naturalism, though as will become clear, not with all of naturalism’s ontological commitments. My premise is that practical reasoning is a natural form of agency that seeks to maximize actions to produce the best result most efficiently for the agent. Although this common sense view of rationality functions successfully most of the time, it occasionally suffers breakdowns that force other conceptions of agency upon us. For instance, the intuitively compelling thought that some actions are wrong in themselves and no amount of efficacy to produce the best result will mitigate that evaluation. This is a very powerful disruption of practical rationality, but it can fit comfortably within naturalism  –​ still the disruption forces reflection down a different path. The fact that a certain natural way of thinking about rational agency can be disrupted by other forms of thinking (say, deontological) is to me very significant. It might indicate that there is no perfectly harmonious way to understand ourselves as rational agents.4

From theoretical to practical reason We do not know how to think about God. Whether we once knew, but have forgotten, is another matter. What is true: we are no longer thinking God –​ no longer capable of a thinking that would think God. The problem with the attempt to think God first became explicit in Descartes’s recognition that to approach God under the guise of ‘some god’ (aliquis deus) was to leave God undetermined and hence unthought and subject to whatever

Notable exceptions are Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), Michael Thompson’s Life and Action:  Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2012) and Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) –​a superb essay in contemporary axiology. 4 Some of the best recent work on deontology and consequentialism explores this tension in our self-​u nderstanding as agents:  See Christine Korsgaard, ‘On Having a Good’, Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, 89, 3 (July 2014): 405–​29; Self-​Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); and Samuel Scheffler, ‘Agent-​ Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues’ in Samuel Scheffler, Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3

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preconceptions we might entertain.5 But if thinking is a determination of its object by means of concepts, every thought of God is already a determination of God that negates the infinity of the divine being. The practical concept of God avoids this dilemma by refusing to treat God as a thing that has to be determined or can be determined by theoretical reason. The aim of a practical concept is not to determine the divine being in itself, but to explore the possibility of a coherent and concrete approach to God based on human agency and the freedom to strive after what we most care about and desire. Nearly a century ago, Whitehead wrote in Religion in the Making: ‘To-​day there is but one religious dogma in debate: What do you mean by “God”? And in this respect, to-​day is like all its yesterdays. This is the fundamental religious dogma, and all other dogmas are subsidiary to it.’6 We should, perhaps, understand his use of the term dogma in light of how in the same text he clarifies the meaning of God as an agent of value: ‘the purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world’.7 Of course, to associate God with purpose and value is to move thought away from metaphysical speculation and in the direction of freedom and action. It is to think God, as Kant advocated, from the standpoint of practical reason, that is, of the will and how we use freedom to achieve our ends, one of which is happiness. For Kant, like Whitehead, laid claim to a groundbreaking insight about how philosophy in the modern world could best engage the topic of God and religion and this is what I want to think about in this chapter. I will argue that it is necessary in the contemporary situation of unbelief in God and indifference to religion to move from theoretical reason’s idea of God to working out the meaning of God from a practical point of view, by which I mean from the primacy of freedom over truth. Although I believe this kind of revision in method is radical, it is not at all novel. Yet, what could The premise about what ‘God’ means, Descartes says, is a ‘preconceived opinion’ (praeconcepta opinio): ‘it occurred to me that perhaps some God [aliquis Deus] could have given me a nature such that I  was deceived even in matters which seemed most evident. But whenever my preconceived belief in the supreme power of God comes to mind, I cannot but admit that it would be easy for him, if he so desired, to bring it about that I go wrong even in those matters which I think I see utterly clearly with my mind’s eye.’ See J. Cottingham, ed. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (with Objections and Replies)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), III (36). 6 A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 56. 7 Ibid., p. 87 5

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it possibly mean to think the concept of God with practical reason, that is, from the point of view of human freedom and agency? Such a project will rightly provoke suspicions of a reduction of the meaning of God to a mere function of human will and desire. This chapter assumes that risk. Heidegger was perhaps the most famous of modern philosophers to place practical reason at the forefront of his project to dethrone speculative reason’s monopoly on the question of the meaning of being. It should strike us still, I  think, as unsettling to encounter Heidegger’s insistence that we can understand the meaning of being only from within the projects and concerns of our concrete existence in the world, rather than from the philosophical theories of a detached cogito. Heidegger owed the inspiration for this radical departure from traditional metaphysics to Aristotle’s reflections about the best good for human beings in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the Ethics Aristotle rejects Plato’s intention to treat the idea of the good as an object of contemplation (‘good is not something common answerable to one Idea’8). Aristotle constantly asked his students: what kind of knowledge are we after in the study of ethics? Not theory, but action, namely, practical knowledge of those actions that will make us better human beings,9 and this would be the highest of all goods achievable by action.10 In the contemporary pursuit of happiness, we necessarily think about ‘the best good achievable by action’ in light of freedom. Consequently, I will argue that to think God from the practical standpoint implies thinking God in relation to human freedom as the condition of the possibility of human flourishing. But why should God enter such a reflection on freedom, let alone the very practice of freedom? Does freedom, understood as autonomy, not demand the absence of divine influence on human action? My point of departure for answering this objection will be Kant’s insight that freedom can be causally effective in the phenomenal world. But this claim is counter-​intuitive in a world where causality means mechanistic determination. To explain how freedom is possible, Kant simply appeals to its noumenal dimension that cannot be comprehended mechanistically. This

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (henceforth NE), I, 6. Ibid., II, 2. 10 Ibid., NE, I, 4. 8 9

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is obviously not sufficient. My gambit is to ignore the theoretical weakness of Kant’s account in favour of a purely practical account.11 Against this background, I want to argue that there are two ways of understanding the noumenal dimension of freedom: (1) as moral and (2) as religious. The fundamental challenge of Kant’s theory of freedom is his claim that moral freedom (understood as autonomy) is not only independent of religion, but also sufficient for a morally good life. My aim is to integrate these aspects by means of Kierkegaard’s religious understanding of freedom as self-​constitution in relation to God: ‘Oh, to what degree human beings would become –​human and lovable beings –​if they would become single individuals before God’.12 As will become clear in the final section of this chapter, Kierkegaard’s singularity thesis, how a human being becomes the specific person he is, is central for my understanding of practical agency and freedom and how they relate to the concept of God. The point is not that freedom comes into existence because of God, but that it can exist only in some kind of relation to God. But even this modest claim is in need of qualification, for I do not wish to argue that a person can be free only in an explicitly religious relation. ‘Before God’ perhaps appears to reflection only by means of interpretation of other phenomena, that is, as an inference from an experience of freedom.13

Kant sets forth the dilemma of moral freedom succinctly and seeks a solution by an appeal to a ‘fact’ connected to our consciousness of freedom: ‘This Analytic shows that pure reason can be practical –​that is, can of itself, independently of anything empirical, determine the will –​and it does so by a fact [ein Faktum] in which pure reason in us proves itself actually practical, namely autonomy in the principle of morality by which reason determines the will to deeds. At the same time it shows that this fact [dieses Faktum] is inseparably connected with, and indeed identical with, consciousness of freedom of the will, whereby the will of a rational being that, as belonging to the sensible world cognizes itself as, like other efficient causes, necessarily subject to laws of causality, yet in the practical is also conscious of itself on another side, namely as a being in itself, conscious of its existence as determinable in an intelligible order of things –​conscious of this not, indeed, by a special intuition of itself but according to certain dynamic laws that can determine its causality in the sensible world; for it has been sufficiently proved elsewhere that freedom, if it is attributed to us, transfers us into an intelligible order of things.’ Consciousness of our freedom’s causal efficacy in the phenomenal world introduces a radical shift in perspective on ourselves as rational agents. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, §42 in The Cambridge Companion to the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 173–​4. An excellent exposition of Kant’s argument can be found in Jens Timmermann’s ‘Reversal or Retreat? Kant’s Deductions of Freedom and Morality’, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrews Reath and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 73–​89. 12 Kierkegaard, ‘On My Work as an Author’, in The Point of View, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 11. 13 A theoretical justification of this claim could be teased out of Kant’s argument for moral freedom as a ‘fact’ of our consciousness. But, as Kant observes, this fact depends upon a shift in the agent’s self-​consciousness. See fn 11. 11

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A freshman at Emory University, who had heard the American short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, speak at the school, wrote to her seeking help with his faith, which he feared he was losing. She responded, I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this . . . One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true. Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, etc., that they cease to look for God in other ways. Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, ‘Give alms.’ He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don’t get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way. The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life.14

Like O’Connor, I do not want to exclude intellectual reflection –​what I have been calling theoretical reason –​from our thinking about God (‘the intellectual difficulties have to be met’). Yet her insight into a serious religious life, one that can appear to make sense and matter to us only from the point of view of action that opens up a world and allows us to engage it in freedom, begins by giving priority to the practical over the theoretical as the object of thought. Do I give alms or not? That is, do I choose to open my life to others in a way that demands freedom, namely, detachment from myself and my possessions? I want to begin by calling into question the coherence of the theoretical concept of God –​what I will expound below as Perfect Being Theology (hereafter PBT). It has a long history, with roots in Greek thought, but I will cite its most obvious and uncontroversial beginning in Augustine’s conception of a being of unsurpassable value. Augustine writes that when we hear the word ‘deus’, we immediately think of a supreme being: 14

Sally Fitzgerald, ed. The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970), pp. 476–​7.

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when the sound of the word deus strikes the ears of anyone who knows Latin, that person is prompted to think of a kind of nature that is utterly surpassing [excellentissimam] and immortal. For when someone thinks of that one God of gods . . . one thinks in such a way that one’s thought strains to reach something than which there is nothing better (aliquid quo nihil melius sit).15

From the point of view of human agency, the theoretical conception of God as the Perfect Being is not only external to our actions and motivations, but it is also alienating from the conception of the self that we constitute for ourselves in agency.16 Seen from the practical point of view of action in the world, ‘perfect being’ does not matter. PBT spectacularly fails to capture how human beings actually live and the myriad concrete ways in which some sort of divine being might begin to attain importance. If God matters to us, then such a being can only appear to do so in light of the general movement of mattering and caring about ourselves in the world. Of course, to situate ‘God’ within the development of temporal self-​ consciousness is to risk the reduction of God to a function of human self-​ interest and concern. This is but one side of alienation, and in this respect has the potential to alienate our idea of God from the actual being of God.17 Seen from the other side of alienation, however, the God of theoretical reasoning estranges practical agents from their own productivity and thereby estranges the divine being from the only human action [praxis] that finally matters to us: self-​constitution as rationally free beings. Hence if a theoretically perfect being reigns supreme in religious consciousness, then our practical concerns encounter an obstacle that necessarily impedes, even repels, the task of self-​ constitution.18 Marx famously highlighted the latter aspect of human alienation: Religion is indeed the self-​consciousness and self-​awareness of man who either has not yet attained to himself or has already lost himself again. But

De doctina christiana I. 6.6–​7.7; cited by Scott MacDonald, ‘The Divine Nature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001), p. 79 (I have slightly altered the translation). 16 The influence of Christine Korsgaard is widespread in what follows. See especially her Self-​ Constitution, ­chapter 5, ‘Autonomy and Efficacy’, which presents her defence and expansion of Kant’s thinking on freedom and practical reason. 17 There is clearly a possibility of accepting a ‘left-​w ing’ Hegelian point of view on God and religion. This was the case for Feuerbach and Marx. 18 I think this is the point of Thomas Nagel’s enigmatic remark that not only does he not believe in God, but more significantly he hopes there is no God. See his ‘Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion’, in The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), ­chapter 7; and 15

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man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produces religion’s inverted attitude to the world, because they are an inverted world themselves. Religion is the general theory of this world.19

Religion is the general theory of the present world alienated from its human foundation by economic and social relations based on the accumulation of power. Religion is just the theoretical expression or ‘logic’ of the existential alienation of the human being from his concrete social essence. This alienation exists, however, not primarily in thought or abstractions, but in the real activity of society itself, especially in its productive relations.20 The alienation of the self from its human essence necessarily compels (whether consciously or unconsciously) resolution in a theoretical justification of human suffering.21 I want to propose a more radical thesis: the religious conceptualization of the world (as exemplified by PBT) manifests a double alienation: first, of the human being from his own agency and practical self and, second, an alienation of God from God’s own agency and freedom.22 Marx importantly takes from Hegel the thought that it is characteristic of alienated consciousness to abstract from its own concreteness to posit spiritual or ideal representations of the fully human condition it had left behind. Hegel would differ, of course, about the conditions that allow for this activity of spirit as well as about its value. Nonetheless, he would agree with Marx’s insistence that philosophical

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Guy Kahane, ‘Should We Want God To Exist?’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82, 3 (2011). Karl Marx, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:  Introduction’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 63. Marx’s idea is simply that the organization of production in society affects the manner, in which we relate to ourselves and to others. It restricts our imaginative capacity to think about other ways of relating and acting in the world. In other words, alienated labour robs us of our world and ourselves. It is thus naïve to assume that of the great variety of productive work, it is the intellectual kind alone that escapes these fundamental structures of human existence. I continue to use the language of Marx here, but his understanding of alienation as a loss of the authentic human ‘essence’ needs to be revised as the recent book by Rahel Jaeggi masterfully demonstrates. She renews the concept of alienation by interpreting it as a disruption of our appropriation of the world and of ourselves. I would just add to her thesis my own not yet fully thought out claim that without a free individuating relation to God, we will not be able to appropriate the world, precisely as our world. See Jaeggi’s Alienation, trans. F. Neuhouser and A. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Admittedly I am making a somewhat obscure inference here: if PBT alienates the human subject from his concrete being, then ipso facto it alienates God from God’s concrete being. This is the case because if human agency reduces to productivity, then the divine being ceases to possess a

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criticism must become practical, that is, it must engage the alienation at its root, where it actually comes into being: ‘The demand to give up the illusions about [the human condition] is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion . . . The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act, and fashion his own reality as a disillusioned man come to his senses.’23 Kierkegaard is a paradigm of the disillusioned man come to his senses, who presented alienation of the human from the divine as a spiritual trial (Anfægtelse) that results from the attempt to relate the total insignificance of one’s finite concerns to an infinite, supreme being: Spiritual trial is the divine repulsion in the quid nimis and can never fail to appear if one is to exist religiously, consequently as an actual definite particular man –​for example, I, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, thirty-​five years old, of slight build, master of arts, brother-​in-​law of businessman Lund, living on such and such a street –​in short, this whole concretion of trivialities, that I dare relate myself to God, refer all the affairs of my life to him. No man has ever lived who has truly done this without discovering with horror the horror of spiritual trial, that he might be venturing too boldly, the whole thing might really be lunacy.24

How can the concrete and thoroughly trivial content of our finite lives matter to an infinitely perfect being the way it matters to us? It is not just a question of significance versus insignificance, but of the possible grounds of the relation itself. How is a relation possible to an infinite, perfect being? Let me clarify more precisely what I have been calling ‘perfect being theology’. This is a theoretical approach to God in the philosophy of religion that is (1) a rational attempt to describe God, one that (2) must inevitably confront problems of a logical, epistemological and metaphysical nature. Because the word ‘god’ does not straightforwardly refer to some object in the world, there arises the difficulty of predication and justification of any claim to knowledge about what that object means (both knowledge of what it is and whether it is). free relation to the human: God is fully free to be God only in relation to the fully free human being and such a relation cannot be created ex nihilo –​it is an achievement of practical reason. 23 See Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 64. 24 Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) 4: 4372 (X1 A22). And see Simon Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self Before God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011) 136 ff.

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Thomas Williams is correct in placing the origin of this kind of philosophy of religion in the practical theological urgency to justify religious discourse about a transcendent being:  ‘attempts to resolve the problem of describing God are ultimately efforts to “save the appearances”: to accommodate within a philosophically defensible framework both the data of what are taken to be divinely revealed texts and the linguistic practices of believers’.25 But, the theoretical justification of religious practices necessarily has a life of its own due to the demands of the logical, epistemological and metaphysical problems. Brian Leftow is one of the most prominent exponents of PBT working in philosophy of religion today. Similar to Thomas Morris, there is an indication that his point of departure, namely, Anselm’s definition of ‘the greatest possible being’, is the result of a decision. In other words, PBT is one way among many other possible ways to describe God. There is, however, as Morris points out, a strong intuitive appeal in the notion that whatever we might mean by the word ‘god’, there cannot be any other being greater than God, because that would mean that we had not been describing God in the first place. Further, logically associated with the premise of the maximal greatness or goodness of the divine being is the thought that the properties we think belong to this being must all be intrinsic properties, how God is in himself, and not in relation to external things. According to Leftow, ‘[Anselm thinks] Perfect-​being theology tells us about God, not things outside God. Roughly speaking, Anselm is trying to find descriptions that apply to God and would still have described Him even if only He existed.’26 But there are at least three questionable consequences of this position: (a) treating God conceptually as having intrinsic greatness-​bestowing properties isolates the divine being from everything else conceivable; (b) it also encourages the discipline of philosophy of religion to meditate solely on those conceptual properties of the divine being that reason alone can determine without input from religious or moral experience of human ­ beings; (c)  a ­paradox follows:  if God is describable in Anselm’s apt phrase as ‘than which nothing greater can be thought’, then we stand the chance of not having described God as He is by means of our representations of Thomas Williams, ‘Describing God’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. Robert Pasnau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 749. Brian Leftow, ‘Anselm’s Perfect-​Being Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, ed. Brian Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 134.

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perfect-​properties.27 But given these three methodological consequences, something interesting and not entirely salutary happens to philosophy of religion: what was heretofore a relatively modest project, to clarify and explain certain theological concepts and claims (as I  have stated, how human language can describe God, i.e. how substantive human concepts apply to God), now takes on a life of its own. Descartes initiated modern philosophy precisely by exploiting a philosophically constructed idea of God. He moved from a descriptive and explanatory method to a speculative and constructive method in order to determine intrinsic properties (essence) of the divine being in and for itself.28 Descartes thus advances from Anselm’s scripturally based conception of a being ‘than which nothing greater can be thought’ to a full-​blown metaphysical conception. Both Morris and Leftow want to maintain scriptural justifications for PBT, but the metaphysical idea of God is logically independent. Morris expresses the thesis succinctly: ‘God is a being with the greatest possible array of compossible great-​making properties.’29 But the key question is the relation between PBT and its supposed scriptural warrants. Both Morris and Leftow present vigorous arguments to anchor PBT within Scripture’s descriptions of the divine being, but at the same time defend the need to think and go beyond scriptural data. As Morris admits, ‘we inevitably ask questions the biblical documents were not designed to answer’.30 Hence, the Christian philosopher must go beyond the biblical portrayal of God in order to construct ‘a comprehensive Christian world-​view’.31 Leftow offers the strongest defence of Scripture as the foundation the method of PBT. I want to examine briefly Leftow’s paper, ‘Why Perfect Being Theology?’ as a defence not only of the predication of perfection to God, but also of PBT’s method, which he traces back to Augustine and Anselm. Leftow places his

Leftow rightly argues that according to Anselm’s definition, God must always be greater than can be described, ‘if He were not . . . we could describe a greater, namely, a God so great as to be beyond our powers of description’ (Ibid., p. 141). 28 Because ‘God’ appears in this guise or mask (i.e. not as Himself –​quid est –​but as an other), Descartes will construct what ‘God’ means from evidence that the cogito’s self-​reflection will provide. That is, he does not begin with the general meaning of what the word means (Aquinas) or with the highest thought he can conceive (Augustine, Anselm), but with the thinking of the Ego in search of a starting point for knowledge that will defeat skepticism. See Jean-​Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), esp. Parts IV and V. 29 Thomas Morris, Our Idea of God. An Introduction to Philosophical Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 35. 30 Ibid., p. 30–​1. 31 Ibid., p. 31 27

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method within the tradition of what he calls ‘S-​PBT’, that is, a theological tradition that ‘tries to show what authoritative statements about God’s perfection entail’.32 These statements stem from Scripture and unambiguously assert an understanding of God as the supreme being, greater than every other being in the cosmos and so forth. Hence, PBT simply follows the logic of conceptual entailment –​filling out rationally the picture of God that scripture provides. Hence metaphysical speculation about the being and nature of God is warranted by biblical descriptions and names of the divine being: ‘the Lord can do all things’; ‘Lord nothing is too hard for you’; ‘nothing is impossible with God’; ‘God is perfect in knowledge’; ‘His understanding has no limit’ and so on.33 Of course, the obvious objection is that metaphysical speculation is completely alien to the Semitic mind and that biblical writers would have had no idea of what later philosophical theologians were talking about. In addition, biblical writers might find such abstract speculations not only mystifying, but also contrary to their own spiritual and religious conceptions of their mission. Where does pure rational extension of biblical language lead us? Here’s Leftow’s justification: A Psalmist asserts that God’s understanding has no limit. We needn’t speculate about exactly what he meant by this. For it’s a safe bet too that he would have accepted as representing at least part of it that what it really is to have understanding with no limits is true of God. So too, a Psalmist who asserts that God is morally perfect doesn’t have a full ethical theory in mind. But surely he means at least that whatever perfect goodness really is, that’s what God has. If Scriptural authors intend at least this by what they say, what they say licenses S-​PBT even as its results far outstrip anything they’re likely to have understood their own words imply.34

In contrast to PBT, practical reason does not face the dilemma of abstract descriptions of God or how predication should begin, simply because it Brian Leftow, ‘Why Perfect Being Theology?’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62, 2 (2011): 108. 33 Ibid., pp. 106–​7. 34 Ibid., p.  110. By S-​PBT he simply means how Scripture provides warrants for metaphysical expansion. The questionable claim, however, is that the scriptural writer could intelligibly grasp the statement ‘whatever perfect goodness really is, that’s what God has’ (my emphasis). 32

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makes no claim to begin with God. Rather, its point of departure is the concrete existing human being. It begins with existence by asking a first-​person question: What matters to me? What’s worth striving for? What is the best result I can expect in light of the actual conditions of my life? I want to suggest that when we begin philosophical reflection from the perspective of rational agency alone, our conception of God changes dramatically. Consider the following thought experiment:  (1)  Imagine the life of a sincere religious believer, what her concerns are, what she desires and how she acts to achieve her aims as a purposive agent. Naturally for such a believer, God plays a central role (2) There occurs for whatever reason an event in her life that completely destroys her religious beliefs, particularly belief in the existence of God (3) Now let’s compare the two cases: what has changed besides the presence of belief? It is likely that outside of her religious beliefs and feelings about their loss nothing would have changed. What matters in (1) will continue to matter in (2) even without belief in God. Her reasons for living a good, morally responsible life, a life of compassion, care and commitment to family, friends and a wider community will continue to be reasons to her. Life would not come to an end; meaning, purpose and value would continue to hold her in existence and motivate her actions. My point has nothing to do with the nature of God or with religious belief, but simply with the immanent intelligibility of life and existence in the finite world –​the nature and value of practical reason. But this thought experiment presents a paradox to our practical thinking about God: God in (1), the life of the authentic believer, was not just one more meaningful piece of a generally valuable life. God was the ‘absolute’ horizon within which everything particular had value and purpose. Consequently, it should follow that in (2), this believer’s world would fall apart, but it doesn’t: the ‘absolute’ falls out of the picture completely, but without destroying the value and meaning of the whole. This paradox is the motivation for the following reflections on human agency and self-​constitution. The integrated life of (1)  is the result not of God’s intervention in the world, but of the person’s self-​constitution as a whole person. Autonomy, in the strong Kantian sense I want to develop, allows the person to continue to create and discover sources of value and meaning after the disappearance of God from her world. Once I have answered the key question, how does this happen? I will be able to return to the practical relation to God.

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Christine Korsgaard’s recent work to justify Kantian normativity as arising necessarily from self-​constitution provides an answer. She has argued in a series of influential papers that we are among the animals for whom things matter and as a result things can go well or badly for us. You are the kind of entity for whom things can be good or bad. This is one of the most important facts about you. It provides you with the grounds for taking a passionate interest in your own life, for you are deeply concerned that things should go well for you. Presumably, you also want to do well, but that may be in part because you think that doing well is good for you, and that your life would be impoverished if you did not.35

If nothing at all mattered, our agency would decay, our wills would slumber, stirred only by the pure necessity of action and survival. But we do act purposively; we are immediately affected by objects of desire, which we then wish to acquire and continue to enjoy. Since we are beings for whom life matters, this necessarily entails that we care about what is good for us and what is best for us to do. Kant argued that this is just what it means to have practical reason (i.e. a will): we make judgments about what is good and that means we subsume the object of our desire under the concept of the good –​desiring something and judging it to be good are identical. Of course further deliberation is needed in order to consider if our representation of the good would be really good for us and if it is at all practicable within the conditions of our lives. [Reflexivity] sets us a problem no other animal has. It is the problem of the normative. For our capacity to turn our attention on to our own mental activities is also a capacity to distance ourselves from them, and to call them into question. I perceive, and I find myself with a powerful impulse to believe. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance.36

This reflective distancing of rational animals enables them to govern themselves and that means to choose the principles that will determine their wills to act in certain ways. But this is just what Kant means when in the ‘formula of humanity’, he defines the human subject as an end in itself. And this is how we constitute an identity for ourselves because identity is just the view Korsgaard, ‘On Having a Good’, p. 1. Christine Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 93.

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or conception I have of myself under which I value (or fail to value) myself as a rational agent. Harry Frankfurt’s seminal paper, ‘On the Importance of What We Care About’ adds another dimension to Korsgaard’s analysis. We can rank the things that matter to us and judge what is good for ourselves in light of their importance to us. What importantly matters to us makes a real difference to our lives, and not simply in a contingent sense of adding amounts of satisfaction or pleasure to our lives. Since we identify with what we care about, we define ourselves specifically as persons for whom some things matter and other things matter more because they are more important to us –​our identity hangs on them. Frankfurt points out a striking feature of such caring, what he calls ‘volitional necessity’. He means that some of the things that matter most to us are not completely under our control. He cites Luther’s remark as a clear instance of volitional necessity: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’37 It is not just the importance of the object, but the manner of caring that makes doing otherwise ‘unthinkable’. Luther certainly had the rational capacity to do otherwise; what he lacked was the will to go against what mattered so greatly to him just because of his self-​identification with it. The reason a person does not experience the force of volitional necessity as alien or as external to himself, then, is that it coincides with –​and is, indeed, partly constituted by –​desires which are not merely his own but with which he actively identifies himself. Moreover, the necessity is to a certain extent self-​imposed. It is generated when someone requires himself to avoid being guided in what he does by any forces other than those by which he most deeply wants to be guided.38

This leads to the essential point about volitional necessity. Because it is a self-​ imposed necessity, the agent experiences it not as coercive, but as liberating. Paradoxically volitional necessity is both self-​imposed and imposed involuntarily since our wills are not entirely independent in choosing what is important. This is a curious fact about the will and agency in general. But why is this experienced positively as liberating? Frankfurt argues that it is an ancient Harry Frankfurt, ‘On the Importance of what We Care About’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 86. 38 Ibid., p. 87. 37

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religious and moral belief that we can be liberated through a power not in our control. He provides two examples: our rationality and our capacity to love. How do we experience freedom in logic and love? When a person is responding to a perception of something as rational or as beloved, his relationship to it tends towards selflessness. His attention is not merely concentrated upon the object; it is somehow fixed or seized by the object. The object captivates him . . . Why is it that we find ourselves to be most fully realized, and consider that we are at our best, when –​through reason or through love –​we have lost or escaped from ourselves?39

Freedom is the realization of the essence of caring for things beyond the self –​ it is the capacity to exist beyond the confines of subjective desire and to be in relation to something that defines and constitutes the self.40 But if mattering is indeed this paradoxical expression of freedom, it should not imply that we are free to find anything at all worthy of care. Frankfurt concludes: ‘Accordingly, it may be useful to inquire into what makes something worth caring about –​ that is, what conditions must be satisfied if something is to be suitable or worthy as an ideal or as an object of love –​and into how a person is to decide, from among the various things worth caring about, which to care about.’41 Hence, the normative question necessarily appears: I am affected by many things that I care about and I care about them because they affect me deeply –​they matter. But how am I to choose among them, if not all of them can be pursued by action? Should I care so much about a given object that has become supremely important to me? Frankfurt’s theory of volitional necessity sets a significant limitation upon the scope of our normative agency. Here we encounter a significant disruption of the Kantian conception of self-​constitution.

The paradox of rational agency and the question of God I cannot present a complete interpretation of the theme of practical reason in the writings of Kierkegaard, but only a brief indication of his central claim Ibid., p. 89. This is what Scheffler has recently called the ‘nonexperientialist’ aspect of value: ‘Something that will not happen until after our deaths can still matter or be important to us. And this in turn implies that things other than our own experiences matter to us.’ See Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 19. 41 Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 91. 39

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that finite existence necessarily moves in the direction of a relation to an absolute Other, without which the freedom to become who one is would not be possible.42 I begin with my own restatement of what I take to be the essential paradox of Kierkegaard’s conception of the freedom to become a self: what importantly matters to me is my practical agency, my free self-​relation that establishes me as an end in myself, the origin of all my ends. This relation constitutes my identity as a rational agent. It is what matters most to me in life because it is the condition of anything at all mattering. But for Kierkegaard, the state of being an end in oneself places impossible demands upon the agent, in fact the very attempt to achieve it is the ‘formula of despair’. An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself –​this is the formula for all despair.43

But why should one want to be rid of the self? Kierkegaard equates being an end in oneself with the task of becoming an individual. In the preface to Sickness Unto Death, he writes:  ‘it is Christian heroism  –​a rarity, to be sure –​to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility’.44 The key term that distinguishes the Christian attempt to become a real self from secular attempts is ‘wholly’. By this Kierkegaard means that to become the only self that you can in fact become, you must accomplish something heroic, for becoming a true self demands singularity. To become this particular individual unlike anyone else is to be wholly oneself, as opposed to taking bits and pieces of an identity from other cultural models. Why is this heroic? Kierkegaard tells us: one becomes a concrete singular only ‘before God’.45 This topic is treated fully by Simon Podmore in Kierkegaard Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death (hereafter SUD), ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 19–​20 (emphasis added). 44 Ibid., p. 5. 45 The author of the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to ponder the terror of such isolation before God:  ‘At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I  will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” ’ The words “once more” [ἔτι ἅπαξ] indicate the 42

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The premise of Kierkegaard’s argument is that becoming a self is an inescapable process of human existence; indeed one way or another we all become selves. The question is how successful are we at becoming wholly ourselves without cutting and pasting identities from other sources.46 It is essential to realize that despair is a necessary moment of becoming a singular individual –​all becoming must pass through despair. In Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard succinctly defines it: ‘despair is the limit: here and no further’.47 Despair in its first and positive manifestation, then, is coming face to face with the futility of self-​constitution by means of rational agency. One finds oneself with a successfully formed worldly identity and the impossibility of becoming any other truer self beyond this present factual self. Despair is the stark realization that I myself have become the limit to my own becoming –​I am not able to get out of my own way. Alistair Hannay analyzes the desire ‘to be rid of the self’ in the following way: ‘it is a response to whatever it is about one’s self that makes one unhappy being it, its particular defects, its contingent historical situation, the human condition as such, or certain demands implicit in the notion of selfhood’.48 Kierkegaard outlines three forms of despair: (1) ‘In despair not to will to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strict sense)’; (2) ‘in despair not to will to be oneself’; (3) ‘in despair to will to be oneself’.49 There is a clear development and progression within the stages of despair from unconscious self-​constitution to self-​conscious willing against the self –​all identifiable as moments of despair: (1) despair is implicit in the thought that I do not want to be otherwise; I am satisfied with my life and attached to my worldly identity; (2) here I experience my worldly identity as explicitly finite –​a limit beyond which I cannot develop, I cannot will; and (3) I will to be my true self, but despair about attaining its eternal substance: whatever this self might be, it can never be created or constructed by me, hence I resist the ‘power’ in which this eternal self rests: removing of what can be shaken –​that is, created things –​so that what cannot be shaken may remain. See Hebrews 12, 26–​7. This is exactly why Kierkegaard writes ‘heroic’. 46 Aristotle would characterize this construction of a self as technê as opposed to praxis, or an action done for its own sake. I will argue that self-​constitution is a special kind of action undertaken for its own sake –​for its intrinsic excellence. See Nicomachean Ethics VI, 5 (1140a-​b). 47 Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 61. 48 Alistair Hannay, ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 332. 49 Kierkegaard, SUD, p. 13.

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So he despairs. In contrast to the despair of self-​assertion, his despair is despair in weakness, a suffering of the self . . . He perceives that abandoning the self is a transaction . . . reflection helps him to understand that there is much he can lose without losing the self . . . Because to a certain degree he has separated his self from externalities, because he has a dim idea that there may even be something eternal in the self.50

The person suffering level (3) despair has obviously made great strides in self-​ consciousness: I realize that I can lose my entire worldly identity without losing my true self. I may lose this or that piece of my cultural identity, but I, whoever I am, still remain. Yet I remain in despair because of the impossibility of actualizing this true self by my own acts of rational agency. Whatever faith in the eternal might be, it is definitely not a product of rational self-​ reflection. To summarize the three types: (1) despair about the self I am not conscious of; (2) despair of the self that refuses to accept the true self; and (3) despair of the self I will but will in a negative way and not ‘before God’.51 Precisely in the act of wanting to become my unique self, I  recognize it as impossible. Consequently, the self in despair is always building only castles in the air, is only shadowboxing. All these imaginatively constructed virtues make it look splendid . . . Yes, they really do, and the basis of the whole thing is nothing. In despair the self wants to enjoy the total satisfaction of making itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself; it wants to have the honour of this poetic, masterly construction, the way it has understood itself. And yet in the final analysis, what it understands by itself is a riddle; in the very moment when it seems that the self is closest to having the building completed, it can arbitrarily dissolve the whole thing into nothing.52

This last point is crucial: if the self I have constructed through rational agency is truly of my own making (Korsgaard’s autonomy), then it necessarily is a construction standing over against the eternal. Consequently, this temporal self is purely contingent and can quickly appear to the practical agent as nothing at all –​‘castles in the air’. Ibid., p. 54–​5. Of this form of despair, Kierkegaard writes: ‘all despair ultimately can be traced back to and be resolved in it’; Ibid., p. 14. 52 Ibid., pp. 69–​70. 50 51

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Despair as a self-​relation cannot escape its own sterility without a third element, namely, the power that established the relation in the first place. But there is a problem with Kierkegaard’s positing of despair in SUD II (‘Despair Is Sin’) in an explicitly theological context. Kierkegaard claims that in all forms of despair there is spiritual resistance to the divine establishing power of the self-​relation. But this is a question begging account that sets itself above all criticism, since every objection to it can be subsumed under the notion of spiritual resistance to God’s power. Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something –​every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically –​every such existence is nevertheless despair.53

Hannay comments: These murky selves that see themselves in abstract universal terms are not selves standing before God. They are not selves at all in Kierkegaard’s sense  . . . they do indeed see themselves as alone, singular; but then they deny they are related to God. They ‘want to be themselves,’ but this wanting is a form of despair precisely because it excludes the thought of being established by a ‘power’ . . . they still lack the idea of standing before God.54

But if this is true, then apparently many of us human beings are not selves, but exist in some sort of denial about who we really are. I don’t find this to be a very plausible account insofar as anyone, who does not consciously exist before God, must be in despair. For despair could exist not due to a lack of a God relation, but because of the paradox of practical agency. Obviously more ought and can be added to clarify what Kierkegaard means by ‘before God’, but at least this much can be said in its favour: (1) I cannot be a singular self only before myself. I take this to mean that a pure immediate self-​relation will never constitute an identity worth having. Why? (2) Because existing merely Ibid., p. 46. Hannay, ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, pp. 343–​4.

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in a self-​relation will not provide any normative standards for who I am to become. Without normative standards, to become me is just to be me  –​a simple iteration of who I already am. Moreover, the Kant-​Korsgaard solution fails to satisfy Kierkegaard’s demand for singularity. The fact that I constitute my practical identity in light of universal moral principles cannot constitute me as me –​this concrete singular person. Clearly this is Kierkegaard’s thought  –​only standing alone before God radically individualizes me and frees me from my cultural roles and universal moral value.55 And only as an individual can I appropriate the world as my world without alienation.

Conclusion I have not wished to argue as Kierkegaard does in SUD II that unless a human being transparently stands ‘before God’, there is no escape from despair.56 We can just as easily understand human fulfilment, being at home in the world and at peace with one’s finite identity, as the purely natural way we overcome despair. I want to think about another way of standing ‘before God’ suggested by the second epigraph of this paper from Kafka’s The Trial: ‘the commentators say about this that, “correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive” ’.57 This paradoxical claim illuminates something about ourselves and rational agency:  that it is possible to achieve natural fulfilment or flourishing, correctly interpreting its causes, while misunderstanding what it’s all about. But, in that case, what would we be failing to understand? Why would our rational success constitute practical failure –​a failure of self-​understanding? Could the correct (richtiges) understanding of ourselves as rational agents constitute a form of self-​deception? The paradox implies that whatever we understand of agency fails to satisfy the Kierkegaardian singularity demand, which lies How even this can make me authentically who I  am is still questionable. For an illuminating discussion, see the Lear–​Korsgaard exchange in Jonathan Lear, The Case for Irony, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 75–​102. 56 See Hanney, ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, p. 346 and Podmore, p. 182. 57 ‘Die Erklärer sagen hiezu:  “Richtiges Auffassen einer Sache und Missverstehen der gleichen Sache schließen einander nicht vollständig aus”‘. The context is the encounter between Josef K.  and a priest in the Prague cathedral. The priest recounts a disturbing parable, ‘Before the Law’, to K.  and the two then discuss its meaning. The priest offers the above-​quoted paradox, which I  interpret as:  correct understanding of something prevents a person from 55

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at the heart of why my life matters to me. So that by understanding natural fulfillment, I misunderstand myself –​at least my self as a continuous possibility of becoming. I think it is plausible to conclude that our understanding of ourselves as rational agents is identical with our misunderstanding of ourselves as individuals:  this paradox leaves us with a question about the coherence of our practical concepts –​ agency, freedom, self-​constitution, rationality, the human good.58 Such a question appearing at the metaphysical edge of rational agency constitutes the beginning of a question about God from the practical point of view. It is certainly possible that experiencing the freedom of self-​constitution along with the impossibility of its rational justification might lead to extreme existential anxiety. But such anxiety might in fact direct practical reason’s interest towards the possibility, though not the necessity, of a concept of God arising from the experience of groundless freedom.59 ‘Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness.’60 One could gloss this simply as the failure of success. By ‘educative’, Kierkegaard means that anxiety may have a cognitive intentionality that would allow faith to orient the self away from despair. But for this, we would need a non-​a lienated and a non-​a lienating conception of God seeing his simultaneous misunderstanding of the same thing. See Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, ­chapter  9 ‘Im Dom’. Accessed online http://​g utenberg.spiegel.de/​buch/​der-​prozess-​157/​26 (27 November 2014). 58 A good discussion of the coherence of these concepts is to be found in a recent paper by John Hyman. He argues that although reasons and desires might sometimes be causes of actions, they fail to account for an array of deviant causes unless we understand desires more broadly as disposition. See his ‘Desires, Dispositions and Deviant Causal Chains’ in Philosophy, The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (January 2014), which is a response to Donald Davidson’s ‘Freedom to Act’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 59 This, of course, will need to be worked out more fully in another context. But as Merold Westphal has remarked with reference to Jean-​Luc Marion, such a ‘theological’ interpretation of intuition moves well beyond Husserl’s concept of phenomenology as rigorous science. He cites Husserl’s ‘principle of principles’ in Ideas I:  ‘that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.’ But Husserl then adds in the original text that, if phenomenology remains within the limits of presentive intuition, then ‘kann uns keine erdenkliche Theorie irre machen’. But going wrong is exactly what we must risk, if we are to venture any determination of the concept of God at all. Otherwise, we will remain, as Hegel argued in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, with the name ‘God’ as a placeholder devoid of any corresponding reality. See M. Westphal, ‘Vision and Voice: Phenomenology and Theology in the Work of Jean-​Luc Marion’, The International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 60 (2006): 119. 60 Søren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980), V, p. 155.

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that does not abridge or compromise human freedom and agency, but arises directly from their internal incoherence. From the practical point of view of this chapter such a concept of God might indeed be practically necessary, not to secure metaphysical knowledge of the divine, but just to gain a better understanding of what it means for us to be contingent rational agents, for whom life matters.

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Introduction Many philosophers in the Anglo-​American tradition believe that God has been put to rest. Naturalism is the default position, and the naturalist can explain what needs to be explained without this unnecessary and problematic detour. This attitude towards God is part and parcel of contemporary, non-​philosophical consciousness, although it has become apparent that some of the proponents of this atheistic movement are working with conceptions which bear little resemblance to the God with whom theologians, and indeed, ordinary believers, have wrestled throughout the ages. We are encouraged to suppose that God is on a level with the various ‘supernatural’ agents to which the primitive and uneducated remain in thrall, and that such people lack the benefit of a good scientific education. Hence the well-​k nown author of The God Delusion states: ‘I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented . . . God’s existence or non-​existence is a scientific fact about the universe . . . the presence or absence of a creative super-​intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.’1 For Dawkins, the scientific fact about the universe is that God is absent from its domain, and he concludes on this basis that atheism must be embraced. His attitude would be applauded by those naturalists who insist that the limits of nature are to be circumscribed by science, and they express a similar antipathy towards ‘anything and everything supernatural’. Nevertheless, they seem in danger of including under this ‘supernatural’ rubric at least some of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006), pp. 36–​58.

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the things which, one would hope, demand a rightful place in the ontology of any remotely human being. Like, for example, value. One response to this worry has been to expand the limits of science to accommodate modes of enquiry which seem better placed to accommodate the relevant phenomena –​ the so-​called human sciences have been significant in this respect. Other philosophers (of whom David Wiggins and John McDowell are the leading representatives) see in this move a residual commitment to scientism, and have defended a conception of nature and naturalism which exceeds such parameters while giving due respect to the findings of modern science.2 They agree, however, that nature thus conceived must be shorn of any reference to gods or God, and we are encouraged to suppose that a move in either of these directions exceeds the limits of intellectual propriety. Expansive naturalism –​as I refer to it –​offers a defensible form of naturalism and I  argue that it should be embraced.3 So I  agree with philosophical orthodoxy that we should be naturalists, but I deny that we should be scientific naturalists, and believe that the typical expansive naturalist can go further. The typical expansive naturalist grants some of the items which are deemed ‘supernatural’ by scientific naturalist lights, but he stops short of God. His reluctance to concede in this direction is understandable at one level –​after all, God is not a part of the natural world in one clear enough sense. Nevertheless, I argue that his position can be expanded to give us a form of theistic naturalism which can accommodate the distinction –​and indeed, the relation –​between God and nature.4 This conclusion will be contentious by most lights –​including those of the typical expansive naturalist. However, I have argued that the resources for making this move are internal to the position itself, and that it can be defended provided that we resist the lure of scientific naturalism. What follows from this conclusion? First, it moves us away from the temptation to suppose that scientific naturalism is the default position, and that we See, for example, John McDowell, ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’, pp. 112–​130; ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’, pp. 131–​50; ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, pp. 167–​97. These papers are to be found in his collection Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). David Wiggins’s position is articulated in his Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (London: Penguin, 2006). There is also a very helpful exchange across several papers between Wiggins and Peter Railton in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed., John Haldane and Crispin Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3 See my God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). I borrow the expression ‘expansive naturalism’ from James Griffin, Value Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 4 See ‘Expansive Naturalism III’, in God, Value, and Nature, ed. Fiona Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 178–204. By permission of Oxford University Press. 2

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are forced to choose between either science or God. Atheists such as Dawkins assume these terms of engagement, but they are neither philosophically nor scientifically supported, although their acceptance by such ‘authorities’ has helped to sustain the view that believers in God are intellectually challenged. Second, it means that we must reconfigure our understanding of the traditional naturalism versus theism debate. In philosophy of religion today, it is standard to define ‘naturalism’ in a way that excludes the existence of God or gods,5 the implication being that naturalism and theism are logically incompatible. According to my position, by contrast, naturalism and theism can both be true. Why take ‘naturalism’ in this broad sense? Why not simply accept a scientific interpretation of the position and grant that the question of God exceeds such parameters? Well the scientific naturalist does not have the monopoly on the meaning of this term, and recent philosophy testifies to its pliability. So its meaning is hardly fixed, and those who have embraced the term to their own particular ends have done so with an eye to the advantages it procures. In particular, it gives their philosophical endeavours the seal of empirical respectability, distancing them from those which involve reference to the ‘supernatural’ or the ‘spooky’, to use the common term of abuse.6 This meaning has not been stretched in a theistic direction –​at least not by contemporary naturalists –​and reservations on this score are therefore understandable.7 However, this does not rule out such a move, and if I  am right then there are naturalistic arguments to this end –​on a suitably expanded conception thereof. The virtues of this move should be apparent. For we are

See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6 For present purposes I ignore some of the complexities which arise in the context of clarifying the terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’. See my God, Value, and Nature for a more detailed account. 7 Robert S. Corrington is a contemporary exception, although he comes from a very different perspective from that of the naturalists with which I am concerned. See his Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). The ecstatic naturalist, we are told, ‘has a special kind of openness to what can never be circumscribed. In addition, an ecstatic naturalist recognizes that almost all philosophical theology has taken the wrong tack towards the nature/​divine correlation’, ‘An Introduction to Ecstatic Naturalism:  Interview with Robert S. Corrington’, Kinesis 36, 1 (2009): 28. I would be happy to describe myself as an ecstatic naturalist according to the first criterion, but it is no part of my position that almost all philosophical theology has taken the wrong tack in this context. However, we can note a similar theme and approach in John Robinson’s Honest to God to whom I refer in ­chapter 4 of God, Value, and Nature. Like Corrington, Robinson takes inspiration from Paul Tillich, applauding his claim that ‘the Divine does not inhabit a transcendent world above nature; it is found in the “ecstatic” character of this world, as its transcendent Depth and Ground’, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 34. 5

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in a position to challenge the conclusion –​common to all naturalists –​that talk of God belongs to the realm of idle metaphysics, that it comprises an esoteric discipline which is irrelevant to what really matters philosophically, and that it has no bearing upon the question of nature and of our natural human being. A further notable advantage of my approach is that it offers the prospects for defending a theistic framework using philosophical resources which can genuinely appeal to an atheist  –​at least, one who has moved beyond the limits of scientific naturalism. This point has been of particular significance to me. I have long been persuaded that there is nothing remotely pernicious or embarrassing about metaphysical enquiry per se, and that reference to Plato’s heaven or the Kingdom of God does not spell inevitable philosophical disaster. What better way to vindicate such notions than by reference to a metaphysical framework which demands no more than a resistance to scientism, a spirit of open-​mindedness, and a preparedness to go where one’s arguments lead? I also find it ironic and amusing that the best philosophical defence of the position towards which I  have been gradually moving should come from a camp which, at one level at least, will have nothing to do with God. Of course, this refusal concedes nothing to the vitriolic tendencies of the militant atheist –​understandably so given that the philosophers in question have no particular axe to grind, and have seen through the fundamentalist faith which tends to drive such attacks. Rather, and in true phenomenological spirit, they seek to return us to the things themselves, guarding against the imposition of frameworks which preclude the possibility of meeting such an aim. It is in the context of appreciating this methodological stance that we can begin to appreciate the theistic significance of their claims. The general shape of the position should be clear, and in what follows I  want to draw out some implications for an understanding of theology, philosophy, and the relation between them. One of the points of doing so is to encourage a shift away from the attitude of the typical (secular) philosopher –​well summed up in a comment once made by a former colleague of mine: ‘The problem with theology’, he said, ‘is that it has no subject-​matter’. A  damning criticism indeed, and it calls to mind Nietzsche’s (unwittingly self-​damning) claim that those who have theologians’ blood in their veins see

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all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective.8 I have no such problem with theology and theologians, and am reminded of yet another comment from a philosophy colleague, on hearing that I was to be working at Heythrop College: ‘that’s good, theologians are more open-​minded than philosophers’. They are certainly more open-​minded than some philosophers, but the philosophers with whom I engage have seen through the distortions to which we are so understandably drawn, and have paved the way towards honest and fruitful dialogue. My aim here is to make a contribution to this task, to offer a voice to the theologian, and to show that his subject-​matter may be of rather more relevance to philosophy  –​and to nature  –​than we have been led to believe.

Theology, prayer and two types of natural theology Nicholas Lash claims that we must approach the question of God ‘on our knees’, making it sound as if theology is a form of prayer. This cannot mean that we must be literally on our knees if we are to think about God. To be sure, we sometimes are on our knees literally when we relate to Him in a non-​theoretical context, when, for example, we engage in explicit acts of worship. However, we can worship God from other positions, and can relate to Him other than by engaging in explicit acts of worship, doing so, for example, by standing in moral relations to others. It remains open that such activity involves being on our knees in some other, perhaps non-​literal, sense, and Lash implies that some such sense is at issue when we are doing theology, for he tells us that ‘there is a sense in which’ such theoretical work must be done ‘at least metaphorically’ on one’s knees.9 This raises the question of how this sense is to be understood, and I have noted already that it suggests that theology is a form of prayer. Saying this much is unhelpful as it stands, for there is no consensus upon the precise meaning of prayer.10 Nor is it ruled out that we are concerned with some non-​literal sense of this term. ‘The Antichrist’, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans., Walter Kaufmann (New  York:  Viking Penguin, 1959), p. 575. 9 ‘The Impossibility of Atheism’, p. 28. 10 Simon Tugwell offers a helpful discussion of the various meanings of prayer in his ‘Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas’, in Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP (Eugene, OR: WIPF and Stock, 2010), pp. 24–​50. 8

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According to one interpretation, prayer involves asking God for something or other. The idea that theology could be a form of prayer in this sense seems odd to say the least. However, it becomes less obviously so if we have in mind the kind of theology which involves putting God at our beck and call and think of the prayerful activity at issue when He is reduced to a distributor of goods. We could respond that there is more to prayer than such petition,11 and that it is best understood as the attitude in play when we ‘ “make space” for God to be God’ and open ourselves to His transformative power.12 The idea that we are to ‘make space’ for God to be God grants us the right to respect what Heidegger describes as the mysteriousness of His distance, guaranteeing that He remains ‘exalted and holy’.13 It also leads us from the temptation to place Him at our disposal. But what could it mean to describe theology as a form of prayer in this sense? And are we to suppose that only a believer can talk properly about God?14 The idea that only a believer can talk properly about God has a point as far as the theoretical endeavours of some atheists are concerned. After all, one is inclined to say that they just do not know what they are talking about. On the other hand, there are believers whose talk about God invites a similar criticism, and it is not ruled out that figures on either side could learn to talk more properly in this context. The question, of course, is how this feat is to be accomplished. The idea of an atheist theologian is hardly a contradiction in terms, and one could imagine such a figure being adept enough to defend I leave open the possibility that petitionary prayer does not have to take an egoistic form. Simon Tugwell explores this possibility in his ‘Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas’. 12 See Sarah Coakley, ‘Kenōsis and Subversion’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 34. This rather broad understanding of prayer might be thought to empty the notion of any determinate content, and, as Tugwell points out, raises the question of whether I should also be expected to pray in any other sense (‘Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas’, p. 26). 13 See Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 26. 14 Compare the theological point of departure which, for Paul Tillich, belongs to the ‘ontological religious’ type: ‘their whole emphasis was on the immediacy of the knowledge of God . . . God is most truly present to the very soul and immediately knowable’, ‘The Two Types of the Philosophy of Religion’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1, 4 (May, 1946): 4. As John E. Smith puts it: ‘[f]‌or this way the religious consciousness is presupposed; there is no going outside the self and its awareness of itself in order to find a proper beginning for reflection. “Enter the inner chamber of thy mind” is the first and chief text, and the aim is to discover or, better recover the presence of God in the form of some ultimate such as truth immediately grasped’, ‘The Present Status of Natural Theology’, The Journal of Philosophy 55,22 (October 23, 1958): 928. Tillich describes this approach as Platonist and contrasts it with the Aristotelian ‘cosmological-​scientific’ approach which, we see, is operative in the conception of natural theology with which Michael J. Buckley takes issue. 11

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his stance by challenging some of the arguments which purport to take us to God. Some such arguments will be bad, none of them will be conclusive, and if we believe, as some have claimed, that they can persuade only those who already believe, then the atheist is going to stick to his guns.15 So we now have two seemingly problematic claims: first, only a believer can talk properly about God; second, only a believer can be convinced by arguments for God’s existence. This latter claim can likewise be contested, for although we can allow that there will be atheists who remain resistant to such arguments, and, of course, believers who retain a similar antipathy for the arguments of the atheist, we must surely grant that arguments from either direction can more than simply reassure those who have already accepted their conclusions. The expansive naturalist can help us to make better sense of what we should be saying in this context, and we can begin to make the required link by considering something said by Michael J. Buckley in his At the Origins of Modern Atheism.16 Buckley denies that the question of God can be tackled adequately in abstraction ‘from any common religious tradition and the experiences it involves’, insisting that religion ‘presupposes personal engagement as the permeating and fundamental relationship with God’. He claims also that it involves viewing God as a ‘living presence’.17 By contrast, the offending abstractive exercise turns the question of God into a purely philosophical question, and it involves being informed about God ‘from the outside’.18 Buckley implicates a certain kind of natural theologian in this context, telling us that such a figure is compelled to ‘apply to the philosophers for philosophic information’.19 This information is to be found in the natural world, it constitutes the putative evidence for God’s existence, and we are encouraged to conclude that it does no such thing. We are to suppose then that we must be informed about God ‘from the inside’. But what could this mean? Is it just The idea that understanding requires belief can be found in St Anselm’s Proslogion, trans. with introduction and commentary by M. J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). An incisive discussion of Anselm’s position can be found in Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason:  Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington:  The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), ch. 1. Eric Mascall gives expression to a similar viewpoint in his The Openness of Being: Natural Theology Today (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971), p. 41, suggesting that arguments for God’s existence will convince only those who already have an ‘intuition of God and finite being together’. 16 New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. 17 At the Origins of Modern Atheism, p. 348. 18 Ibid., p. 348. 19 Ibid., p. 342. The quote comes from Etienne Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy, p. 33. 15

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another way of saying that we must assume the perspective of the believer? And if so, what becomes of the possibility of there being arguments which could open the way to faith? The secular expansive naturalist has his own version of the ‘internalist’ position we are seeking to comprehend. According to this version, our theorizing about value must be ‘engaged’ and ‘participative’ in the sense that it leaves intact all the resources and commitments of the evaluative thinking it seeks to interpret, and concerns itself with the ‘full gamut of valuational considerations that actually weigh with real life moral agents’.20 We must work from within in this sense, the justification being that this is the only way we shall be in a position to engage properly with our subject matter. We are said to fail on this score when we tackle the question of value in exclusively scientific terms, and the expansive naturalist claims likewise that this involves an attempt to approach our subject matter from without. It does so in the sense that it involves detaching from the concepts and commitments which give us the values we are seeking to comprehend. It is not ruled out that a scientific approach can cover some of the explanatory ground, but the expansive naturalist denies that it can take us all of the way, even while conceding that there are versions thereof which come close to eliminating the offending explanatory gap. We then face the question of whether there are any good arguments in favour of an expansive naturalist approach to value. There are no prospects for satisfying this aim if we remain within the confines of scientific naturalism, for the scientific naturalist takes himself to have defined a satisfactory conception of value, objecting that anything more leads to unwarranted cosmic excess. As he sees it then, the expansive naturalist ends up postulating a further level of being which is irrelevant to the question of value and intolerably odd to boot. The expansive naturalist responds that scientific naturalism involves an unwarranted commitment to scientism, that this commitment generates the conclusion that an expansive naturalist position is metaphysically and epistemologically problematic, and that this position is better placed to capture all that needs to be said about value and our relation to it. In this way, we are encouraged to suppose that their respective aims are not 20

Wiggins, ‘A Neglected Position?’, in Reality, Representation, and Projection, p. 333. See my God, Value, and Nature, ­chapters 2 and 3 for a discussion of this position.

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so disparate after all, and that the scientific naturalist has every reason for taking seriously the envisaged position. This point gains credence once it is made clear that there is no question of denying the significance of scientific investigation, nor of courting an alternative which conflicts with its findings. The case of God presents us likewise with two theoretical approaches  –​ one ‘from the inside’ and one ‘from without’. The details of the first approach remain vague, in particular, it is unclear which concepts and commitments must be operative here, but it seems to involve being receptive to God, or, more weakly, to presuppose reference to some common religious tradition and the experiences it involves –​experiences in which God figures as a living presence. The second approach abstracts from such experiences, it is aligned with a kind of natural theology, and takes as its starting point the evidence for God’s existence which is to be found in the natural world. The implication here is that we should be wary of taking religious experience at face value, and ensure that our claims about God are empirically grounded if we are to avoid the kind of idle speculation which culminates in those familiar cosmic excesses. As F. R. Tennant has put it, we must be ‘empirically-​minded’ theologians, ‘letting the Actual world tell its own story’ rather than silencing it ‘while abstractive speculation . . . weaves a system of thought which may prove to conflict with the facts’.21 We are encouraged to suppose that the putative natural evidence falls short, and that there are good philosophical reasons for insisting upon this negative conclusion. After all, nature can be adequately comprehended in non-​God involving terms, and a move in the direction of God does no more than to introduce a further and highly problematic realm of being which explains precisely nothing. This much suggests that the prospects for defending a theistic framework are bleak, for such arguments would have to come from natural theology, and the model we have been given of such an approach suggests that it cannot meet this aim. The predicament is similar to that we face when we try to argue for an expansive naturalist conception of value from the standpoint of scientific naturalism. The solution to this predicament in the case of value is to try to persuade the scientific naturalist that a move in the direction of expansive naturalism does not pose the envisaged threat, and that it promises a more satisfactory conception of value. This suggests that if we are going to argue 21

Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), vol. II, p. 78.

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for a theistic framework along analogous lines, then the natural theology we exploit in this context is going to have to involve considerations which could appeal to an atheist, and which does not proceed from a standpoint which blocks this possibility at the outset. The difference in this case, however, is that the relevant considerations cannot involve claiming that the framework makes for a more satisfactory conception of God, for the atheist has no desire to bring God into the equation. In my book I seek to satisfy this aim by taking as my opponent the secular expansive naturalist and arguing that a theistic framework does not pose the threat he foresees. In particular, I question the assumption that a move in the direction of God involves the postulation of an intolerably odd level of being which is irrelevant to the question of value, and, more generally, that of nature, and suggest that his reluctance to concede in this direction may involve a version of the error he finds in the scientific naturalist’s starting point. I claim also that a willingness to take seriously a theistic framework retains the spirit of expansive naturalism, for it is built into this approach that we must challenge the impulse to close off avenues of enquiry by imposing frameworks we have no good reason to accept. This argumentative strategy occupies a position between two problematic extremes. According to the first extreme, we argue for a theistic framework using resources and assumptions which preclude the possibility of meeting this aim. This would be like arguing for an expansive naturalist conception of value from a scientific naturalist standpoint, the analogue in a theistic context being an approach which presupposes that God could only ever be a problematic cosmic excess. According to the second extreme, we accept a theistic framework and make no attempt to argue for it –​either you get it or you do not, and if you do not then there is nothing to be done about it. This would be like throwing expansive naturalism in the scientific naturalist’s face and ignoring his protests to the contrary. The alternative is to argue for the position in a manner which precisely does have a chance of meeting the required aim, for it is a matter of challenging some of the considerations which suggest that the position is a non-​ starter, and bringing it more into line with the standpoint of the disputant. Natural theology in this sense involves ‘applying to the philosophers for philosophic information’. However, the philosopher in question has already set in motion the required line of argument, and the information we are given is that there is more to nature than what the scientist can comprehend. Are we

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being informed about God ‘from the outside’? Buckley’s natural theologian informs us about God ‘from the outside’ by abstracting from any experience of God, and taking as his starting point the evidence for God’s existence to be found in the natural world. We can applaud his wish to ensure that our claims about God are empirically grounded.22 However, there is no immediate requirement that religious experience be excluded from the picture, for such experiences belong to natural beings in a natural world, and, as such, could surely constitute part of the evidence to which one could appeal in the context of defending a theistic framework. The natural theologian in question has been told by the philosopher that there is no good evidence for such a framework, the implication being that any putative evidence from religious experience is inadmissible, and that there is nothing else to which we could appeal. The evidence does indeed fall short if it is assumed that nature contains no trace of God, and this assumption is compelling if we accept the truth of scientism.23 It will then be tempting to treat the term ‘God’ as a misleading and dispensable placeholder for whatever scientifically explains the relevant natural facts, which latter will be interpreted in a manner that lends credence to this framework. On this way of thinking, God is a hypothesis we can do without, the God question is really a scientific question, and theology is but an embarrassing and dispensable extension of science. As for those putatively religious experiences, they are simply the province of  superstitious24

Compare an analogous requirement as it applies to the case of value. Natural theology in this sense can be aligned with the ‘cosmological-​scientific’ approach to God as understood by Paul Tillich. As John E. Smith puts it: ‘the point of departure for the cosmological-​ scientific type is . . . the world of limited things and processes as they are known both through ordinary experience and the precisely formulated knowledge of the natural sciences. This way of approach, often called the “way from Nature to God”, begins the quest with a world of fact beyond the self, although this world is often said to include man as well’ (‘The Present Status of Natural Theology’, p. 929). Smith cites F. R. Tennant’s approach in his Philosophical Theology as exemplary in this context, for it ‘starts with physical fact and presupposes the validity of science as a method and its picture of the world. “Natural theology”, says Tennant, describing his own approach, “sets out from facts and inductions its premises are as firmly established and as universally acknowledged as any of the stable generalizations of science’ (Philosophical Theology, vol. II, p. 79). Smith raises the crucial question of whether Tennant’s conception of experience is broad enough ‘to permit consideration of the whole range of distinctly human experience made possible by the fact that man is a subject or whether man will be included only as one object beside others in virtue of the fact that the scientific knowledge with which we are bound to begin is incapable of regarding man in any other way’ (pp. 929–​30). 24 I return to the question of whether the notion of superstition admits of a less pejorative interpretation. My answer is that it does, and hence, being superstitious need not be as intellectually embarrassing as our naturalists tend to assume. 22 23

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minds –​minds who have succumbed to a similar error to that which is operative when the magic-​making gods were around. The fact that no religious adherent conceives of God in these scientific terms is left unexplained,25 although his protests would cut no ice with the philosopher whose faith is scientism. The secular expansive naturalist shares no such faith, but he denies that nature contains any trace of God. I argue that his philosophical framework grants him the right to resist this negative conclusion. So it is appropriate to say that he is being informed about God ‘from without’ if this is taken to mean that the relevant philosophical information can be appreciated by a non-​believer. Does it involve abstracting from any experience of God? In one obvious sense it does, for the natural world, as conceived by our expansive naturalist, involves no reference to God, and it is therefore denied that natural beings could engage with Him. In another sense, however, it does not, for the framework within which he is operating offers the resources for questioning these imposed strictures so as to allow that at least some of our experiences already carry theistic import. If this is right, then an empirically minded theologian is not forced into atheism, and his evidential domain –​ nature  –​is not irrevocably sealed from the ‘supernature’ of the so-​called revealed theologian. As Eric Mascall has put it, they are not ‘two apartments on adjacent floors, with a layer of soundproof packing between the natural ceiling below and the supernatural floor above’.26

Engaging with God and talking about God The considerations I have rehearsed presuppose a distinction between theology, philosophy, and science and offer various ways of understanding these terms and their respective relations. Buckley challenges the idea that the question of God is purely philosophical, he aligns this philosophical approach with a brand of natural theology, and takes it to operate in abstraction from any personal engagement with God. Natural theology in this sense takes the natural world as its point of departure, it treats God as an explanatory hypothesis See John Hutchison, ‘The Uses of Natural Theology: An Essay in Redefinition’, The Journal of Philosophy 55, 22 (23 October 1958): 939. 26 The Openness of Being, p. 151. 25

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to be confirmed or rejected by the available evidence, and we are encouraged to suppose that there are good reasons for its rejection. Buckley’s objections to a philosophical approach to God bear comparison with the expansive naturalist’s objections to a scientific approach to value. The scientific naturalist treats this question in purely scientific terms, and the expansive naturalist complains that such treatment cuts us loose from the very values we are seeking to comprehend. So this philosophical/​natural theological approach to God is structurally equivalent to a scientific naturalist/​natural philosophical approach to value, and the complaint in both cases is that we lose our grip upon our subject matter. Buckley’s philosopher is unconcerned with the question of value,27 but our expansive naturalist works likewise from within an atheistic framework and claims that this question has nothing to do with God. However, he denies that it is a purely scientific question and upholds a distinction between philosophy and science which maps onto Buckley’s distinction between theology and philosophy. I argue that there is a form of natural theology which poses a challenge to the expansive naturalist’s atheism, and that he is in a position to appreciate this challenge given his philosophical starting point. Natural theology in this sense involves approaching the question of God in philosophical terms, these terms are anti-​scientistic, and they are exploited by the expansive naturalist in the context of defending his own preferred position against that of the scientific naturalist. So this philosophical/​natural theological approach to God is no longer to be aligned with a scientific naturalist approach to value. However, it can be described as a brand of natural philosophy, and the hope is that it might persuade the expansive naturalist to take the God question seriously. This requires a spirit of open-​mindedness on his part, and I have suggested already that this spirit underlies and motivates his philosophical It is not ruled out that a natural theologian of this type could make reference to our experience of value. Hence Smith on Tennant’s approach: ‘although it is claimed that man no less than the world forms part of the starting point for this kind of theology, there exists within it no tendency to allow man’s religious dimension and experience to dictate the meaning of the theistic concepts. This is not to say that man is excluded altogether from the facts which determine the content of the divine idea, but Tennant is inclined rather to confine himself to the moral or esthetic aspects of human experience and to admit the religious only after his empirical theism has been established. In this regard religion may be said to be postponed or left out of the account until the constitutive idea of God has been elaborated; it is then introduced only as a means of enriching and enhancing a theistic idea which it had no hand in shaping. God appears primarily as the explanation of the world conceived as a certain type of teleological system, and theology stands not as a discipline coordinate with philosophy or the theory of being but rather as an extension of or extrapolation from science’. ‘The Present Status of Natural Theology’, p. 932.

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approach to value. We might even say that it involves a preparedness to ‘make space’ for God to be God, to be open to Him to this degree at least, where this involves a willingness to question the kind of approach which excludes God from the picture by imposing a contestable model of His reality. The expansive naturalist may be persuaded to take seriously the question of God. However, he would deny that he is personally engaged with God, and certainly has no inclination to fall to his knees in awe or wonder –​not before God at least. His denial is understandable if we accept, as he does, that there can be no relating to God. However, this conception of God can be challenged. One way of mounting such a challenge, of particular relevance to the case of the secular expansive naturalist, is by reference to the idea that we engage with God personally by standing in moral relations to others, and that this is what it means for God to be a living presence among us.28 For if this is right, then the expansive naturalist is already engaged with God, in spite of himself as it were: he is a closet theist. It suggests also that he is situated at the ‘religious’ level which, for Buckley, must be operative if we are to tackle the question of God aright –​a level which is said to presuppose ‘personal engagement as the permeating and fundamental relationship with God’. Are we to conclude that the expansive naturalist is a closet theologian? That he is talking about God without realizing it? The expansive naturalist could protest that we have simply turned a terminological trick in the opposite direction, and that what we should really be saying is that theology is reducible to the philosophy of value. Furthermore, he would be quick to draw out the atheistic implications of this reduction given his reluctance to bring God into the equation. This response would be applauded by one who takes seriously the Nietzschean complaint that the theologian falsifies reality –​that he sees all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective.

Theology, philosophy and myth One way of lending justice to this complaint is to say that the theologian trades in myths and superstitions rather than with the facts. According to 28

In ­chapter 6 of God, Value, and Nature, I consider this view with reference to the position of Emmanuel Levinas.

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this way of thinking, myths/​superstitions are falsifications of reality,29 they are embraced by those who lack an eye for the truth, and stand to be exorcised by good philosophy and science. Modern science has certainly called into question the assumption that the workings of nature are the doings of magic-​ making gods, and it would be scientifically and philosophically naïve to resist this advance. So we must banish the gods from the ambit of scientific enquiry, and accept with McDowell that its subject matter is to be duly disenchanted in this respect.30 We can allow also that it would be a falsification of reality to enchant nature in this sense, although it would be misguided to conclude that those who accepted such a worldview had no eye for the truth. After all, they were groping in the direction of science, albeit a form which is primitive by modern standards. McDowell denies that nature itself is to be disenchanted, implying that we can banish the gods without succumbing to scientism, and grant a rightful place to our identity and nature as moral beings. The gods at issue were hardly moral,31 but their postulation exceeds the aforementioned quasi-​scientific terms, for they served also as expressions, no less primitive, of the human predicament, our place in nature, and the nature of the nature in which we are so placed. In particular, we are given a sense that we are not the measure of reality –​contrast the ambitions of the hard line scientific naturalist –​ and that this measure is itself to be understood in human terms, albeit terms we cannot fully meet and which fall short of capturing what it means to be properly human. Should the gods be banished in this particular context? It is unclear that they can be rejected on scientific grounds, for their role here is irrelevant to the quest of comprehending the workings of nature. On the contrary, they serve more properly to give expression to a way of thinking about self and world which takes us beyond the standpoint of science, although we can allow that the distinction between scientific and non-​scientific forms of explanation

This conception of myth is criticized by Schubert Ogden, in his ‘Myth and Truth’, in The Reality of God and Other Essays (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), p. 99. See ­chapter 4 of God, Value, and Reality for a critical discussion of McDowell’s conception of enchantment and disenchantment. McDowell’s views are spelled out in his Mind and World (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994). 31 The gods with which I am concerned in ­chapter 4 of my book are motivated by purely egoistic considerations. I am not ruling out that there are more sophisticated gods, and it is a task of the book as a whole to comprehend the transition from gods to God. 29

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was inadequately defined when they were originally put to use in this way. Nevertheless, we may well wish to banish them on moral grounds, for the picture with which we are presented leaves no room for a conception of humanity which exceeds the egoistic terms with which the expansive naturalist takes issue. Does this mean that we are entitled to populate the world with more properly moral gods? The answer seems to be an obvious ‘no’, but we must be clear about what such a position could really mean. First, it could be a matter of allowing that there are, in addition to human beings, other beings who are similarly moral, but who do not exist in quite the way that we do. The move seems superfluous, and it smacks of the kind of cosmic excess that the typical naturalist is so eager to avoid. However, the notion of a cosmic excess is not philosophically innocent, and such an accusation can betray a commitment to scientism. The scientific naturalist’s response to the expansive naturalist’s values provides an obvious case in point. This case is significant to the present line of thought, for according to a second interpretation, postulation of a realm of moral gods is really just a picturesque way of describing the values which make their demands upon us in a moral context. This move introduces a level of authority which takes us beyond the powers of the aforementioned gods, and it offers the prospects for lending superior expression to the intuition that we are not masters of the universe. It is morally superior, for there is no suggestion that we are to respond to this limitation by developing analogous mastering tendencies of our own, nor that we are doomed to be slaves. On the contrary, we are capable of acknowledging the relevant authorities, and it is by so doing that we become properly human. Is the picture not also metaphysically superior given that we have abandoned any reference to a realm of gods? Not from the scientific naturalist’s point of view, for he sees an analogous metaphysical difficulty in the postulation of a realm of moral values; at least, in so far as these values exceed his own preferred scientific terms. Once we reject the scientism which underlies this complaint, we lose the motive for concluding that the postulation of such values involves a falsification of reality; that it involves myth and superstition in this sense. But what of the idea that these values have their source in God, that we relate to Him by virtue of being moral, and that nature is irreducibly open to His communicative action? Do these claims involve myth and superstition? Yes, on the

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assumption that myth and superstition amount to a falsification of reality, but we have challenged this negative verdict by questioning the assumption that the myth-​maker is simply an aspiring scientist whose myths stand to be exorcised by modern science. On the contrary, they serve as primitive expressions of the human predicament, giving us a sense that we are beholden to something beyond ourselves. Indeed, the Latin etymology of the term ‘superstition’, super-​stare, serves to capture this sense, for it suggests a standing over, or, as the Latin dictionary definition puts it, a ‘standing still over or by a thing; hence, amazement, wonder, dread, especially of the divine or supernatural’.32 What of the element of story which seems fundamental to the notion of myth –​an element which has been said to capture the original meaning of the term ‘theology’?33 According to this way of thinking, theology involves ‘stories about divine beings and their happenings’,34 and it corresponds to the ‘fabulous’ or ‘mythical’ theology which is discussed by Augustine in his City of God.35 Augustine tells us that theology in this sense is ‘chiefly used by poets’, ‘best adapted to the theatre’,36 and that it ‘contains a great deal of fiction’. He adds that it is important to ‘separate divine matters from the follies and falsehoods of men’,37 suggesting that such theology counts as mythical in the aforementioned pejorative sense. That is to say that it involves a falsification of reality. The further implication is that it is not theology. At least, this follows if we grant the importance of separating divine matters from the follies and falsehoods of men and allow that such matters are the province of true theology. Durwood Foster claims that the conception of theology as ‘stories about divine beings and their happenings’ is best comprehended as the ‘coming to expression of theos, of the divine’.38 The idea that it involves a coming to A Latin Dictionary, Charles T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890). A. Durwood Foster Jr cites L.  Ziehen’s article, ‘Paulys Real-​Encyclopädie Der classischen Altertumswissenschaft’, in Pauly-​Wissowa Encyclopaedia , 2te Reihe, 5te Band (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1934), pp. 2031–​33, and in his own article, ‘Myth and Philosophy: Theology’s Bipolar Essence’, Journal of Bible and Religion 34, 4 (October 1966): 316. 34 See Durwood Foster, ‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 317. Durwood Foster takes this expression from Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Theologie:  Begriffsgeschichtlich’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3te Auflage, 6te Band (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1930), pp. 754–​69. Durwood Foster relates this conception of theology to Tillich’s definition of myth as a ‘history of the gods’, ‘Mythus’, Religion in Geschichte and Gegenwart, 2te Auflage, 4te Band (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1930), pp. 363–​70. 35 Book VI, ch. 5.  Augustine is reporting Marcus Terrentius Varro’s division of theology into ‘mythical’, ‘natural’, and ‘civil’. 36 Ibid., ch. 5. 37 Ibid., ch. 6. 38 ‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 317. 32 33

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expression of the divine suggests that the expressions in question are more or less adequate, and this might lead us to categorize the ‘follies and falsehoods’ with which Augustine takes issue as less adequate expressions of the relevant divine matters. On this way of thinking, there are stories about divine beings and their happenings which contain a germ of the truth  –​compare those primitive forms of scientific thinking which can be read into such stories –​ but which require to be supplanted if we are to arrive at a more truthful vision of the divine. But what does this mean? Does it mean that the story element is to be transcended? Or is it, rather, that we are to transcend those stories which involve a falsification of reality? The first option suggests that theology should be purged of any reference to stories of divine beings and their happenings –​a claim which is more or less compelling depending upon how we interpret the notion of story in this context. If a story is defined as a falsification of reality, then these two putative options merge into one, although it remains open that reference to divine beings and their happenings is perfectly in order. Alternatively, we can distinguish between stories that falsify and those that do not, and insist that theology remains confined to those of the latter category. This returns us to the second option which now becomes a terminological variant upon the claim that we are permitted to make reference to divine beings and their happenings. For the Judaeo-​Christian theologian this involves making reference to God’s communicative action, ‘the recital of God’s mighty acts in history’ as G. Ernest Wright has put it.39 This is the story of God, and it is to be distinguished from the stories of the pagan gods that are on a level with the myths of pre-​scientific superstition. Theology in this sense is revealed theology, it can be said to involve superstition in the sense that it carries an irreducibly supernatural dimension, and, in so far as it remains within ‘the arena of God’s activity’,40 the happenings it describes involve a history which is shot through with divine purpose. The atheist will complain that the use of the term ‘history’ in this context is a misnomer. After all, the story of God did not really happen, and it involves a falsification of reality to suppose ­otherwise. We can agree that the story of God is inappropriately described as

God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press, 1952), p. 11. Durwood Foster cites this claim in his ‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 322. 40 God Who Acts, p. 38. 39

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‘historical’ if history is taken to involve reference to a ‘secular, naturalistic, cause and effect process in which events are to explained solely by the interplay of environment and geography on individual and social organisms’.41 We may wish also to reject the scientistic presuppositions of this particular definition so as to make room for a conception of history which is more obviously appropriate to that of human subjects.42 Nevertheless, our expansive naturalist would be quick to distinguish history in this broader, albeit naturalistic, sense from that which is operative when we are concerned with ‘the arena of God’s activity’. He would no doubt repeat the complaint that God’s activity is not properly historical, and understandably so, given his assumption that the supernatural is permanently sealed from the domain of nature and its happenings. I challenge this assumption, even while granting that the arena of God’s activity can be neither comprehended without remainder nor properly appreciated by one who lacks faith. Where does this leave the question of its history? It would be inappropriate to comprehend its elements in the naturalistic/​ causal terms with which Ernest Wright takes issue, although it is familiar enough that these terms have been erroneously applied to the act of creation. Are we to conclude that God did not really create the world, that this did not really happen? In one sense this is precisely what we must conclude, although it should be clear that this is no concession to atheism. On the contrary, it is a matter of denying that God is a part within a larger whole, and that the act of creation is just one more historical event –​the first –​of a similar series to be dispensed with in the light of modern science. We know also that the offending conception of God has been operative in certain interpretations of the Incarnation. At the risk of oversimplifying an understandably contentious issue, it does not seem outrageous to suggest that the question of whether the Incarnation really happened demands a similar response. That is to say that the answer is no if saying that it happened is taken to mean that it is just one

Ibid. Schubert Ogden cites Rudolph Bultmann’s (Heideggerian) conception of history as historicity (Geschichtlickeit). On this way of thinking, ‘the “real subject” of history is the individual person, existing in freedom over against the past which presents him with his limitations and opportunities, and therefore also in responsibility in face of the future . . . Our relation to history is not to be viewed so much as a relation of subject to object, as it is as a relationship of subject to subject . . . What we have to do with in history is ultimately ourselves’, ‘The Debate on “Demythologizing” ’, Journal of Bible and Religion 27, 1 (January, 1959): 17.

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more event within a historical sequence –​one which is to be comprehended either in non-​God involving terms or in terms which turn God into a separable, causally efficacious part. Saying this much, however, is not a denial of the Incarnation. Rather, it is a matter of denying that it can be comprehended in the offending terms at issue. The further claim we made was that it is more properly interpreted as the supreme instantiation of God’s omnipresence to the world, an omnipresence which is likewise expressed in creation and which, in this particular case, is inextricably tied to the redemptive purpose of God’s communicative action. The implication again is that we are dealing with something rather more significant than a mere happening in the dim and distant past which stands to be rejected by those who have had the benefit of a good scientific education. Durwood Foster argues that revealed theology, the recital of God’s mighty acts in history, is to be distinguished from the more properly philosophical theology which involves the attempt to comprehend the content of revelation and submit its claims to rational scrutiny. He claims that these two poles of theology correspond to myth and philosophy respectively, and that we can abandon either one of them only at the cost of reverting to an impoverished and ultimately unsustainable conception of the theological task. The myth pole –​‘theology A’ –​prevents theology from dissolving into philosophy; the philosophy pole –​‘theology B’ –​prevents it from subsiding into myth.43 What would it be to eliminate all myth? If myths are taken to be falsifications of reality, then it is a matter of eliminating from the subject matter of theology those aspects which involve falsification. The Judaeo-​Christian theologian would eliminate the pagan myths on this ground; the atheist would extend the exercise to include any reference to divine action, concluding that the very subject matter of theology, namely God, stands to be exorcised. I reject this conclusion, and with it the assumption that the theologian is in the business of falsification. The elimination of myth in this latter sense involves the elimination of God, and if this is so, then we have a justification for insisting upon the aforementioned myth pole of theology. What of the idea that theology involves a pictorial element which stands to be eliminated? 43

‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 325.

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That we should be seeking to ‘demythologize’ its content in this sense?44 If this means simply that we must reject the conception of God as a man in the sky, then we can applaud such a move. We can agree also that we must resist thinking of God as a being who stands over and above the world in a realm which cannot be intelligibly related to it. However, it is unclear that we must forsake all reference to picture thinking provided that we are clear about its limitations. After all, the ordinary believer/​worshipper needs some kind of handle upon God, and even philosophers can be excused for employing imagery in their attempts to give expression to His reality. The myth pole gives theology its content, and philosophy can offer insight into its meaning and truth. However, there is another sense in which philosophy can be of service to theology, namely by making it into something more than just the recital of God’s acts. Philosophy can be instrumental in confining theology to this corner, when, for example, it insists upon viewing the theologian as the mere collator of philosophically insignificant sacred stories.45 Furthermore, it is understandable that the theologian might respond to this conception of his activity by repudiating any reference to philosophy. In such a scenario, however, the philosophy which stands to be rejected is most likely to correspond to that which generates the offending conception of theology, and it is not ruled out that the theologian can continue to philosophize under another name.46 The alternative is for him to remain at the level of recital and repetition, in which case the threat of fundamentalism looms large,47 and the philosopher’s negative judgement of his activity becomes compelling. Hegel is an obvious figure to mention in this context, for his position is often taken to be the prototype of a demythologizing approach to God, his aim being to transform Christian religion into his idealist metaphysics. Durwood Foster mentions Hegel in this context, claiming that he ‘exemplifies’ ‘Pole B’ work in relative remoteness from ‘Pole A’. I reserve final judgement on the matter except to say that, on my reading of Hegel, he is doing exactly what Durwood Foster recommends, namely, ensuring that these two theological poles are maintained in polar tension. 45 See ‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 326. 46 Durwood Foster mentions Schleiermacher, Ritchl and Barth in this context. Of the latter he says: ‘The Kirchliche Dogmatik has not been sufficiently appreciated as the monumental achievement in philosophical theology that it is. While Barth has rejected any second (apologetic) task alongside dogmatics, this has not meant for him a remission of the ontological exploration and articulation of Biblical faith. His thinking is saturated with kerygmatic content, but it is projected with a speculative vigour and thoroughness rarely if ever matched in Christian reflection’, ‘Myth and Philosophy’, p. 327. 47 Compare Lash: ‘in the school of Christian Pedagogy, however, silence is interrupted by memory of a Word once spoken, a life once lived and death once undergone. Acknowledging that what was done and seen in him is of eternal and imperishable significance and validity, we could come up with a doctrine of the Word incarnate. It might even be a true doctrine, permitting us, once again, to worship. But, if we stopped there, we would be in danger of ascribing absolute 44

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How does philosophical theology in this sense correspond to the two types of natural theology I have defined? Natural theology in the first sense operates in isolation from revelation. Its content is the natural world, and the world, thus understood, contains no trace of God. Theology in this sense leads to atheism and it is motivated by a philosophy which demands this result. I have argued that the methodological presuppositions of this philosophy can be questioned. Natural theology in the second sense is motivated by a philosophy which is shorn of the offending presuppositions, and it operates likewise in isolation from revelation. The difference, however, is that this philosophy’s methodological presuppositions are amenable to a theistic framework. Philosophy, thus understood, is not bound to be concerned with sacred story, or indeed, with the stories of the pagan gods. However, its conception of nature is broad enough to accommodate such things, although they are repudiated by the secular exponent of such an approach. This repudiation can likewise be questioned, although we can agree that there are elements of the picture which require to be transcended. It is at this point that we are in the business of raising philosophical questions about the content of nature thus conceived, and of doing philosophical theology in the manner described by Durwood Foster.

Conclusions We must deny that philosophy and theology are distinct disciplines with distinct subject matters, and that theology is to be dispensed with on scientific or philosophical grounds or because its subject matter  –​God  –​resists all attempts to be comprehended. These contested claims rest upon the assumption that God and the world add up to two,48 leaving it open for the atheist to reject the first term of this distinction, and, with it, the discipline which takes this term as its subject matter. God and the world do not add up to two, but significance to the past as past, in danger of idolatrously identifying the “nature” of God with given “form” and constituted meaning; in danger of divinising the language and particular institutions which mediate his memory (it is no accident that “fundamentalism” tends to be politically conservative). The pattern needs breaking up again, through acknowledgment that it is creativity and transformation, not in inherited stability, in new possibilities, not ancient meanings, that acquaintance with God is to be found’, ‘Considering the Trinity’, pp. 192–​93. 48 I borrow this expression from Herbert McCabe’s ‘Creation’ in God Matters (London: Continuum Press, 1987).

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nor are they to be identified, for God is distinct from the world, albeit not as a distinct thing, and in such a way that He remains omnipresent to all things. So the world is irreducibly God-​involving, but God is not reducible to the world. The idea that God is not reducible to the world suggests that we need to uphold a distinction between theology and philosophy, and it is no part of my position that the two disciplines are to be conflated. On the contrary, we can philosophize about things in the world without mentioning God, just as we can take as our focus God Himself. The conclusions we draw in this latter context will be confined to God as He is in relation to the world, for even if we endeavour to talk about God outside His relation to the world, such talk involves an implicit and irreducible reference to the one who is seeking to comprehend Him in this manner.49 The mistake is to suppose that this imposes an irredeemable limitation. The world returns us to the things we can consider in non-​God-​involving terms, when, for example, we strive to comprehend them scientifically. This level of comprehension is important, and we might even go so far as to say that there is a scientific explanation for everything. After all, this could simply mean that for any subject matter we can raise explanatory questions that can be answered scientifically. However, it does not follow from this that, for everything, the only explanations are scientific explanations, and we must resist this implication so as to allow that there are other sorts of explanations which are consistent with scientific explanations but which make things intelligible in a different, non-​scientific way. So philosophy raises doubts about whether the scientist has the monopoly on things, and it also grants us the right to allow that these things have theistic significance. The implication here is that there is an overlap between the respective subject matters of science, philosophy, and theology. What of the disciplines themselves? The question of what counts as science is a matter of some dispute, and there are forms of social science which have the potential to merge with the expansive naturalist’s avowedly non-​ scientific standpoint.50 So we have an overlap of sorts, although there is no This point is clearly made by Anselm K. Min in his ‘Hegel’s Absolute:  Transcendent or Immanent’, The Journal of Religion 56, 1 (January 1976): 85. 50 The aforementioned dialogue between Railton and Wiggins illustrates this point. Railton argues from a social scientific perspective, Wiggins questions this perspective, and their conclusions suggest that there is a knife-​edge between them. See ­chapter 2 of my God, Value, and Nature. 49

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justification for insisting that the explanatory ground is to be covered without remainder in scientific terms, except in so far as science becomes equivalent to any approach which resists the temptations of cosmic excess. Likewise, we have seen that natural theology can merge with philosophy, that philosophy in this context can assume a scientistic guise, but that philosophy exposes this restriction as an ideological prejudice, granting us the right to allow that a move in the direction of God can be intellectually respectable. Subsequent talk of God overlaps with the expansive naturalist’s talk of value, but it involves more besides, and I argue that expansive naturalism can accommodate this additional dimension. Naturalism in this sense accommodates phenomena which elude the grasp of the scientist, and we might even go so far as to say that it can accommodate everything. However, the explanations it exploits do not conform to a single model, and it is therefore misguided to talk about the naturalistic method, nor can we say that the relevant methods can adequately explain everything. After all, God is part of the picture, and He cannot be comprehended without remainder. God is part of the picture, but because He is irreducible to anything within the world we must reject John Herman Randall’s negative definition of naturalism as ‘the refusal to take “nature” or “the natural” as a term of distinction’.51 Could a naturalist really accept that ‘nature’ is a term of distinction in this sense? Is it not fundamental to the position that there is nothing besides nature? The expansive naturalist rejects the scientific naturalist version of this claim, for he allows that there is something besides nature as comprehended in exclusively scientific terms. Furthermore, as far as the scientific naturalist is concerned, he precisely is postulating a further, problematic realm of being, and is committed hereby to the conclusion that ‘nature’ is a term of distinction. The expansive naturalist challenges this interpretation on the ground that the claim being advanced is that nature, all that there is, is to be comprehended in terms which exceed the parameters of the scientific naturalist, and that the supposition to the contrary is generated by an unwarranted commitment to scientism. I have rejected an analogous interpretation of the 51

‘Epilogue:  The Nature of Naturalism’, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 357.

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theistic naturalist’s claim that ‘nature’ is a term of distinction. According to this interpretation, nature is to be set in opposition to God, and God is an unintelligible addition which can be rejected while leaving everything else in its place. Such a position invites the ‘dualisms and gulfs’ which remain anathema to the naturalist’s standpoint. The theistic naturalist has no truck with such dualisms, and challenges this interpretation of his position on the ground that nature is to be comprehended in terms which are already God-​ involving. So nature is no longer set in permanent opposition to God, it is open to His communicative action, but it is nonetheless to be distinguished from God because God is its source, and qua source, cannot be a part of it. The secular expansive naturalist remains unimpressed by the claims of theology, and he would deny that philosophy becomes impoverished in its absence. Nevertheless, he works with versions of all of the claims which would be exploited by the theologian in the context of defending his own preferred stance. His fundamental aim is to lead us away from an impoverished conception of philosophy, the kind of philosophy which is forced upon us if we commit to scientific naturalism, and he holds that this reductive impulse leads to an impoverishment of self and world. So we are required by philosophy to expand its limits, and this brings a corresponding expansion of the limits of nature. He allows that such a move will be challenged by one who remains locked within the disputed framework, and that it can appear to be an invitation for courting bad philosophy. His response to this complaint is twofold. First, he points out that it stems from a commitment to a contestable framework, one which leads us to suppose that philosophy is respectable only if it is reducible to science, and that self and world must be understood accordingly. Second, he demonstrates that his own preferred standpoint is rationally defensible. It is rationally defensible not simply because it offers a corrective to the impoverished world view of the scientific naturalist, but because it can subject itself to critical scrutiny, albeit a scrutiny which involves and applies to a range of concepts which exceed these reductive limits. Our theologian agrees that there are impoverished conceptions of philosophy, and that such conceptions lead to an impoverishment of self and world. He believes, however, that philosophy is enriched by theology, and that our being is enriched to the extent that we are inwardly transformed by God. The expansive naturalist rejects the idea that philosophy is enriched by theology,

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doing so on the ground that philosophy has the resources to enrich itself. It does so by exposing the errors of scientific naturalism and broadening its scope accordingly. Likewise, he would deny that God’s action is required to remedy any deficiencies in our being. All that is required is that we move beyond the parameters dictated by science so as to allow that we are capable of participating in evaluative life and thought. As McDowell puts it, ‘our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons’.52 This openness is no ‘occult power, something extra to our being the kind of animals we are, which is our situation in nature’.53 On the contrary, it is something of which we are capable by virtue of being the natural beings we are, and the dimension of reality to which we become receptive is ‘essentially within reach of human beings’.54 It should be clear from all that has been said that, for McDowell, the theologian’s conception of the supernatural precisely does involve some ‘occult power’ which is isolated from man’s natural being, and out of reach of human beings. The offending conception abounds, but it is not mandatory, and it is fundamental to good theology that the supernatural is a dimension of nature which serves to enrich our natural being and that of the nature we inhabit. Indeed, it is tempting to turn the tables at this point and throw at the expansive naturalist a version of the argument he uses to undermine the position of the scientific naturalist. That is to say, we can point out that the expansive naturalist is operating with a framework which leads to the conclusion that philosophy is respectable only if it remains untainted by theology, a framework which implies that theology can only ever amount to idle superstition, and that its subject matter has no bearing upon the lives of natural beings. However, this framework is not mandatory, and its imposition risks leaving us with an impoverished conception of philosophy, self and world. These deficiencies can be overcome if we allow that theology can enrich philosophy, and that God’s action can enrich nature. This can look like an invitation to bad philosophy, and there are versions of this move which warrant such a complaint. However, the theologian under present consideration is critically astute, and believes that there are good reasons for taking seriously his position. Yes, he Mind and World, p. 82. Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 84. 52

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is introducing a range of concepts which will strike the expansive naturalist as problematic, just as the expansive naturalist introduces a range of concepts which are problematic to the scientific naturalist. However, he believes that they admit of rational defence, albeit a defence which will be difficult to appreciate by one who is closed to this way of thinking and being. It will be difficult to appreciate, and perhaps impossible for the kind of philosopher who remains locked within the parameters of scientific naturalism. However, the expansive naturalist has escaped these parameters, and, to the extent that he shares at least some of the aspirations of the theologian, he may come to see that the theologian’s reasoning makes some kind of sense, and that there is significant common ground to their respective endeavours. At this point, and in the spirit of his expansive naturalist approach, he may be persuaded to enter into dialogue with the theologian. If my conclusions are justified then he can forsake such a task only at the risk of compromising his insights and robbing theology of a fundamental philosophical resource. After all, he offers the prospects for demonstrating that belief in God is intellectually respectable, and that this conclusion can be appreciated by those who have taken on board the lessons of the best naturalistic philosophy of our time.

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A Secular Age? Anthony J. Carroll

Introduction In this chapter, I argue that our age is less secular than the one depicted in Charles Taylor’s magisterial book A Secular Age.1 Taylor notes that exclusive humanist positions often dominate among some intellectuals and elites in the media,2 I am not convinced of Taylor’s assumption that these thinkers have sufficient empirical or normative significance to set our common framework in the West.3 As the book by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back argues, rather than living in a secular age post-​ September 11, 2001, it seems as if on the contrary our age is becoming increasingly religious.4

Charles Taylor’s starting point in A Secular Age A Secular Age frames the origins of our secular age within the parameters of 1500, when it never existed, to 2000, when it dominates. Perhaps 2000 was its zenith and this new millennium has inaugurated a different age, a post-​ secular age5 as some have been calling it in which, and I completely agree with Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). For a review of the book, see William Schweiker et  al., ‘Grappling with Charles Taylor’s A  Secular Age’, The Journal of Religion 90, 3 (July 2010), 367–​400. 2 A Secular Age, p. 13. 3 See, for example, Alistair McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism (London: Rider, 2004). 4 See John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back. How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 5 See, for example, Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-​Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 1

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Taylor on this point, religious belief has indeed become a matter of choice in a pluralistic world. I disagree that this choice is the less obvious one and that it is the less-​framework-​setting one for our actual social imaginary in the West.6 While I consider the diachronic trajectory that A Secular Age outlines of reform, through Deism, to the origins of exclusive humanisms, and leading to our secular age to be a highly informative and fascinating genealogy of the secular, I do, however, think that A Secular Age concedes too much to the secularist position in its synchronic thesis of the emergence of a dominant atheist social imaginary.7 However, I am aware that A Secular Age is evidently so rich that any short paper which picks up on a single point may appear one-​sided, contradicted at some point in the book, or simply downright churlish. Nevertheless, I would like to question this fundamental synchronic assumption of A Secular Age in order to at least propose a possible complication for the narrative of it to account for. Taylor outlines this assumption as follows: What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do:  I  mean the ‘we’ who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world –​ although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the judgment of secularity seems hard to resist when we compare these societies with anything else in human history: that is, with almost all other contemporary societies (e.g., Islamic countries, India, Africa), on the one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or otherwise, on the other.8

The phrase, ‘almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do’, clearly allows for a degree of manoeuvre room that could immunize it from the kind of critique that I am here proposing. For example, the claim that the world is flat is clearly in some sense true. When we walk around, we do not have the experience of being on a curve or of walking around a spherical object. In this sense the earth is flat, and it is, in fact, in the common sense meaning of being The concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’ is used by Taylor to mean the intellectual schemes and social practices that ordinary people use to navigate their way through contemporary Western societies. See A Secular Age, pp. 171–​6. See also Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 7 By the term ‘synchronic’ thesis I mean the account of the present day situation. The ‘diachronic’ thesis is the changing historical dynamics which have led to the present. 8 A Secular Age, p. 1. 6

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flat. It thus seems that the secularists or naturalists ‘have’ it, in the way that the flat-​earthers ‘have’ it. They trade upon a common sense which, when we do not question things, seems to be the most reasonable assumption available. The ‘in some sense’ that is the actual specific sense that Taylor wants to claim is ours is that defined by what he calls the secularity three model,9 namely, that religious belief is a choice10 and not the most easily apparent one available to us in the immanent frame.11 In favour of this understanding of secularity is the fact that it provides us with a convincing explanation for just how it is that weak arguments for the exclusive humanist option, such as those proposed by Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion,12 for example, seem to have an influence way beyond their actual value, as Taylor notes in Part V.13 As he puts it, they confirm the background default position and so need to do less work than the belief position which contradicts the commonly accepted position. This situation is clearly recognisable today but one can also argue that the popularity of views such as those of Richard Dawkins’s is more down to their dramatic quality, they are presented polemically with little nuance and seem to challenge an orthodoxy that appears dull and out of touch. Arguments presented in a nuanced form such as:  ‘on the one hand, and on the other hand’, for example, tend to leave many people cold and this is also the reason why some traditional forms of Christianity such as Pentecostalism tend to be the fastest growing types of Christianity today.14 Positions like Dawkins’s and to some extent evangelical traditions of Taylor outlines three kinds of theories of secularity. ‘Secularity One’ is that which holds religious belief and practice are retreating from the public space as in the separation of religion and politics. ‘Secularity Two’ is defined as the increase or decrease of religious belief and practice. Taylor’s own version of secularity adds a third dimension in order to provide a framework for considering the conditions of religious belief today in the context of a default position of unbelief, which he calls the ‘immanent frame’. He argues that while the immanent frame tends to favor the unbelief option it is not necessitated by it and that closed world structures which screen out a priori religious options are overlooking an epistemic possibility available in our secular age. See ibid., pp. 1–​22. 10 For an excellent development of the idea of the optionality of religious belief, see Hans Joas, Faith as an Option. Possible Futures for Christianity, trans. Alex Skinner (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2014). 11 Taylor defines the ‘immanent frame’ accordingly:  ‘So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call “the immanent frame” ’. (Ibid., p. 542) The ‘buffered-​self’ is the modern understanding of the self as cut off from its external environment and no longer porous to mysterious forces and spirits. 12 See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006). 13 See A Secular Age, pp. 567–​74. 14 See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9

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Christianity are much more black and white and you have no doubt who is right and wrong, good and bad in the narrative. Nevertheless, secularists are becoming increasingly embarrassed by the lack of nuance in the interventions of the so-​called Archbishop of Atheism, Richard Dawkins, and often distance themselves from his polemical remarks about religious people being, ‘faith heads’, for example. It is this move beyond the polemical, oppositional style of Dawkins that, from within the secularist atheism camp, is the origin of a potential dialogical atheism that may well be the future of atheism in the West.15 In arguing for the possibility of openness to transcendence even within what Taylor calls the ‘immanent frame’ of closed rationality structures, Taylor is making the case for the justification of belief within our secular age as characterized by his secularity three model.16 While I applaud this, I want to question whether the burden of proof actually falls more heavily on believers rather than on unbelievers today, and I want to do this by outlining just how the reality of interreligious dialogue has undermined a what I call a ‘non-​dialogical’ or ‘oppositional’ model of the secular and its rationality and indeed of the religious and its rationality that have been shaped against the background of a predominantly Protestant forged oppositional modernity. This tradition of interreligious dialogue emerges particularly out of the Catholic tradition of Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century and is one which Taylor draws on in his understanding of Catholicism as defined by the meaning of the word –​καθóλου –​universality through wholeness of differences which he outlines in A Catholic Modernity.17 While this tradition has biblical and patristic origins, there can be little doubt, as the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner has noted, that Vatican II was in many ways a See Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman (eds.), Religion and Atheism. Beyond the Divide (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 16 See A Secular Age, pp. 539–​93. 17 See James L. Heft, A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture with Responses by William M.  Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). It is for this reason that I disagree with the counter cultural and very much Barthian inspired rejection of secular culture that characterizes the Radical Orthodoxy tradition, which mirrors the rejection of the differences which actually constitute this dialogical tradition of Christianity as it continues to emerge through the early apologists, to Augustine, St Thomas through to Vatican II and beyond to the recent teaching document of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales on Interreligious dialogue, Meeting God in Friend and Stranger, which I draw upon later. See Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, Meeting God in Friend and Stranger: Fostering Respect and Mutual Understanding between the Religions (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2010). For a critique of the counter-​cultural stance of the radical orthodoxy tradition, see my ‘Church and Culture: Protestant and Catholic Modernities’, New Blackfriars 90, 1026 (March 2009), pp. 163–​77, especially, 167–​9. 15

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significant moment in the constitution of this understanding of Catholicism as a world church as, for the first time in its history, the universal church actually met and made common pronouncements.18 One might even consider Catholicism in this light to be an unfinished project rather than a tradition closed in on itself and fully formed as it is often characterized.19 In the spirit of both this dynamic and unchanging understanding of tradition, the encounter with the world religions is thus not merely of external interest in terms of how one should relate to Muslims, or Hindus and so on, but rather should be understood as of internal significance for the actual constitution of the identity of Catholicism and other Christian traditions such as Anglicanism which seek to enter into dialogue with other religious traditions.

From a monological to a dialogical age In describing the pathway to a secular age, Taylor has charted many of the great civilizational changes that we in the West have undergone throughout modernity. But it seems to me that one significant change has not been articulated in A Secular Age, and it is precisely this change that is playing a determining factor in constituting the present, especially at the normative level. Namely, the shift from monologically constituted religious identities to dialogically constituted ones. I bring this change into dialogue with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in order to see to what extent his account has traded upon a certain conception of the religious origins of our modern secular age that has qualitatively shifted in the last sixty years and so further destabilized the secular age social imaginary, which he suggests is our current dominant framework in the West. This change may well not have been reflected upon because of the memory of a certain traditional model of religion that has undergone a significant shift and has to a certain extent been unreflected by the wider ‘common sense’ secular society. See Karl Rahner, ‘Concern for the Church’, Theological Investigations, vol. 20, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1981), pp. 77–​102. 19 The understanding of tradition as involving both unchanging and dynamic dimensions is characterized by the ressourcement movement which shaped Vatican II and was exemplified in the great work of thinkers such as Yves Congar. See, for example, his work The Meaning of Tradition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). 18

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Prior to the 1960s, religions were operating broadly speaking according to what I shall call the ‘monological model’. Each religion had its own version of the truth which it saw as exclusive of all other religious truth claims and as absolute even when this absolute was relative, as in Hinduism, for example. Within Christianity, countries with confessional schooling such as England and Germany, or the Catholic aumoneries as in France, low levels of intermarriage, and other sectarian divides fuelled a confessional separation in some parts of Europe, which was supported by a superstructure of home, school and parish. In the United States since the American Revolution of 1776 it has been the dynamism of the sects which have tended to dominate over against the more established denominations. This trend has continued until today and has often fuelled a less dialogical religiosity as competing sects tend to try to outdo each other in exclusivity. While various types of Christianity have provided the standard religious landscape in the United States until recently, since the large-​scale immigration following the 1970s until today the world religions have arrived in America and are introducing Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism to a nation which has come to this pluralistic reality much later than its European counterparts. The outcome on interreligious dialogue in a deeply religious culture in the United States together with a missionary democratic spirit and firm commitment to pragmatism is as yet unclear. But one might expect that such a combination of factors, together with the freedom of religion that is enshrined in the American Constitution, would foster a dialogical attitude between religions that will characterize the twenty-​first century on both sides of the Atlantic.20 Similar to religious people many secularists grew up in monologically constituted Christian traditions and moved away from these to atheist or agnostic positions but retained the image of the old monological religion that they had left behind. This is why it is not an uncommon experience for believers to be astounded by the images of religion that non-​religious people carry. They are drawing on a background of monological confessionalism radicalized by

20

See Jon Butler, Grant Wacker and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History, updated edition (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2008); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America 1776–​2005:  Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow, Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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contemporary fanaticism to paint a picture of a backward religion unable to cope with the differentiated rationality structures of the modern world. So, while it is true that the relationship between the church and modernity has often been an oppositional one, and here one could note the modernist crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,21 since the Second Vatican Council this has qualitatively shifted within some Christian traditions at least. It thus seems now as if the issue of ‘backward religion’ and ‘progressive secularism’ is actually the wrong way around. Religions have increasingly entered into a dialogical space in which their identity is formed more with than against others while allowing for the other to remain other. Moreover, through such dialogues we have learned that rather than mimic the voice of the other we need to allow each other to speak for themselves.22 Contemporary comparative theology in the work of people such as Francis Clooney, Keith Ward, Claude Geffré, Michael Barnes and Robert C. Neville is a good example of this growing maturity between the faiths and is illustrative of the real improvement that has taken place recently.23 This theological approach has developed in response to the increasing religious diversity that characterizes our present day societies. It attempts to avoid two earlier tendencies that have shaped theological reflection on religions. On the one hand, it rejects the monological assumptions which sort to confine truth claims to one particular religious tradition and so excluded other religions from their own conception of the truth. On the other hand, it seeks to avoid the relativist claim that because of religious diversity strong claims about truth and value are no longer possible. Instead, comparative theology is rooted in the particular tradition of the theologian. It is both this rootedness in the personal faith tradition of the enquirer and their openness to enter into the faith tradition of another religious tradition which characterizes the discipline of comparative theology. Such a comparative theologian is seeking greater understanding of See Oliver P. Rafferty (ed.), George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism (Dublin:  Four Courts Press, 2010). 22 A point well made by Rémi Brague in ‘Dieu des chrétiens, Dieu des musulmans’, Communio 35, 3 (May–​June 2010): 67–​77. 23 See, for example, Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Comparative Theology:  Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Chichester:  Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010); Keith Ward, Religion and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Claude Geffré, De Babel à Pentcôte. Essais de Théologie Interreligieuse (Paris:  Cerf, 2006); Michael Barnes, Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert C. Neville, On the Scope and Truth of Theology: Theology as Symbolic Engagement (New York: T and T Clark, 2006). 21

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both their own religious faith tradition and one or more other religious faith traditions. It can be said to be comparative in that it seeks to be interreligious in its appropriation of both one’s own faith and the faith of the other tradition. The relation between the faiths provides the grounds for this type of theological learning to be considered comparative as, in the exercise of entering into both traditions’ perspectives, the scholar reflectively and contemplatively deepens their mutual learning of both their own faith and that of the other tradition. Such a shift in methodological attitude is significant because it corresponds to the experience today that people are increasingly meeting each other as real persons of faith embodying living faith traditions which make particular claims to truth and value.24 The eminent philosopher of religion, Rémi Brague, puts the importance of this methodological shift for the understanding of religion today well when he comments that, ‘the real question rather, is to have the courage to grasp the internal coherence of each religion, to respect it in its own logic, and to accept its consequences. A vast programme . . .’25 As Brague indicates, at the level of the comprehension of modern religion the shift from an outsider to an insider perspective has brought significant developments and presents us with a major new research programme. The former dominant outsider traditions constructed an artificial object, as in the ‘world religions tradition’, in order to explain it in more fundamental scientific terms. Tomoko Masuzawa has convincingly argued that this world religions tradition embodied a certain understanding of European universalism which the language of liberal pluralism has preserved.26 It corresponded to a chiefly European superiority complex, which sought to explain the world religions according to the yard stick of ‘advanced’ Christianity. Max Weber’s studies of the world religions which measure the rationality of a religion Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth. The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2006) develops this point in a very interesting way and illustrates the paradigm shift that awareness of taking the lived faith of the other person seriously makes to its study. The secularist assumption that religion is somehow to be ‘explained’ by a more fundamental reality as the subtraction theories claimed is from within the field of the study of religion looking increasingly inappropriate and anachronistic (subtraction theories attempt to explain religion away as various forms of ideological overlay which scientific advances have revealed as false. See A Secular Age, p. 22). 25 Rémi Brague, op cit., 77. ‘La vraie question est plutôt d’avoir le courage de saisir la cohérence interne de chaque religión, de la respecter en sa logique propre, d’en accepter les conséquences. Vaste programme.’ 26 See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 24

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according to their degree of de-​magification is a good example of this tradition and one which I have argued elsewhere demonstrates a clear Protestant bias.27 These outsider approaches held a belief in science as the master narrative of the totality. Such naturalistic metanarratives still fuel the New Atheist self-​confidence that this conception of reason is the only reason available and provides them with an evidential basis with which to explain religious beliefs and practices as merely epiphenomena of natural social processes. Often drawing upon Weberian or Durkheimian accounts of religion they continue to seek the real basis of belief outside of the self-​defined beliefs and practices of a particular religious community. The availability of an insider perspective which seeks to understand the inner coherence of a particular living faith in its own terms has overturned this former hegemony of the outsider methodological vantage point as the only legitimate scientific stance possible and in this it corresponds to a shift from monological to dialogical religious perspectives, typified by currents such as comparative theology, at the level of the study of religions.

New ways of conceiving the rationality of religious beliefs and practices These critiques of monological secularist positions are also accompanied by innovative developments in the areas of religious epistemology and the philosophy of language, which further undermine an unchallenged dominant exclusive humanist social imaginary. Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology argues against the evidential basis of epistemic warranty in deciding the status of basic beliefs such as belief in God. Instead, he argues that these basic beliefs do not require argument to be rationally held as they are not inferred from other beliefs. They stand alone because the believer considers them to be fundamental and they have warrant for the believer.28 This basic-​ness See my Protestant Modernity:  Weber, Secularisation, and Protestantism (Scranton and London: University of Scranton Press, 2007). Plantinga defines his central concept of warranty by saying, ‘a belief has warrant just if it is produced by cognitive processes or faculties that are functioning properly, in a cognitive environment that is propitious for that exercise of cognitive powers, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at the production of true belief’. Warranted Christian Belief, xi. For a critique of his notion of warranty, see Richard Swinburne, ‘Plantinga on warrant’, Religious Studies 37 (2001): 203–​14. For Plantinga’s reply, see Religious Studies 37 (2001): 215–​22.

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and warranty provide the necessary and sufficient conditions, according to Plantinga, to defend the rationality of religious belief.29 This so-​called Reformed Epistemology tradition has opened up interesting retorts to narrowly defined evidentialist accounts for internalist justification and provided a reasonable response to the criticism posed at religious believers that their positions lack justification, rationality, or warrant. As, Plantinga suggests, it is only when one presupposes the falsehood of religious belief that conclusive arguments for the irrationality of such beliefs seem to hold.30 Such a presupposition clearly animates the exclusive humanist default position, which Taylor holds sets the unbelief parameters of our modern social imaginary. While unbelief is a valid option in our secular age, it is overstretching its epistemic warranty to infer that this conclusively defeats the believing option. This is borne out in countless surveys of religious beliefs, which indicate that if anything the background default position of the West (social imaginary) is rather the believing option.31 William Alston complements Plantinga’s basic propositional beliefs model to provide a better account of the actual formation of religious beliefs in his reliabilist account of the process of belief formation.32 In his Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience he draws on a lifetime’s reflections on the justification of religious belief or ‘mystical perceptual practice’  –​the practice of belief formation about God on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’33 of this Ultimate reality.34 Located within the Christian tradition, Alston defends the particular epistemic basis of engaging in Christian mystical perceptual practice [CMP]. For him, those who engage in CMP are (in the absence of specific overriding considerations from within CMP) justified in forming their beliefs because their practice is ‘socially

See Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See Warranted Christian Belief, xiii. See, for example, D. Barker, L. Halman and A. Vloet, The European Values Study 1981–​1990. Summary Report (London/​Netherlands: European Values Study Group, 1992) and at the public institutional influence level (Taylor’s Secularity 1), see Jonathan Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 32 See William P. Alston, Perceiving God:  The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 33 pp. 103, 258. 34 For Taylor’s engagement with the question of religious experience in the light of William James’s groundbreaking work, see Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 29

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established’ and because of the lack of sufficient reasons to defeat the reliability of the practice.35 Plantinga’s and Alston’s positions advance on epistemologies which a priori exclude religious beliefs from being rationally justifiable. But they are in themselves insufficient to account for the rationality of the practice of interreligious dialogue as, remaining within the epistemological-​representational model of knowledge formation, they are less well equipped to explicate the dialogical and communal practices associated with the intersubjective dynamics of religious language use and communal belief formation. They require supplementing by those pragmatic traditions of linguistic philosophy which have sought to explicate the structures of communication and action oriented towards mutual understanding such as the transcendental pragmatics of Karl Otto Apel, the reconstructive universal pragmatics of Jürgen Habermas and the analytical pragmatism of Robert Brandom.36 Together these traditions provide resources for coming to understand more clearly the epistemic and pragmatic conditions of the social practice of interreligious dialogue and so of outlining its basis in reason and rationality. In outlining their different pragmatic theories, Apel (transcendental hermeneutic reading of Charles Morris’s behaviourist analysis of semiotics) and Habermas (universal pragmatics of the theory of communicative action) turn towards the traditions of pragmatism and hermeneutic philosophy to criticize the representational model of knowledge put forward by the epistemological tradition, which sees cognition as the process by which the human mind comes to know a reality as an object of reliably justified true belief. 37 Rather, they see cognition as intrinsically intersubjective and mediated through social language use and which can only be properly ­u nderstood through the rational reconstructive practice of taking the (using p. 224. For a critical discussion of Alston’s Perceiving God, see the articles by Richard Gale, J. L. Schellenberg and Terrence W.  Tilley together with Alston’s responses in Religious Studies 30 (1994): 135–​80. 36 See Karl Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glynn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 37 For a critique of this tradition that has been influential on Apel, Habermas and Brandom, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980). 35

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Ryle’s terms38) intuitive ‘know-​how’ knowledge of practitioners and explicating it as the formal competences exhibited by rational speakers and actors as ‘know-​that’ knowledge. In providing a methodology of formal analysis of the rationality conditions of competent interreligious dialogue partners the cognition models of Apel and Habermas provide helpful complements to the epistemological traditions whose focus is more on subjective cognitional mental operations. While both Apel and Habermas have not applied their theories to this particular domain, such an application would provide a helpful complement to the more epistemologically oriented theories of thinkers such as Plantinga and Alston and further help to elucidate the cognitive dynamics at work in the practice of interreligious dialogue. Robert Brandom’s combination of inferential semantics with a normative pragmatics has produced a new philosophy of language that builds on the work of Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars and Rorty. In accounting for the rationality of speaking and acting subjects beyond the representationalist philosophy of consciousness model associated with Descartes and his heirs, Brandom has carried out a rigorous account of the formal linguistic pragmatics that theorists such as Apel and Habermas have pointed to in their own theories.39 In his master work Making it Explicit, Brandom elucidates what is implied in the social practices of rational thinking creatures who in making assetoric claims are committed to or precluded from being entitled to making certain other claims. Building upon this complex inferential semantics, he develops a normative pragmatic realism which rejects the Cartesian substance dualism in identifying the characteristic human trait as our being capable of holding and asserting normative attitudes. It is this normative definition of the human subject which could provide a useful method of analysis of the inferential dynamics that come into play in the complex processes of interreligious dialogue today. As interreligious dialogue is fundamentally an attitude and a way of living in relationship to others,40 which is normatively governed, it is reasonable to assume that Brandom’s work could help to

See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchison, 1949). See Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 142–​6. 40 See Meeting God in Friend and Stranger, p. 13. 38 39

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explicate something of the richness of the intersubjective encounters which occur in such dialogical practice.41 Consideration of current epistemological and linguistic-​pragmatic traditions shows that any serious engagement with the beliefs and practices of religious people today should take into account the actual practices constitutive of belief formation within the particular faith community and also the practices of interreligious dialogue which take place between faith communities. Only then will an adequate, although clearly always open to revision, account of the epistemic and pragmatic conditions of the lived reality that religious beliefs are often strengthened in such interreligious dialogues be provided. To pre-​decide the rationality of such practices on the basis of an ungrounded assumption of their irrationality is philosophically lacking and perhaps even ideologically motivated by a monological core embedded within some secularist positions. Plantinga’s and Alston’s42 work provides counter arguments to those such as Richard Feldman’s,43 for example, who argue that religious disagreements over doctrinal beliefs are an example of the impossibility of finding reasonable disagreement in the religious domain.44 This position is inadequate because it fails to correspond to the actual experience of interreligious dialogue today in which rational disagreements over doctrinal issues are common place and in fact have a very long history behind them.45 Furthermore, in assuming the impossibility of arriving at rational disagreement, support is given to a view of our secular age as needing to rest upon liberal normative pluralism which makes little or no demands on social integration. In the face of such a presupposed inescapable relativism of radical disagreements, social bonds between communities are eroded as they are simply left alone to live their own lives. Social fragmentation and a failure to provide adequate models of For Taylor’s reading of Brandom and his critique that Brandom gives insufficient attention to the disclosive dimension of language over against its assetoric dimensions, see Bernard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer (eds) Reading Brandom: On Making it Explicit (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 32–​47. For Brandom’s reply to Taylor, pp. 301–​304. 42 See especially Alston’s ­chapter 7 ‘The Problem of Religious Diversity’, in Perceiving God, op cit., pp. 255–​85. 43 See Richard Feldman, ‘Reasonable Religious Disagreements’, in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular, ed. Louise M. Antony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 194–​214. 44 See Mara Brecht, ‘Meeting the Challenge of Conflicting Religious Belief:  A  Naturalized Epistemological Approach to Interreligious Dialogue’, Heythrop Journal 48 ( 2010): 1–​12. 45 See, for example, Peter Adamson, Al Kindī (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 21–​45. 41

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social cohesion are no doubt fuelled by the mediocrity of such liberal pluralist solutions whose systemic and societal rationality structures are in part responsible for pathological social dynamics today such as ‘home grown’ terrorism and the tribalization of ethnic and religious communities.46 Developments in inter-​religious dialogue over recent years are moving beyond liberal pluralist positions such as John Hick’s and Paul Knitter’s pluralist theologies of religions47 towards more tradition centred forms of post-​liberal theology such as those coming together in the various types of contemporary comparative theology. These initiatives provide useful models for elucidating the epistemic and pragmatic conditions of successful interreligious dialogue that when reconstructed would reveal insightful rationality structures which transcend the various forms of liberal pluralism embedded in different but overlapping ways in the British and American social models. When the dominance of a Protestant metanarrative of modernity is made explicit, it reveals how such liberal pluralism issues out of a lack of sensitivity to the differences between traditions which remain obscured when from within Western modernity confessional accounts of modernisation are homogenized into general religious accounts. This homogenisation tendency frames religious disagreement as simply one form of epistemological relativism making religion an object of private taste rather than a bond of public solidarity. Such homogenisation of religion as ‘one object’ typical of approaches like the nineteenth-​century ‘world religions school’ still shapes much of the common sense reflection about religion today.48 In moving beyond this conception, comparative theology in its various forms is articulating a reality that many of us have lived for quite some time now. Namely, that being religious today is also increasingly meaning becoming inter-​religious as formerly hard and fast boundaries are crossed and the challenges of holding identity and difference together are faced by growing numbers of people.49 As a result, the assumption that the multiplication of spiritual and indeed non-​spiritual See Anthony J. Carroll, ‘Religious Symbols in Public Institutions’, The Way 43, 4 (2004): 80–​93. See, for example, John Hick and Paul Knitter (eds), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005). 48 See, for example, Hans Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 49 Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, argues that this is the major challenge facing the world today and that such monological attitudes have been the major factor behind the slaughter of countless people on the altars of great historic ideals. See Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2002), 45–​66. 46 47

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options necessarily makes belief more fragile, needs to be questioned.50 In a dialogical model of religion and of the secular, while the increase of options may provide new challenges, it can also be a source of strengthening the beliefs of a person. Such an experience is not uncommon in people involved in interreligious dialogue and manifests the fact that, as Francis Clooney’s work has illustrated, deep learning and solidarity can occur across religious borders.51

The persistence of monological frameworks This shift to a dialogical conception of religion should, of course, be set in a more uneven context than I  have so far outlined. Fundamentalism and non-​dialogical forms of religion still play an important part in our world and within Christianity today. At the popular level of the practice and beliefs of ordinary people, dialogue is no doubt unevenly spread. However, the particular issue with respect to the relation between religion and the secular that I  highlight here is that the secular age imaginary of Taylor seems to trade on a non-​dialogical understanding of religion without taking seriously the implications of the shift to dialogical modes of operating for its own self-​ understanding. This monological conception of religion and secular society is the other side of the diachronic trajectory of the origins of exclusive humanism that Taylor’s A Secular Age so masterfully traces. This, of course, is not all that surprising since, as Taylor and many others have noted, the constitution of secular Western modernity has been brought about through engagement with Christianity.52 It is thus to be expected that the secular age that we have been given has a monological exclusivist feel to it. In being formed within the cradle of Christendom and growing out of this background through eventually opposing itself to it in the exclusive humanist option of the secular age, modern atheism, particularly in the form of the ‘New Atheists’, has been structured by a distinctively oppositional architecture. In fact, it looks like a mirror image version of pre-​Vatican II exclusivist See Charles Taylor, ‘Closed World Structures’, in Wrathall (ed.) (2003): 66. This issue is taken up in A Secular Age under the category of ‘cross pressures’, see A Secular Age, pp. 594–​617. 51 See Clooney, Comparative Theology. 52 See, for example, Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World:  A  Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 50

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Catholicism. The problem for this default setting, if it indeed is our default setting, as Taylor suggests, is that which it has been constituted against has undergone a dialogical transformation. Since the Second Vatican Council and its documents on interreligious dialogue and religious freedom, Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae, Pope John Paul II’s calling of the world faiths together at Assisi in 1986; right up until the recent teaching document of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, Finding God in Friend and Stranger of 2010, a deep and structural change has been set in motion within Catholicism, which to use a phrase of Taylor, is a ‘ratchet effect’, or in other words, is irreversible. That change is the relation to the other, and not simply to the non-​believer but to the ‘other believer’. Taylor’s complexification of our current epistemic environment in which believers and unbelievers coexist and present each other with a continual reminder that other positions are possible is an example of the kind of position that I articulate here under the category of the shift from monological to dialogical religion.53 Perhaps, I am simply trying to radicalize this for both religious and secular positions by the inclusion of other religions. This inclusion decentres the traditional oppositional relation between belief and unbelief and so produces a transformative dynamic which breaks out of an oppositionally constituted secular age and opens up a dialogically constituted secular space which thinkers such as Habermas describe as a ‘post-​secular society’.54 At the level of Catholic Christianity, since the end of the ‘exclusivist model’ of Catholicism with the Second Vatican Council (extra ecclesiam nulla sallus: outside of the church no salvation), dialogue has come to characterize the church’s understanding of relations with the secular world and with other religions. As Meeting God in Friend and Stranger speaks of it, dialogue is an attitude, a way of living in relationship with others.55 No longer is it the case that Catholicism, for example, sees those of goodwill in the secular world and in other religions as outside of the plan of salvation. This means that the secular and other religions are internally significant for a theological understanding of Catholicism. Again, as Meeting God in Friend and Stranger puts

Cf., A Secular Age, 12. See J. Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-​Secular Age. 55 See Meeting God in Friend and Stranger, p. 13. 53

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it, ‘there can be no doubt that the present-​day Catholic Church’s promotion of inter religious dialogue has marked a new departure, setting the Church on a new path’.56 It is a ‘ratchet effect’ in the Catholic Church which signals an irreversible change that can only lead to deeper encounters between the world faiths. So, while the Regensburg speech of Pope Benedict may have been widely perceived as counter to this in actual fact it has led to a much deeper dialogue between Catholics and Muslims with responses and counter-​ responses from both sides of the dialogue.57 In taking the other seriously, dialogue is not only a strategy of communication, but also a new form of mission. In other words, the old oppositional approach to the other has undergone a paradigm shift in Catholicism and its self-​understanding. At the unbelief level of the exclusive humanism of atheism this shift to a dialogical stance destabilizes the traditional oppositional character of modern atheism.58 In encountering a Christianity which seeks to learn from atheism the asymmetrical relationship between belief and unbelief is being made increasingly apparent.59 In the end it seems as if non-​dialogical forms of atheism require a pre-​Vatican II ecclesiology to thrive. Its only hope at the moment is the rise of fundamentalism in religion which provides it with a much needed oppositional partner with which it can constitute itself as oppositional. It will become increasingly difficult for oppositional forms of atheism to survive if dialogue continues to embed itself in the world religions in the future. See Meeting God in Friend and Stranger, p. 51. See, for example, Benedict XVI, Glaube und Vernunft: Die Regensburger Vorlesung, Kommentiert von Gesine Schwan, Adel Theodor Khoury, and Karl Kardinal Lehmann (Freiburg: Herder, 2006) and ‘A Common Word between Us and You’ 5th anniversary edition, The Royal Aal Al-​Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2012, available at http://​w ww.acommonword.com/​ (accessed 14 May 2015). 58 Louis Dupré distinguishes between eighteenth-​century atheism which defined itself as oppositional and contemporary atheism which is less oppositional and polemical but more thoroughly immanent than in the past. While it is true that some contemporary forms of naturalism do correspond to this description, the actual dominant form of new atheism is renewing its old polemic in the face of the resurgence of religious belief. I do, however, agree with Dupré that the actual challenge for theology today is to articulate an account of the transcendent which corresponds to a spirituality of world affirmation. It is to respond to such a challenge that I  am attempting to work out an account of modernity which provides ways to understand transcendence in panentheistic terms which does not simply negate the immanent dimension but which fulfils it. See Louis Dupré, ‘Spiritual Life in a Secular Age’, in his Religious Mystery and Rational Enquiry (Grand Rapids, Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 131–​43. 59 The invitation of Cardinal Martini to prominent atheists to preach in the cathedral in Milan explaining why it is they do not believe is, I think, a wonderful example of this spirit in the contemporary church. This position was echoed by Charles Taylor at the Lumen Christi Conference ‘Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition’ at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris, 24–​26 June 2010, in his call for a dialogue based on what it is that motivates people to believe what they do and to live with these options. 56 57

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One reason for this underdeveloped dimension in Taylor’s account of the secular age is the absence of some important distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism in an overly homogenized account of reform. As Hans Joas has noted, Taylor views Christianity in modernity under the optic of Weberian disenchantment in which a Protestant inspired de-​magification (Entzauberung) of the world structures the ‘affirmation of the ordinary’ narrative that plays a crucial role in the rise of the immanent or buffered self in the exclusive humanism of modernity.60 But, this fails to appreciate the distinction between magic and sacrament, a Weberian legacy, that would make his linear vector of modernisation rather more complicated when such confessional differences are taken into account.61 Central to these confessional differences is the importance of a Catholic sacramental imagination which grounds both a diachronic spiritual trajectory of world affirmation in modernity and a synchronic correlation between the immanent and the transcendent, between faith and reason, grace and nature in a post-​secular age. A position that was robustly defended in the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 2004 Munich exchange with Jürgen Habermas, with his arguments for a religiously polyphonic post-​secular correlation between faith and reason.62 In not sufficiently differentiating Protestant and Catholic trajectories of modernity, Taylor has implicitly adopted a monological Protestant metanarrative in his diachronic thesis and allowed this metanarrative to set the synchronic agenda for his attempts to find viable conditions of belief within the imminent frame as outlined in Part V of A Secular Age. This overlooks the Catholic approach to modernity that has, since Vatican II, become an embedded orthodoxy but which has been exemplified in some earlier Catholic missionary strategies. Taylor thus fails to utilize his earlier intuition of a Catholic Modernity,63 exemplified by missionaries such as Matteo Ricci, at the diachronic level and so ends up with an overly dominated Protestant See Hans Joas, ‘Die Säkulare Option:  Ihr Aufstieg und ihre Folgen’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57 (2009): 293–​300, esp. 297–​98. 61 See, for example, my Protestant Modernity; ‘The Importance of Protestantism in Max Weber’s Theory of Secularisation’, European Journal of Sociology 50, 1 (2009):  61–​95; ‘Church and Culture:  Protestant and Catholic Modernities’; ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Catholic Modernism’, in George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism, pp. 38–​55. 62 See Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization:  On Reason and Religion, ed. with a foreword by Florian Schuller, trans. Brian McNeil C.  R. V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). 63 See L. James and S. M. Heft, A Catholic Modernity? 60

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synchronic thesis of epistemic pluralism, which thinkers such as John Hick have adopted in their pluralistic conception of religions.64 This implicit oppositional Protestant metanarrative obscures the epistemic transformation that has emerged in several Christian traditions in lieu of the paradigm shift to dialogue as the new form of mission. In other words, the secular age has been constituted by opposition but that opposition is currently in the process of transformation. It is this transformation which makes the old constitution of the exclusively humanist default setting of the secular age seem increasingly anomalous in a world of predominantly religious belief.65 In the light of such anomalies, the real challenge today for believers, non-​believers and other-​believers is to shape a new dialogical secular space which is able to meet the normative and often universal challenges of our age such as environmental protection, international justice, global peace and prosperity and stable and effective governance at local, regional, national, international and supra-​ national levels.66 Furthermore, globalization is making increasingly apparent the exceptional nature of religious unbelief and so undermining the privileged status of a formerly unaware unbelief default position.67 It is also undermining the oppositional dialectic between belief and unbelief by reconstituting it in the field of a post-​liberal pluralism of religious beliefs increasingly shaped through dialogue and unbeliefs which have been monologically patterned and so are ill-​equipped to deal with dialogical religions. This represents an extra-​and often unacknowledged-​cognitive strain on atheism (unbelief) that is potentially corrosive of its self-​constitution as oppositional.68 A  point which the work of Michael Buckley 69 and Eberhard

See, for example, John Hick, Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion (Basingstoke:  Palgrave McMillan, 2001). 65 See, for example, Peter Berger et al., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Cambridge: Eerdamans, 1999). 66 On the importance of supranational governance in the European Union, see John P. McCormick, Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supra-​ National Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 67 See Grace Davie, Europe the Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: DLT, 2002). 68 I therefore disagree, on this point, with Habermas who argues that the cognitive strain on believers and unbelievers is asymmetrical as it is more difficult on the side of believers. See J.  Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion:  Philosophical Essays (Oxford:  Polity Press, 2008), p. 136 and 143. 69 See Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1987). 64

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Jüngel70 make  at different methodological levels  –​science and religion for Buckley, and metaphysics and theology for Jüngel  –​with respect to the dialectical relation between theism and atheism in modern theology and anti-​t heology. A new atheism, should it now arise, will clearly need to rethink itself post-​t he death of the metaphysical conception of God that escapes the structuring opposition of the old theism-​atheism controversy. This clearly has effects not simply on monotheistic traditions but even on traditions such as Buddhism which may well deny a metaphysical conception of God in overlapping ways to the post-​onto-​theological71 theologians and philosophers of the different monotheistic traditions.72 The closed world structures that Taylor speaks of as blocking transcendental options seem to correspond to such old monological forms of religion and secularism. These structures are normatively lacking for cultures such as those of the West which are increasingly grounded on the truth conditional basis of dialogue and not on the monological exertion of particular theistic or atheistic claims. So, while Matthew Arnold’s sea of monological ‘closed belief structures’ may have receded, so too have the ‘closed world structures’ of monologically formed secularism.73

Towards an age beyond theism and atheism This reconstitution of the belief and unbelief problematic in terms of belief, unbelief and other-​belief indicates that atheism (unbelief) may well have retreated to a corner of some parts of the Western world, but that corner has a new door opening with disorientating effects.74 While, Western liberal atheists may denigrate ontotheological Christianity, it is much harder to relate to

See his God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified one in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. D. L. Guder (London: T and T Clark, 1983). Onto-​t heology is that tradition of religious thought which has conceived of God as the highest being in a hierarchy of beings. Martin Heidegger is the philosopher who makes a decisive break with this tradition and who, following Nietzsche, rams home the death of a certain metaphysical conception of God. 72 See, for example, Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003). The work of Jean-​Luc Marion is an important contribution to post-​ ontotheological thought today. See, especially his God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson with a forward by David Tracy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). 73 Cf., A Secular Age, pp. 551–​92. 74 See McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism. 70

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other religions in this manner because their identity has been forged particularly by opposition to this ontotheological metaphysical conceptualisation of Christianity. They are caught in the dilemma of either proposing an anachronistic universal theory of progress from the pre-​A xial through the Axial religions to Christianity and ultimately to scientific atheism or of simply denigrating one form of belief and not another.75 While opposing, one other may be reasonable and demonstrates a certain degree of self-​assertiveness opposing everyone tends to make you seem somewhat beleaguered and contrary. It would seem as if in a post-​secular world, religious fundamentalism and old time ontotheological thought is the last hope for oppositional non-​dialogical and anti-​ontotheological atheism or the exclusive humanism that our secular world may once have been set on but which looks increasingly anachronistic when applied to the contemporary world and its post-​ontotheological thinking. In positing as the core synchronic thesis of A Secular Age the emergence of exclusive humanism as the default setting of our secular age, it seems that Taylor may have been overly generous to the importance of secularism in a world which seems increasingly sceptical and much less naïve of preordained monological comprehensive default settings that operate in an ontotheological framework of either theism or atheism.76

For much more nuanced discussions on the importance of the Axial Age in the evolution of religion and secularity, see Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds), The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2012); Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution:  From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2011); S. N. Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (New  York:  State University of New York Press, 1986). 76 See Anthony Carroll, ‘Beyond Theism and Atheism: The Search for Truth’, in Carroll and Norman (eds.) (2017): 95–104. 75

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Contemporary Jesuit Epistemological Interests James G. Murphy SJ1

Apart from an orientation to and interest in the discernment of spirits as laid out in St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, there does not exist a Jesuit epistemology as such. Compared to the numbers of Jesuit systematic theologians, scripture scholars, metaphysicians and ethicists, there have been few Jesuit epistemologists.2 In metaphysics, Jesuits have been Thomist or Suarezian, even Platonist. In ethics, they have ranged from proportionalist through deontologist to virtue ethicist. No similar distinctive Jesuit presence is to be found in epistemology. On the other hand, from its earliest years, the Society of Jesus has been committed to education, not just in theology and philosophy but also in the humanities and the sciences. This commitment has led it into wide engagement with different ways of knowing, to a diversity of interpretations of the world, human beings, and God. Accordingly, the focus of this chapter is not Jesuit epistemologists as such, but epistemic aspects of Jesuit ventures: it attempts an overview of how Jesuits have grappled with issues of knowledge in theology, philosophy and the sciences, roughly since the Second Vatican Council (1962–​65). It ranges across how they have viewed the epistemic status of experience and perception, the role of theory and interpretation, the appropriate ways to link theology and the sciences, the nature and sources of moral knowledge, the role Thanks to Stephen Schloesser SJ whose suggestions have greatly improved this chapter. His ‘Jesuit Hybrids, Catholic Moderns, and Futural Pasts’, in For the City and the World:  Conversations in Catholic Studies and Social Thought (Lane Center Lectures 2005–​2010), ed. Julia Dowd (San Francisco: University of San Francisco Press, 2010), pp. 114–​41 gives a fascinating overview of aspects of the history of Jesuit scholarship. Thanks also to Gerry O’Hanlon SJ and Conall Ó Cuinn for helpful criticism. 2 Bernard Lonergan, Vincent Potter and Patrick Heelan are among the notable few. 1

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of the Spiritual Exercises and particularly the discernment of spirits as an epistemic guide to spiritual wisdom, the importance of judgment leading to commitment to action, and the cognitive potential of different religions and cultures.

Humanism: Alessandro Valignano SJ versus Pope Benedict XIV Traditional and pre-​Vatican II Catholic theology and philosophy in which the Jesuits, like other Catholic clerics, would have been trained, tended to be based on premises from scholastic philosophy that were heavily a priori, or derived from the authority of Scripture and magisterium. While critics at the time and subsequently saw scholastic philosophy and ecclesial authority as objectionable, the real problem was the apparent rejection of, or perhaps more precisely, the attempt to limit and control science and experience. From the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1540 to its suppression in 1773, and again from its restoration in 1814 to Vatican II (1962–​65), its members had a well-​worked-​out philosophy (usually Thomist or Suarezian) and were thoroughly grounded in post-​Tridentine systematic theology. Few theological uncertainties were to be found among them; and, epistemologically, certainty was a virtue in that era. At the same time, their strong faith commitment and conviction that the Christian Church was the indispensable means to salvation made them strongly missionary, leading them to bring the gospel to the peoples of Asia and the Americas. However, in fulfilling that mission, they were also humanist. Their Renaissance-​based humanism led their missionary zeal to take seriously the language and cultures of the peoples they sought to evangelize, a stance most associated with Alessandro Valignano SJ (1539–​1606). They did not just seek to ‘know’ those peoples, in the sense of knowledge as acquaintance; they also sought to understand how different peoples interpreted the world. In short, their knowing of their target people and intended converts came to involve cognitively embracing their culture, which included knowing how those people knew and interpreted their experience.

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A significant instance was the Jesuit missionary project in China from 1600 to 1773.3 As early as Matteo Ricci (1552–​1610), the Jesuits interested themselves in Confucianism, as a natural quasi-​religion. They also took Chinese culture seriously in a way that many of their European contemporaries did not. The contrast in that period between the Jesuit and the Franciscan approaches to evangelizing the Chinese is vivid testimony to Jesuit humanism. This divergence in culture distanced the Jesuits from the dominant Roman view, leading to the clash between Rome and the Jesuits in the Chinese rites controversy. The fact that the pope who finally decided the issue was Benedict XIV (1740–​58), perhaps the most enlightened pope between the Council of Trent (1545–​63) and Vatican II, indicates the depth and seriousness of the clash: it was no mere misunderstanding.4 The clash over rites and religion reveals an underlying epistemological divergence. The Jesuits believed there was important knowledge to be had through immersing themselves in Chinese culture, partly because some of it would probably lead them to discover how to mediate Jesus Christ to Chinese culture, and partly because Chinese culture seemed of value for its own sake as a way of interpreting experience, the world and human nature. Their opponents deemed such inculturation unsound, thinking non-​Christian ideas would dilute the gospel message, making it harder for the Chinese (and the Jesuits themselves) to know who Christ was and where he was to be found. They judged that the results of such inculturation could not possibly be epistemologically authoritative: it was bad enough for the Jesuits to argue that inculturation was good, it was worse to suggest that it was necessary to the point that the gospel could not be communicated to the Chinese except through Chinese culture.

Vatican II: Signs of the times The conventional view of Vatican II is that it was an ‘opening-​up’ moment for the Catholic Church. From a condemnatory mode of rhetoric going back to The Jesuits didn’t confine themselves to the sophisticated high-​class mandarin and Confucian culture of China. In the seventeenth century, they also studied the cultures of North American natives, as the multivolume Jesuit Relations shows. For important papers on these topics, see John W. O’Malley et al., eds, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–​1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 4 In 1939, as war with Japan engulfed China, the newly elected Pope Pius XII rescinded the ban on the Chinese rites. 3

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the sixteenth century Council of Trent, continued and heightened from 1815 to the 1950s, and a generally fearful and defensive stance towards the modern world, the Catholic Church suddenly began to express a cautious openness, even a willingness to listen and learn. The view that Vatican II represents a revolutionary moment for the Catholic Church is, no doubt, rather crude in its sweeping generalization, but it has sufficient accuracy to let it stand. As Vatican II recedes into the past, historians are increasingly able to discern the continuities with previous developments, such as Pius XII’s opening the doors to Catholic scripture scholarship and liturgical reform. At the time, it was amazing to hear an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church not merely accept the principle of freedom of religion, but also commence its document about the Church’s stance towards the modern world as follows: ‘The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age . . . are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ’. It continues: the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which people ask about this present life and the life to come . . . We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its explanations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics . . . True, there is a growing exchange of ideas, but the very words by which key concepts are expressed take on quite different meanings in diverse ideological systems.5

Such a note had never been struck before in official Church documents, not because the pre-​Vatican II Church had been opposed to such ideas but because it hadn’t thought them important. Where the Church had seen its role as that of handing on the message of Christ, presenting and teaching Catholic doctrine clearly and precisely, it now seemed to want to listen also: it was not abandoning its traditional role, but it was also expressing a novel epistemological openness. The novelty lay not in prelates and priests being open to new ideas and insights, but in their taking such openness to be of value for its own sake: first, as an intellectual, See http://​w ww.vatican.va/​a rchive/​hist_​councils/​ii_​vatican_​council/​documents/​vat-​ii_​const_​ 19651207_​gaudium-​et-​spes_​en.html: Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, nn. 1 and 4.

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cognitive or epistemic virtue, and second, as directly relevant to effective evangelization and communication of the Christian faith. In the extract quoted from Gaudium et Spes, the points of epistemological interest include (1) the claim that anything belonging to the range of human experience or interest is relevant to understanding the Christian message, so must be cognitively appropriated by the Church; (2) the requirement that the Church identify and interpret ‘the signs of the times’; (3) the importance of being receptive to the questions and concerns of the people of the age and (4) the difficulty of understanding where humanity is situated on its historical journey, given major cultural change, technological revolution, ideological clashes and even shifts in linguistic and conceptual meaning.6

Vatican II: Stable truth, developing teaching From an epistemological perspective, the most significant moment at Vatican II may have come in Pope John XXIII’s opening address to the council. The pope, probably reflecting the influence of the nouvelle theologie or ressourcement theology of de Lubac, Congar, Chenu, Rahner and Balthasar, created space for fresh inquiry and new insights by stating: ‘The deposit or the truths of faith . . . are one thing, while the mode in which they are enunciated, keeping the same meaning and the same judgment, is another.’7 No truths of faith would be denied or rejected. But new formulations could be developed for those truths, fresh interpretations were to be encouraged, traditional truths could be deepened or further elaborated and maybe new truths emerge. The pope’s comment illustrates something important about human cognition. Epistemological concern is not confined to coming to know new things or recognizing previous ones. It also embraces (1) exploration of what we know in part, since most knowledge is partial; (2)  deeper understanding of what is already known to be true; (3) application of what we know to It is doubtful if many bishops at Vatican II had read Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), published the year the council assembled. But the views expressed in the passage quoted from Gaudium et Spes reflect a similar sense of cultural and semantic transformations. 7 John XXIII, Opening address to Vatican II, no. 6: ‘Est enim aliud ipsum depositum Fidei, seu veritates . . . aliud modus, quo eaedem enuntiantur, eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia’. http://​ www.vatican.va/​holy_​father/​john_ ​x xiii/​speeches/​1962/​documents/​h f_​j-​x xiii_​spe_​19621011_​ opening-​council_​lt.html. 6

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situations not hitherto encountered, with the result that we may understand that truth in new ways and (4) translation of the language within which the truth is expressed into other formulations.

Jesuits before Vatican II: New paths to theology The change at Vatican II had been in the making since the 1920s, and Jesuits had been prominent among its makers. To describe what they contributed would take several books; here I  merely point to the epistemological dimensions. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a palaeontologist and cosmologist who, influenced by Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution Créatrice, grappled with the challenge that evolution appeared to present, not directly to formal Catholic doctrine, but more to the general network of ideas and concepts that made up Catholic tradition(s) on anthropology. By the late 1930s, he was in trouble with Church authorities for his openness to Darwinian theories of evolution, who did not share his sense of the importance of approaching the evolutionary aspects of anthropology scientifically. Given the importance of evolution, however, somebody had to knock forcefully on the Church’s door, even though it might produce a ‘shoot-​the-​messenger’ reaction. Teilhard stood in a long Jesuit tradition of openness to new knowledge in knocking loudly and in accepting the personal sacrifices involved in remaining faithful to science. Henri de Lubac SJ’s Catholicisme:  les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris 1938)  was significant in proposing the Fathers of the early Church, rather than the medieval scholastics, as offering a more fruitful epistemological model for developing an up-​to-​date theology. His later work promoted this essentially epistemological ressourcement and was influential at Vatican II. In the years after Vatican II the term ‘theological reflection’ was often heard. In many theologates, students were encouraged, not simply to learn the tradition and familiarize themselves with the Church’s doctrines, but also to ‘do’ theology themselves. Professors bred under the older scholastic system would have wondered if this notion was not merely an empty rhetorical flourish. However, the ressourcement movement could point to the Fathers as providing an example of theological praxis, since they were bishops and pastors developing theological thought in response to pastoral need. They modeled

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how to do theology, in a way responsive to the concerns of the people of their times.8 Karl Rahner’s doctoral dissertation (published in 1939)  treated epistemological issues in Thomas Aquinas from a perspective influenced by Kant, Heidegger and another Jesuit, Joseph Maréchal. His dissertation director Martin Honecker judged it unacceptably Heideggerian. In an era of intense ideological struggles over justice and social order between fascism, liberal capitalist democracy and communism, Jesuits such as the Frenchmen de Lubac and Yves de Montcheuil and the German Alfred Delp, all involved in active resistance to the Nazi regime, became keenly aware of the social and political dimensions of human existence as sources of knowledge for a more adequate theological anthropology. Montcheuil was influenced by Maurice Blondel’s focus on the primacy of action, and on what might be called the importance of knowing-​by-​doing. Scholastic philosophy’s notion of experience was increasingly seen as too narrowly Aristotelian or Humean in its focus on sense data. Montcheuil and Delp died at the hands of the Nazi regime, but Jesuits (like de Lubac) who survived had been transformed, almost overwhelmed, by their experience, and pre-​Kantian categories seemed quite inadequate to the experience of war, occupation and genocide. They meant something quite new in the Catholic theological tradition when they argued that theology must arise from lived experience.

Jesuit missions: Atheism Vatican II called on religious orders to renew themselves in line with their founder’s charism. The Society of Jesus duly made a start at its 31st General Congregation (1965–​66).9 In his opening address to the Jesuits assembled for GC 31, Pope Paul VI asked the Society to tackle the distinctively modern phenomenon of atheism. Distinguishing between the state atheism of contemporary Communist states, philosophical atheism and what he called ‘hedonistic’

In reading de Lubac and the others, we are most aware of their criticisms of standard theological and philosophical positions; but in historical perspective, we see the continuities between them and the scholastics. Furthermore, intellectual and cultural contexts change: in some, the scholastic systematic approach might be precisely what is needed. 9 From here, I abbreviate General Congregation to GC, followed by the congregation number. 8

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atheism, he called on Jesuits to study atheism seriously and systematically.10 It wasn’t like being asked to combat Protestantism or heresy, where the issue was to clarify Christian doctrine and defend the orthodox variant of it, for atheism was not a doctrine that defined a particular group. In their response, Decree 3 of the GC 31 documents, the Jesuits showed that they understood that it also involved seeking to understand modern atheism, that the view of atheism which prevailed before Vatican II was dated and inadequate, and that acquiring understanding required significant dialogue with atheists.11 The sources of atheism appeared to be many: ideological Marxism, a kind of materialism encouraged by the rise in material wellbeing, simple de-​Christianization in older Christian countries such as France and the Church’s frequent support of ultra-​conservative causes and perceived hostility to modern culture and modern science. Like the Church, the post-​Vatican II Society of Jesus was changing its response to the world. The traditional approach would have taken an ontological stance on the facts: the facts are that atheism is irrational and false, since its anthropology is mistaken on several major points, so let that be reiterated firmly. Now came a shift of emphasis to an epistemological stance: (1) If atheism could be understood, it could be more effectively countered and defeated; (2) Acquiring that understanding is not just a matter of identifying false philosophical theses, but also exploring why modern people are drawn to it; (3) Doing this requires culturally wider and more open-​ minded engagement. The next step, unacknowledged because it was not fully realized in 1965, was: (4) Such engagement with atheism could shift Jesuit goals from opposing atheism to clarifying it, dialoguing with it and living with it. Atheism as an ideological or philosophical movement would probably be around for reasons that the cultural historian would be better placed to address than the philosopher, so refuting atheism, while important, was not as overridingly important as might have been thought. Atheists, agnostics and the indifferent were persons whose need called Jesuits to walk with them.

See John W. Padberg, ed., Jesuit Life and Mission Today:  The Decrees and Accompanying Documents of the 31st–​35th General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009), p. 231. 11 GC 31, nn. 24–​30, in Padberg, Jesuit Life, pp. 53–​6. 10

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In any case, winning arguments was relevant only to atheism of the doctrinaire kind, which did not flourish in the post-​1965 era. Academic Jesuit philosophers or theologians did occasionally engage in well-​publicized debates with unbelievers. In 1948, English Jesuit Frederick Copleston, author of a famous multivolume history of philosophy, debated Bertrand Russell on BBC radio, and from the 1950s to the 1970s Jesuits could be found at academic conferences with such Marxists as Roger Garaudy. Since the year 2000, the challenge from what have been labeled the New Atheism (with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and even Stephen Hawking falling under this label) has appealed to science as an epistemic authority that proves religion to be false and God not to exist. In some ways, the New Atheism is quaintly old-​fashioned, harking back to Enlightenment ideas about the universal scope of science and instrumental reason. Jesuits have been involved in responding to the critique. Some have argued that various developments relating to what astrophysicists sometimes term the ‘fine-​tuning’ of the universe support or at least show the theist stance as not unreasonable and no more implausible than the atheist stance.12 In that respect, the Jesuit response was one with long roots in Jesuit history, going back to the Society of Jesus’s early engagement with science through such Jesuit contemporaries of Galileo as Kristoph Klau (Christopher Clavius), who developed the Gregorian calendar still in use, and in the age of the Enlightenment through Jesuits such as Rudijer Boscovic. Others have focused on highlighting the epistemological distinctions between the sciences, metaphysics and theology, making the case for the position that the science-​religion clash is something of a mirage.13 They have also drawn attention to the importance of disciplinary boundaries within science, noting the difficulty of identifying what scientific method is, and effectively queried the supposition that there is such a thing as ‘science’ as distinct from particular sciences. Modern philosophers, including the logical positivists, Husserl and the phenomenologists, and Heidegger have recognized the See Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). See also George Coyne and Michael Heller, A Comprehensible Universe: The Interplay of Science and Theology (New York: Springer, 2008); Guy Consolmagno, ed., The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican (Vatican Observatory Publications, 2009). 13 See Séamus Murphy, ‘Science vs. Religion:  The Phony War’, Studies, Irish Jesuit Quarterly 96 (2007): 245–​56. 12

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epistemological significance of the fact that the sciences differ among themselves both with respect to the entities they treat and with respect to their methodologies.14 The relationship between the sciences and theology remains a significant issue for Jesuit engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical culture. In the ongoing multiplication of disciplinary specialization and the increased divergence of those disciplines, Jesuits sense a challenge to the Renaissance humanist view of the unity of knowledge and seek in their universities to respond to this challenge.15

Justice and interdisciplinary issues GC 32 (1974–​75) was momentous principally for two reasons. First, the Congregation committed itself to the proposition that the promotion of justice is an ‘absolute requirement of’ or ‘integral to’ the service of faith. Social justice was clearly uppermost in the minds of the delegates, even if the justice that was integral to the service of faith was necessarily broader than social justice.16 Referring to Paul VI’s mission to the Society of Jesus of combating atheism, GC 32 expressed the sense that social injustice, often global in extent, sometimes structural and state-​sponsored in nature, both reflected and reinforced a kind of practical atheism.17 While it was easy enough to find Scriptural and patristic support for that claim, what was striking was the change in emphasis: the Jesuits had come quite a distance in their interpretation of the world since 1965 when their talk about atheism seemed primarily concerned with the ideas of people such as Jean-​Paul Sartre and Nikita Khruschchev.18 Now their judgment was that the spread of The most famous Jesuit epistemologist of the twentieth century was Bernard Lonergan (1904–​ 1984), whose two major works, Insight (Longman, 1957)  and Method in Theology (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972)  direct attention to these issues, notably in his discussion of functional specialties. 15 See, for example, http://​w ww.luc.edu/​mission/​index.shtml for the mission statement of the Loyola University Chicago, in particular the document ‘Transformative Education’. 16 See Séamus Murphy, ‘The Many Ways of Justice’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 26, 2 (1994). 17 GC 32, nn. 76–​9; in Padberg, Jesuit Life, p. 305. 18 It would be easy to retort that Jesuits had been well aware of social injustice long before the early 1970s, and point to Fr General Janssens’s document on the social apostolate of 1948 as well as to social initiatives undertaken by Jesuits in those years, such as the Latin American Jesuit educational movement Fe y Alegría founded in 1955 by Fr José Maria Vélaz SJ. What was novel was that the experience of social injustice was now changing their understanding of evangelization. 14

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atheism had more to do with social structures and mass culture than with philosophical ideas. A Jesuit who was particularly influential both as a catalyst and as a non-​ academic synthesizer of these disparate trends in the Society of Jesus from 1968 to 1980 was the Jesuit general, Fr Pedro Arrupe. He had survived the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima and, along with Jesuits who had been marked by their war-​time experiences, seemed a striking proof of the epistemic authority of experience, particularly extreme social experience, as distinct from (and in some sense trumping) the authority of academic theology and philosophy.19 Fr Arrupe communicated to young Jesuits in a way that no previous or subsequent Jesuit general (except Ignatius) has matched, and his addresses seemed to suggest that knowledge without social commitment was without value.20 It is not surprising that the ‘we-​need-​to-​learn’ note was struck more strongly at GC 32 than at GC 31. GC 32 admitted: ‘Too often we are insulated from any real contact with unbelief and with the hard, everyday consequences of injustice and oppression’.21 Accordingly, it called for greater experiential learning through insertion into the lives of the poor and marginalized. In response, a number of Jesuits undertook initiatives in this direction with varying degrees of success. In order to understand the nature of oppressive social structures that should be transformed in the interest of human liberation, GC 32 also directed Jesuits’ attention to the social sciences.22 Liberation theology had emerged in Latin America a few years earlier, and its popular slogan was that theology should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Among Latin American liberation theologians and European political theologians it was widely held that theology’s privileged dialogue partner should be sociology or economics, not philosophy. At the same time, GC 32 noted a crisis in Jesuit attitudes to philosophy and perhaps to reason in general:  ‘From different parts of the Society it has been reported that philosophical studies in recent years have suffered As one commentator put it later, late twentieth-​century people (including Jesuits) rejected the experience of authority in favour of the authority of experience. 20 I owe this point to Steve Schloesser. 21 GC 32, nn. 84, 96–​9; in Padberg, Jesuit Life, pp. 306–​10. It was also struck at GC 34 in its document on women in Church and society; see GC 34, n. 372, in Padberg, Jesuit Life, p. 618. 22 GC 32, nn. 84, 93; ibid., pp. 307–​8. 19

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deterioration.’23 After Vatican II, the discipline and practice of philosophy in the Society of Jesus fragmented and became directionless, at the very same time as theology was in a state of ferment and excitement, having liberated itself from the scholastic philosophy that had supported and constrained it prior to 1962. No doubt that meant many Jesuit philosophers were out of work, but the deeper issue was that with respect to philosophical foundations, Jesuit theologians and Jesuits in general were adrift. One response was that philosophy could be replaced by the social sciences. A number of Jesuits were directed towards studies in sociology. Forty years later the outcome of that commitment suggests that the Jesuits involved were not quite sure what to do with sociology in order to transform their theological understanding of their corporate ministry. It gradually became clear that if theology was to be connected fruitfully with the social sciences, philosophy was indispensable. Drawing attention to the fact that economics and sociology were empirical disciplines while theology was not, Francisco Ivern SJ warned of the danger of giving a theological stamp of approval to a particular economic theory (e.g. dependency theory, widely influential on the thinking of Latin American liberation theologians) or of claiming a quasi-​scientific status for one particular theological approach (such as liberation theology).24 His point was that valid linkage of theology with any science required philosophy, specifically epistemology and philosophy of science, as a kind of transformer or mediator. Epistemology and philosophy of science were needed to identify and distinguish between the different kinds of knowledge provided by theology and the social sciences. How successful Jesuits (or others) have been in linking the social sciences and theology so as to produce something substantially new in the forty years since GC 32 is unclear. Today, the verdict would probably be that it has not yet been achieved. In economics, Jesuits have not been immune to the temptation to escape into anti-​intellectual populism as response to globalization and the collapse of communism. Jesuits who became sociologists often seemed philosophically underdeveloped, unable to think their way through the positivistic limitations of traditional sociology.

23

GC 32, n. 156; ibid., p. 326. Francisco Ivern SJ, ‘The Future of Faith and Justice: A Critical Review of Decree Four’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 14, 5 (1982): 18–​20.

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Matters became worse. After 1980, the seductive attractions of post-​ modernism influenced many Jesuits, in theology, philosophy and sociology, far more than was healthy for the Society of Jesus’s intellectual and theological commitments. It was one thing to shift emphasis from ontology to epistemology; it was quite another to abandon metaphysics or to regard truth and objectivity as mere cultural tools for Western hegemonistic oppression.

Clashing epistemologies The second reason that GC 32 was so momentous was that it revealed, and also exacerbated, rising tensions between Pope Paul VI and the Society of Jesus. Later these tensions reached crisis point under Pope John Paul II in 1980–​81. I  suggest that the tensions can be viewed interestingly from the prism of conflicting epistemologies. Pope Paul VI’s opening address to the Jesuits assembled to commence the General Congregation was lengthy and serious. One expects popes to admonish, or at least suggest reforms, when they officially register the fact that the Jesuits are convening a General Congregation, the equivalent of a general chapter for other religious orders. But this time there seemed to be more involved. The pope expressed his sense that the Jesuits no longer knew who or what they were. He invited them to reflect on the questions ‘Where do you come from?’, ‘Who are you?’ and ‘Where are you going?’ and proceeded to give his own answers.25 To the first question, he recalled their history, and to the second he stated that they were religious, priests, apostles and united with the pope through the special vow of obedience to the pope. Much of what he said was laudatory of Jesuit achievements, and he praised their willingness to engage in intellectual ministry: ‘Wherever in the Church, even in the most difficult and most extreme fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the front line of social conflict, there has been and there is confrontation between the deepest desires of man and the perennial message of the Gospel, there also have been, and there are, Jesuits.’26 This was praise indeed, but many Jesuits differed profoundly from the pope with respect to what was Padberg, Jesuit Life, pp. 380ff. Ibid., p. 384.

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involved in Jesuit encounters with others at the ideological crossroads. Where the Jesuits might have thought dialogue and learning was the goal, the pope had something else in mind. For he then demanded: ‘And why then do you doubt?’ He told them that the doubts they experienced were precisely what was to be experienced in a world hostile to God, and complained: You are as well aware as we are that today there appears within certain sectors of your ranks a strong state of uncertainty, indeed a fundamental questioning of your very identity . . . What is the state of acceptance and loyal witness in regard to the fundamental points of Catholic faith and moral teaching as set forth by the ecclesiastical magisterium?

He went on to criticize a desire for novelty for its own sake that he detected in the Society of Jesus, and among other things urged the Jesuits to be more discerning between the demands of the world and those of the Gospel.27 Of interest here are the charges of doubt, uncertainty and the apparent pursuit of novelty for its own sake. While linked to loss of faith, as well as to a kind of moral weakness, they also imply a kind of epistemological failure; a loss of intellectual nerve and conviction through being too open-​minded to the world. At the time, many Jesuits viewed Paul VI and his advisers as intellectually timorous and closed. They saw the pope as taking Vatican II to be a point of terminus, with the remaining task for the Church to be reception of the council’s decrees, whereas they, as progressive Jesuits, saw Vatican II as a point of departure in a radically changing world. They wanted more openness to the global range of cultures and ideologies, while the pope insisted that there was little point to being open to other positions if one no longer understood one’s own position. Which view was correct? Perhaps both, depending on one’s angle of perception. Some of the pope’s more excitable advisors probably thought that heresy was rife among the Jesuits, but even they knew that formal heresy would have been hard to identify, let alone to prove. There was quite a diversity of sociopolitical views among Jesuits, although the overall balance was more ‘left-​wing’ than was the case among the pope’s advisors. But focusing on Ibid., pp. 384, 385 and 388.

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this is sterile. While a few Jesuits rejected some Church teachings, the typical Jesuit was not heretical and didn’t think that a firm reaffirmation of dogma was the most important thing needed. Bernard Lonergan’s tri-​partite structure of cognition seems a useful metaphor here to image the divergence at GC 32. The Jesuits felt that the Church, of which they were a microcosm, was still at the level of seeking insight and understanding, by trying to read experience in new ways and by widening the scope of what was to count as experience, and by seeking to think ‘outside the box’ without being constricted in a slightly uncritical and even fearful way by focusing on dogma. The pope believed the range of possible understandings and interpretations of the world and human experience that had emerged in the previous decades was rich enough for the present, and that, at least with respect to Jesuit identity, the stage of judgment had been reached, where specific propositions had to be affirmed as true and other options excluded. No wonder there was a clash. I suggest that the clash was not doctrinal or ontological (i.e. about how things are, or about what propositions are to be affirmed and held as true) but epistemological:  are we doing our knowing well? The Jesuits could have defended themselves by saying that no doctrines were being challenged by the Society of Jesus as a whole. Paul VI could have retorted that understandings that never moved to judgment were epistemologically sterile. On this front, the dialectic continues. Subsequent decades have been less tumultuous than were the 1970s, the Jesuits have dwindled in numbers, and gradually a wary modus vivendi was reached between later popes and the Jesuits. Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, has repeatedly affirmed appreciation of cultural diversity and the epistemological emphasis that sees the importance of listening and being willing to aim for new insights.28 The Catholic Church has come a long way since the time of Pius X (1903–​14) when the anti-​ Modernist movement had become a veritable witch-​hunt within the church, hunting down any intellectual originality in theology or philosophy even when oriented to orthodox ends. 28

In his homily at the Gesu Church in Rome on 3 January 2014, the pope remarked: ‘to be a Jesuit means to be a person of incomplete thought, of open thought: because one always thinks looking at the horizon which is the ever greater glory of God, who ceaselessly surprises us. And this is the restlessness of our void, this holy and beautiful restlessness! However, because we are sinners, we can ask ourselves if our heart has kept the restlessness of the search or if, instead, it has atrophied.’ See http://​w ww.zenit.org/​en/​a rticles/​pope-​f rancis-​homily-​at-​mass-​in-​t he-​church-​of-​t he-​gesu.

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On the other hand, Paul VI’s challenge has yet to be fully received by the Society of Jesus.29 The Jesuits correctly grasped that knowing is culturally conditioned, and wanted to be open to and accommodate other perspectives. It would then have been easy to dismiss the pope as simply reasserting orthodoxy and demanding an end to creative rethinking in theology and ethics. However, the pope’s point can be read more charitably, as worried that cultural openness risked implicitly assuming that truth could never be reached from a particular perspective, since all perspectives are limited and constrained. But since all knowing is indeed perspectival, it follows that if truth is attainable it must be attainable from a particular perspective. Culture and perspective may be critically transcended, but cannot be escaped. Furthermore, the pope’s address implied that to know how to go forward Jesuits needed to remember where they were coming from. If the knower forgets who she is, either losing her cultural and cognitive grounding or lacking critical awareness of her cultural presuppositions, she cannot know, since she cannot judge and hence cannot grasp truth and move, in informed faith, to action.30 The drive to inquire loses its moorings if its metaphysical grounding in the culturally rooted embodied cognitive agent is forgotten. Finally, the epistemological drive loses its purpose and creative tension if its metaphysical goals are considered impossible. Christian faith affirms that reality is intelligible, that its intelligibility is independent of human knowers and their cognitive constructs, and that it is knowable by human knowers. A post-​modernist rejection of ontology, and a historicist or culturally relativist stance that excludes the possibility of truth, can only doom the Society of Jesus’s commitment to the intellectual apostolate, since that commitment’s intelligibility assumes a coherent theology. The only option left will be some kind of ‘retreat to commitment’, that is to a practical activism chasing an elusive relevance.31 John Paul II reiterated the challenge in Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Fides et Ratio (1998). Not every judgment succeeds in arriving at the truth; truth is hard to come by. The point is that if the real is merely conceptual, there is nothing for judgment to grasp, nothing about which it can say ‘it is thus-​a nd-​so’; and without judgment, epistemology degenerates into non-​normative cultural studies. 31 This is not a criticism of Jesuit social, spiritual or pastoral ministries. The point is that if the Society of Jesus drifted into thinking its intellectual engagements in theology, philosophy and the sciences had little value (apart from an instrumental value of providing teachers in Jesuit universities for undergraduates) it would indicate a profound loss in the Society’s sense of what it means to hear and communicate the word of God. 29

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Philosophically, the implication was unavoidable: banishing metaphysics (along with the possibility of truth claims) meant the death of epistemology. Metaphysics that foreclosed on epistemology meant a dogmatic sclerosis; epistemology that excluded metaphysics quickly becomes pointless. The Jesuits and the pope needed each other.

Culture and theology In GC 34 (1995) the Jesuits addressed culture. This widened GC 31’s focus on atheism and shifted the angle of perception of GC 32’s theme of justice. There is thus a kind of natural evolution in thought at work here, since the decrees of any Jesuit general congregation reflect the reception of the decrees of previous general congregations. In this instance, the work of Jesuits of inculturating the gospel in Asia and Africa was bearing fruit. In addition, the creative contributions of such notable students of culture as American Jesuit Walter Ong (1912–​2003) and French Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925–​1986) played a significant role. The harvest of the explorations of ways of knowing involved in the diversified Jesuit outreach to culture was rich. However, GC 34’s document on culture shows hesitant uneasiness and intellectual softness. On the one hand, it wished to express openness to those cultures where Christianity had never put down deep roots, particularly in Asia and Africa. On the other, it saw the importance of taking a critical stance towards various aspects of contemporary (particularly Western) cultures. But it did not succeed in harmonizing these two perspectives. The insights of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951) portraying the different ways Christ is related to culture, whether in antagonism, affirmation, transcendence or transformation, seemed forgotten at GC 34.32 The critical intellectual edge the Jesuits had traditionally displayed seemed blunted. To speak of this as a Jesuit intellectual crisis would be an exaggeration. It is more an indicator of uncertainty, a continuing intellectual hesitation in the Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975) is more coherent in dealing with evangelization and culture than is GC 34’s decree on culture. At one point the latter even suggested that cultures had rights, oblivious of that claim’s implications for adopting a critical stance towards cultures; see GC 34, n. 112, in Padberg, Jesuit Life, pp. 544–​5.

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Society of Jesus.33 A few years earlier, in 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed. The age of ideology, as the early twentieth century had been called, seemed over. The radically relativist disciples of Kuhn and Feyerabend, the pragmatist disciples of Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, as well as the nihilistic thinkers in post-​modernist thought, had moved in a direction of rejecting truth and objectivity as Western cultural tools of oppression.34 While these figures were a minority among philosophers, they were remarkably influential, joining up with and reinforcing wider post-​modernist culture.35

Looking to the future At GC 34, the great intellectual projects that Vatican II had put on the table seemed to be yesterday’s agenda, not in the sense that the Jesuits no longer believed in them but in the sense that the intellectual excitement and challenge involved had worn off. Those projects were, and necessarily had to be, theological in nature. They were not primarily about scriptural theology, since Catholic scripture scholars had caught up with their Protestant counterparts and there was little controversy around Scripture in post-​Vatican II years. Significant difficulties emerged in moral theology after Vatican II and became sharper after 1980, reaching an impasse around 2000:  ‘liberal’ moral theology seemed too epistemologically shallow, while the conservative ‘restorationist’ project (encouraged by John Paul II) was too dominated by a tacit desire for an anti-​ epistemological stasis and doctrinal inertia. Help could only come from outside and that depended on a revitalized systematic theology. In the half-​century from 1930 to 1980, there were major strides in Catholic systematic theology, through Jesuits Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and Avery A landmark book is Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (New York: Orbis, 1997). It reflects both success and ambiguity in contemporary Jesuit engagement with religious and cultural plurality. 34 One well-​k nown Indian Jesuit, influential as a retreat-​g iver and writer on spirituality, would regularly dismiss objections to his claims as products of a ‘Western logic’ and hence lacking in rational cogency or force. 35 For a thoughtful Jesuit pastoral response, see Michael Paul Gallagher, Clashing Symbols:  An Introduction to Faith and Culture (London: Paulist, 2003). A collection of papers that reflects post-​ modernist influence in the Jesuit world is Francis X. Clooney, ed., Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century (Lanham: Lexington, 2006). 33

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Dulles, ex-​Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar, diocesan priest Joseph Ratzinger, and Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-​Dominique Chenu. The breakthrough for these theological modernizers came in Vatican II and what it made possible. The legacy of these theologians continues to influence. But most had faded from the scene by 1990, some unhappy at post-​conciliar developments. They had made a revolution, probably to their surprise, but were not so clear as to what was to come afterwards. They were creative, innovative and illuminating, but their work was also defined by its relation to pre-​Vatican II theology and Thomistic scholasticism. With that older world swept away, as it rapidly was after 1965, the significance and influence of their work faded. In the third millennium, with Vatican II already a half-​century in the past, and its battles largely historical now, a revitalized systematic theology is needed in the Catholic Church, if such groups as the Society of Jesus are to regain their intellectual élan. The Jesuits, like the Dominicans and a few other groups, are among those to whom the Church looks to make such renewal possible. I content myself here with drawing attention to Jesuit commitment to knowledge, and to the epistemological tasks involved in acquiring knowledge. There are two principal epistemological modes: critical and constructive. In the lead up to Vatican II, critical thought was needed, involving a willingness to listen to those outside the Church and a desire to rethink and develop Church doctrines in ways that eschewed easy answers. In that mode, historically we can see the Jesuit epistemological contribution as critical, placing distance between our ways of knowing, in all their cultural and contextual diversity, and any systematic metaphysics that went beyond a vaguely general Weltanschauung. The other mode is constructive, and its goal is to be productive, to midwife (as Socrates ambitioned) a metaphysic and an anthropology that is rich in Christian thought, intuition, faith and experience of practical love. If the critical mode then required breaking the chains of a rigid and ossified conceptual system that passes for orthodoxy, the constructive mode today will have to express itself in resisting the enervating post-​modernist sensibility that is skeptical of truth, anti-​metaphysics, and fearful of intellectual boldness. It is an essential service that Jesuits, who work in epistemology, the sciences or cultural studies, must offer if systematic theology is to flower in our time.

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Eastern Christianity and Jesuit Scholarship on Arabic and Islam Modern History and Contemporary Theological Reflections Anthony O’Mahony

The trend towards the study of ‘world Christianity’ with a focus on Asia, Africa and Latin America has emerged in recent times; however, little attention has been given to the Eastern Christian churches despite the fact that the Eastern Christians constitute one of the largest Christian traditions in the world.1 Dyron B. Daughrity, however, has posed a challenging consideration: ‘the “North to South” metaphor has been helpful and challenging, but before we adopt it as rigid paradigm, we must face up to the absence of the East in that typology’.2 The Middle East is the place of origin of Christianity and its historical and original character was formed in this early context:  the Roman Empire and its Latin civilization; the Jewish and Greek world; in Armenian, Coptic and Syriac languages and cultures. Sidney H. Griffith situates Eastern Christianity in the Middle East for the history of Christianity: It is important to take cognizance of the seldom acknowledged fact that after the consolidation of the Islamic conquest and the consequent Anthony O’Mahony, ‘Christianity in the Middle East:  Modern History and Contemporary Theology and Ecclesiology: An Introduction and Overview’, Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 65, 3–​4 (2013): 231–​60. 2 Dyron B. Daughrity, ‘Christianity Is Moving from North to South –​So What About the East?’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 35, 1 (2011): 18–​22, 21. Herman Teule, ‘Christianity in Western Asia’, in Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, ed. Felix Wilfred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 17–​30. 1

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withdrawal of ‘Roman/​Byzantine’ forces from the Fertile Crescent in the first half of the seventh century perhaps 50 per cent of the world’s confessing Christians from the mid-​seventh to the end of the eleventh centuries found themselves living under Muslim rule.3

The complex history and distinct ecclesial culture of Middle Eastern Christianity have generally not been appreciated in the modern encounter between Western and Eastern theology.4 In many accounts the Christian East is fixed in historical terms, clearly oriented towards divisions on Christology in early Christianity. In the engagement with Western Christianity, Middle Eastern Christianity has struggled to retain its specificity.5 That said, Christian tradition has been encouraged especially since the Second Vatican Council to ‘breathe fully with two lungs, the Western and the Eastern’, an expression used by John Paul II.6 Sebastian Brock, however, building upon this idea, emphasizes that the Syriac Christian tradition adds and develops our understanding of this scheme: The importance that Pope John Paul II has consistently given to the Eastern Orthodox tradition is indeed greatly welcomed . . . however, I should like to suggest that –​unlike human beings! –​the Church is endowed, not just with two lungs, but with a third lung as well, from which she also needs to learn to breathe once again. The concept of Christianity as coming to us in the twenty-​first century through two main streams of tradition, which once can label for convenience as ‘the Latin West’ and ‘the Greek East’, is a widespread one. This binary model for the Christian tradition, however, is unsatisfactory and inadequate, since it effectively leaves out of

S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 11. Constantin Simon SJ, ‘Eastern Catholicism:  Modern Historical, Ecclesial and Contemporary Contexts’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East: Studies for The Synod for the Middle East, ed. Anthony O’Mahony and John Flannery (London: Melisende, 2010), pp. 69–​86. 5 Ecumenical dialogue between the churches has altered this situation, albeit, at a high inter-​ ecclesial level; see S. Brock, ‘The Syriac Churches in Ecumenical Dialogue on Christology’, in Eastern Christianity, ed. Anthony O’Mahony (London: Melisende, 2004), pp. 44–​65; S. Brock, ‘The Syriac Churches and Dialogue with the Catholic Church’, The Heythrop Journal, 45 (2004): 466–​76; S. Brock, ‘The Syriac Churches of the Middle East and Dialogue with the Catholic Church’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, ed. O’Mahony and Flannery, pp. 107–​119. 6 The origin of this phrase, which is often quoted, is the Russian Catholic Vjačeslav Ivanovič Ivanov (1866–​1949) who taught at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome; see Vincenzo Poggi SJ, ‘Ivanov a Roma, 1934–​1949’, Europa Orientalis: Studi e Ricerche sui Paesi e le Culture dell’Est Europeo, 21, 1 (2002): 95–​140. 3

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consideration a further important Christian tradition represented by the indigenous Churches of the Middle East. This third main tradition can, for convenience, be termed ‘the Syriac Orient’.7

Edward G. Farrugia SJ, Pontifical Oriental Institute (Rome), opined that ‘without its Eastern identity the Society loses its own sense of Church and universal mission, largely forged in the early East through the biblical, liturgical and practical canon’.8 The Jesuit theologian, Fadel Sidarouss SJ, who himself is from the Coptic Catholic tradition, echoes the importance of this observation: ‘The roots of Christianity are decidedly Eastern. Consequently, when the West adopted Christianity, it in fact adopted an “other”, something different; this Eastern alterity became constitutive of its Western identity, which enabled it to be more easily open to difference throughout its long history.’9 The East belongs to Ignatius’s formative years (his early desire to go to Jerusalem)10 and the Society’s encounter with Eastern Christianity from the Middle East to Ethiopia, from India to Eastern Europe.11 The Jesuit period of engagement with Ethiopian Christianity with its attendant ecclesiological and theological exchange, albeit undertaken with the religious mind of the time,12 is still debated

S. P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Orient: A Third “Lung” for the Church?’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 71 (2005): 5–​20 (p. 5). 8 Edward G. Farrugia, SJ, ‘The Study of the Christian East on the Church’s Priority List and What We Jesuits Could Do to Revamp It’, in Shaping the Future. Networking Jesuit Higher Education for a Globalizing World, ed. Frank Brennan SJ (Report of the Mexico Conference April 2010:  Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, 2010), p.  39. Quoted from his full-​contribution: http://​w ww.uia.mx/​shapingthefuture/​fi les/​1-​Frontier-​Theology/​Theology-​ Culture-​Farrugia-​DIR.pdf. 9 Fadel Sidarouss SJ, ‘Pour une Théologie Contextuelle dans l’Orient Arabe Contemporain’, in Quo Vadis, Theologia Orientalis? Actes du Colloque, ‘Théologie Orientale:  contenu et importance’ (TOTT), Ain Traz (April 2005), Université St Joseph ,Textes et Etudes sur l’Orient Chrétien, no. 6, Beirut, CEDRAC (2008): pp. 215–​37. Sidarouss develops this point in relation to Christianity in modern Egypt, ‘The Renewal of the Coptic Catholic Church: Grappling with Identity and Alterity’, The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, ed. O’Mahony and Flannery, pp. 139–​52. 10 The dialogical context for the early Jesuits might be understood as retrieving the ‘alien voices’ in the encounter. On Ignatius in perspective, see James W. Reites SJ, St Ignatius and the People of the Book: An Historical-​Theological Study of St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Motivation in His Dealings with the Jews and Muslims (Rome: Pontificia Università, 1977); J. W. Reites, ‘Ignacio y los musulmanes de Tierra Santa’, Manresa, 52 (1980): 291–​318. 11 Robert F. Taft SJ, ‘The Society of Jesus and the Christian East: Realities, Prospects, Reflections’, Diakonia, 27 (1994):  144–​6 4; Robert F. Taft, ‘The Jesuit Apostolate to the Christian East:  An Interview with Robert Taft, SJ’, Diakonia, 24 (1991): 45–​78. 12 Hervé Pennec, ‘Les abrégés portugais du Refuge de l’âme. Une apologie de la foi monophysite adressée par les moines du Tigré au roi Susenyos, le 20 juin 1620’, Anais de História de Além-​Mar, 1 (2000): 133–​59, who compares the use of Ethiopian texts by the Jesuit missionaries and often did so in an abbreviated form thus obscuring the authenticity and meaning of the texts presenting Ethiopian Christianity as something negative and incoherent. 7

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in the Ethiopian Orthodox ecclesiology and theology today.13 The spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola and that of the Exercises would seem to be influenced by the early Eastern Fathers.14 Heinrich Bacht SJ (+1986) who was a well-​known scholar of Christianity in early Egypt and of the exercises of the Society of Jesus considered them to be the ‘spirituality of primitive monasticism’. Bacht posits the following line of argumentation: the post-​apostolic writings of the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermes provide elements of a doctrine for the discernment of spirits, which is more true of Origen who, in his De Causis, provides detailed rules for judging inner experiences which read like a preliminary sketch for Ignatius’ Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. These ideas further developed in Eastern monasticism, for example, in the life of Antony the Hermit, in which the struggle with devils and the discernment of spirits are prominent themes.15 For Tomáš (Cardinal) Spidlik SJ, Czech Jesuit scholar of Eastern Christianity, ‘The Syrian Church has a prophetical tradition. It came from the Semitic background and this is near to the biblical t­radition . . . The first degree of the asceticism is to hear the voice of the Spirit and obey it.’16 John of Dalyatha, the eighth-​century East Syriac mystic, speaks directly through the prayer ‘Anima Christi’ to Ignatius of Loyola as he received spiritual direction at Montserrat.17 The Society of Jesus, due to its early encounter with Eastern Christianity,18 found itself in relations with Islam.19 This engagement between the Jesuits and Philip Caraman SJ, The Lost Empire. The Story of the Jesuits in Ethiopia 1555–​ 1634 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985); Hervé Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du prêtre Jean (Éthiopie). Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation (1495–​1633) (Paris, Centre culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003); ‘Ignace de Loyola et le royaume du prêtre Jean: projet et malentendus’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 111 (1999): 203–​29. 14 Vincenzo Poggi SJ, ‘Saint Jean Climaque et saint Ignace de Loyola’, Proche-​orient Chrétien 32 (1982): 50–​85. 15 Heinrich Bacht SJ, ‘Der heutige Stand der Forschung über die Entstehung des Exerzitienbuches des hl.Ignatius von Loyola’, Geist und Leben 29 (1956) : 327–​38, p. 328; H. Bacht, ‘Die frühmonastischen Grundlagen ignatianischer Frömmigkeit. Zu einigen Grundbegriffen der Exerzitien’, in Ignatius von Loyola. Seine geistliche Gestalt und sein Vermächtnis 1556–​1956, ed. F. Wulf (Würzburg, Echter-​Verlag, 1996), pp. 223–​61, p. 226. 16 Thomas Spidlik SJ, ‘East Syrian Asceticism’, in East Syrian Spirituality, ed. Augustine Thottakara (Rome: Centre for Indian and Inter-​religious Studies [CIIS], 1990), pp. 127–​42, p. 134. 17 Joseph Munitz SJ, ‘A Greek “Anima Christi” Prayer’, Eastern Churches Review 6, 2 (1974): 170–​ 80. Antoine Audo SJ, ‘Isaac de Ninive, Jean de Dalyatha et la spiritualité orientale’, in Mélanges en mémoire de Mgr. Néophytos Edelby (1920–​1995), ed. Nagi Edelby and Pierre Masri (Université St Joseph Textes et Étudies sur l’Orient chrétien, vol. 4, Beirut, CEDRAC, 2005), pp. 43–​62. 18 Bernard Heyberger, ‘Eastern Christians, Islam and the West: A Connected History’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2010): 475–​8. 19 Bernard Vincent, ‘Les jésuites et l’Islam méditerranéen’, in Chrétiens et musulmans à la renaissance, ed. Bartolomé Bennassar and Robert Sauzet (Paris: Champion Honoré, 1998), pp. 519–​31; Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, ‘Ignacio de Loyola y la expansión del Islam en el siglo XVI’, Anuario del Instituto Ignacio de Loyola 4 (1997):  93–​105. The frontier between Christianity 13

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the world of Islam would stimulate knowledge and a culture of exchange.20 Ignatius (Ignacio) de las Casas SJ (1550–​1608) is a central figure in this relationship.21 He was born in Granada in 1550, son of Cristobal de las Casas and of Gracia de Mendoza, both of whom were of Morisco background and who had converted to Christianity. Ignatius de las Casas, who found himself under the guidance of Archbishop of Granada, Don Pedro Guerrero,entrusted his education to the Society of Jesus, in 1562, at the Albaicin, Granada. He c­ ontinued his studies in Humanities at Montilla (1567–​68) and Cordoba (1568–​70). Due to the difficult situation caused by a Morisco rebellion in Granada (1568–​70), Ignatius de las Casas was admitted into the Company of Jesus in Rome on 19 March 1572, probably directed to do so by the Jesuit General Fr Francisco de Borja, as he happened to be in Spain. De las Casas was inscribed in the book of the Roman novitiate with the name of Lope Alvarez. He studied at the Roman College in August 1573. In Florence 1574, he appears with the name of Ignatius Lopez. After three years in Rome he was sent to the province of Castilla to the college of Segovia in 1579, by which time he had taken the and the Muslim world created the need to redeem and ransom captives; see Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘Rescate de cautivos cristianos bajo Muhammad Al-​Mutawakkil. Misión a Tetuán del P. Gabriel Bautista del Puerto y H. Gaspar López (1574–​1575)’, Archivo Teológico Granadino 58 (1995): 213–​99. 20 V. Poggi SJ, ‘Arabismo gesuita nei secoli XVI–​X VIII’, Studia Anselmiana 110 (1993):  339–​72 [Eylogema:  Studies in Honour of R.  Taft SJ ].  The early Jesuit missions discovered the plurality of the Muslim world, especially the Druze and Alawite-​Nusayris traditions; see Bernard Heyberger, ‘Peuples “sans loi, sans foi, ni prêtre”: druzes et nusayrîs de Syrie découverts par les missionnaires catholiques (XVIIe –​XVIIIe siècles)’, in L’Islam des marges. Mission chrétienne et espaces périphériques du monde musulman XVIe –​XXe siècles, ed. B. Heyberger and R. Madinier (Paris: Karthala, 2011), pp. 45–​80. 21 Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘La Compañía de Jesús y la minoría morisca (1545–​1614)’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 57, 113 (1988): 3–​136. Youssef el Alaoui in his study of Jesuit missions draws a link between the religious backgrounds of Acosta  –​Jewish, Ignatius de las Casas  –​Morisco as having a lasting impact upon their approaches to the religious Other in the context of conversion in the context of mission; see Jesuites, Morisques et Indiens:  Etude comparative des methodes d’evangelisation de la Compagnie de Jesus d’apres les traites de Jose de Acosta (1588) et d’Ignacio de las Casas (1605–​1607) (Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2006). At least until 1593 the Society of Jesus welcomed new Christians, whether of Jewish or Muslim origins, into the order. It is well documented; some of the most outstanding Jesuits of the early generations were such new Christians, including the second superior general, Diego Lainez. Thomas M. Cohen, ‘Jesuits and New Christians: The Contested Legacy of St. Ignatius’, Studies on Jesuit Spirituality 42, 3 (2010): 1–​46. See the work of Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘Ignacio de Loyola y los Judíos’, Anuario del Instituto Ignacio de Loyola 4 (1997):  37–​63; Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘Ignacio de Loyola y la Limpieza de Sangre’, Encuentro Islamo-​Cristiano no. 339–​40 (2000): 1–​16. The Jesuit province of Andalucia was an important context with regard to these religious and pastoral issues of identity associated with mission; see Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘El proceso fundacional de la Provincia de Andalucía’, in Los jesuitas en Andalucía. Estudios conmemorativos del 450 aniversario de la fundación de la provincial, ed. Wenceslao Soto Artuñedo (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2007), pp. 49–​162; F. de Borja Medina, ‘Blas Valera y la dialéctica ‘exclusión-​integración del otro’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 68 (1999): 229–​68.

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paternal surname ‘de las Casas’ (‘Della Casa’, ‘Delle Case’, in the Italian ­documents). In 1579, the Jesuit General Fr Everardo Mercurian, dispatched him as a companion of Juan Bautista Eliano on his mission to the Maronite Church; however, at the Port of Alicante, he became unwell and stayed to convalesce at the Jesuit college in nearby Murcia. In 1580, Mercurian sent orders to the provincial of Toledo, Baltasar Alvarez, to keep Casas in this province so he might convalesce. Three months later, the Vicar General of the Society, Oliverio Manareo, with the death of Mercurian, gave orders to Casas to return to the college at Segovia. Because of the apostasy and flight to Northern Africa of a brother of Ignatius de las Casas, it was advised that he should leave Spain. The new General, Claudio Aquaviva, appointed de las Casas as a penitentiary in Loreto. He was later sent to a post in the penitentiary at St Peter in Rome, where he stayed until the end of 1581. In this office in 1582, he received the nomination for the pontifical legation to the Syriac Church (1583–​84). It was during this mission that de las Casas developed a keen interest in the religious and pastoral situation of Eastern Churches under Muslim rule in Dar-​a l-​Islam (House of Islam as opposed to Dar al-​Harb –​The House of War, an Islamic term used for countries which are not under Islamic rule.22 On his return he worked in Rome, Florence, and in 1587, he was sent to Valencia to take charge of the Morisco Apostolate. He finished his studies at the University of Gandia (1587–​89) at Valencia (1589–​ 90) and the University of Alcala de Henares (1590–​93). In 1597–​98 he was charged by the Archbishop of Granada, Don Pedro Vaca de Castro, to translate and interpret The Lead Books of Sacromonte (Los Libros Plúmbeos del Sacromonte) written in Arabic, found in the mount of Valparaiso, Granada (Sacromonte), together with supposedly apostolic relics. These works are now generally considered to be contemporary forgeries. De las Casas, initially open to their authenticity, discovered the fraud. The leading Spanish scholar of the Society in Spain and Latin America during this period, Francisco de Borja Medina, reminds us that this episode reveals the lack of knowledge of Islam and its religious culture among Spanish theologians during the sixteenth and Francisco de Borja Medina SJ, ‘Legación Pontificia a los Siro-​Ortodoxos, 1583–​1584. Las relaciones de Ignacio de las Casas de la Compañía de Jesús’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 55 (1989):  125–​ 67; Sami Kuri SJ, Monumenta Proximi-​Orientis I:  Palestine-​Liban-​Syrie-​ Mésopotamie (1523–​1583) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1989), documents 88, 99 and 100.

22

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seventeenth centuries and the ambiguous language of their counterfeiters, in all probability two Granada Moriscos, Alonso del Castillo and Miuel de Luna.23 De Las Casas, whose mother tongue was Arabic and who was familiar with Islamic thought, discovered the fraud by recognizing the Lead Books as based upon Muslim religious themes found in the Qu’ran and other traditions which circulated among the Moriscos. This was challenged by the Archbishop, whose See of Granada claimed Marian and St James origin. He and his theologians found in the alleged relics ‘evidence’ of the coming of St James to Spain, the tradition of the Assumption of Mary, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and confirmation of one of the most ancient Trinitarian formulas.24 Ignatius de las Casas, however, had demonstrated that this formula ‘lâ ilâha illâ (A)llâh wa-​Yasû‘ rûh Allâh’ (‘There is no God but God, and Jesus is the Spirit of God’) was Islamic in origin.25 De las Casas became one of the fiercest opponents of the authenticity of the Lead Books of Sacromonte. Rafael Benitez Sanchez-​Blanco, a recent historian of the affair, who quotes Ignatius de las Casas statements to the effect26 that the translators of the Los Libros Plúmbeos always worked in the presence of the Archbishop of Granada or of persons appointed by him. During this process the translators were often encouraged to select a particular word or passage to be translated with a particular meaning. The translators of Morisco background found themselves in a difficult situation as they did not wish to challenge the Archbishop who might have doubted the orthodoxy of their religious identity. They conveyed this in statements to Ignatius de las Casas. De las Casas, due to the increasingly complex religious and ecclesial situation, left Granada for Castilla. On various occasions, until 1607, he was summoned by the Inquisition to defend his thesis: that the doctrine of the books (Los Libros Plúmbeos)contained not only heresy but were also oriented towards conversion to Islam. In 1602, he was called by the Inquisition of Valencia as a consulter for the Arabic language, but his fragile health forced him to return to Castilla in 1604. Ignatius Francisco de Borja de Medina SJ, ‘Islam and Christian Spirituality in Spain: Contacts, Influences, Similarities’, Islamochristiana (Rome) 18 (1992): 87–​108 (p. 105); Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, ‘Fragmentos de orientalismo Espãnol del. S. XVII’, Hispania 66, 222 (2006): 243–​76 (p. 260). 24 T. D. Kendrick, St James in Spain (London, Methuen, 1960), pp. 69–​87; pp, 104–​115. 25 Francisco de Borja de Medina SJ ‘Islam and Christian spirituality in Spain’, pp. 87–​108 (p. 106). 26 Rafael Benitez Sanchez-​Blanco: ‘De Pablo a Saulo: traduccion critica y denuncia de los Libros plumbeos por el Ignacio de las Casas SJ’, Al-​Qantara 23, 2 (2002): 403–​36. 23

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de las Casas wrote an important ‘memorial’, De los moriscos de España, on behalf of Cristobal de los Cobos (1553–​1611), the provincial of Castile from 1605 to1609, in which he defends the use of Arabic in mission and as a language of the Moriscos.27 He died in July 1608 in the college of Avila. Manuel Barrios Aguillera pointed out in his study that Ignatius de las Casas’s opposition to the authenticity of the Sacramonte Tablets was still felt a hundred and fifty years later. In 1756, two canons of the Sacromonte of Granada, Luis Francisco de Viana y Bustos and Joseph Juan de Laboraría, published the Historia authéntica, a condemnation of the thesis of Ignatius de las Casas.28 Ignacio de las Casas left an influential legacy for the study of Arabic in the culture of the Society of sJesus.29 His influence was felt in the way the Jesuit mission to the Moriscos was regarded in the following century.30 Emanuele Colombo sets this out in his study of Tirso González Santalla (1624–​1705), the thirteenth General of the Society of Jesus. Santalla assembled a manual for the conversion of ‘the proponents of the Islamic religion’ about which Colombo notes: Missionary practice, fully described in this manual and in the rich documentation preserved in the Roman archives of the company, shows an attitude less rigid and in some respects comparable to the Jesuit approach to missions overseas. It is the traditional accommodation, but remote method applied in this case to close contacts in the area, through culture, education and religion.31

In the twentieth century, the study of Arabic and Islam takes a particularly creative theological and scholarly direction. This is demonstrated in the life Youssef el Alaoui, ‘El jesuita Ignacio de las Casas y la defensa de la lengua árabe. Memorial al padre Cristóbal de los Cobos, provincial de Castilla (1607)’, Areas. Revista internacional de ciencias sociales, no. 30 (2011): 11–​28; Youssef el Alaoui, ‘Ignacio de las Casas, jesuita y morisco’, Sharq al-​Andalus, no. 14–​15 (1997–​1998): 317–​39. 28 Manuel Barrios Aguillera:  ‘El Castigo de la disidencia las invenciones plumbeos de Granda. Sacromonte versusu Ignacio de las Casas SJ’, Al-​Qantara 24, 2 (2003): 477–​531. 29 Hugues Didier, ‘Entre Espagne et Italie, les jésuites et la langue arabe (XVI-​X VIIe siècles)’, in Le texte arabe non-​Islamique, ed. Marie-​Thérèse Urvoy and Dominique Urvoy (Paris: Éditions du Paris, 2008), pp. 179–​ 96; Emanuele Colombo, ‘Defeating the Infidels, Helping Their Souls:  Ignatius Loyola’, in A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola:  Life, Writings, Spirituality, Influence, ed. Robert A. Maryks (Liden: Brill, 2014), pp. 179–​97; E. Colombo, ‘A Muslim Turned Jesuit:  Baldassarre Loyola Mandes (1631–​1667)’, Journal of Early Modern History 17, 5–​6, (2013): 479–​504. 30 Emanuele Colombo, ‘Even among Turks. Tirso González de Santalla (1624–​1705) and Islam’, Studies on Jesuit Spirituality 44, 3 (2012): 1–​41. 31 Emanuele Colombo, ‘La Compagnia di Gesù e l’evangelizzazione dei musulmani nella Spagna del Seicento: il caso González’, Revue Mabillon 20 (2009): 203–​27. 27

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and work of Louis Cheikho SJ,32 Paul Nwyia SJ and Antoine Audo SJ33 three distinguished Jesuit scholars of Arabic and Islam.34 Cheikho, Nwyia and Audo all place the question of mysticism as a central element in their various accounts of Arabic and Islam.35 They are all from the Chaldean Catholic tradition, which is the sister church to the Church of the East.36 The origins of the Chaldean Church go back many centuries. In the thirteenth century, Catholic missionaries, Dominicans and Franciscans, had been active among the faithful of the Church of the East. The first union of the Church of East with Rome was concluded at the Council of Florence. The Mediterranean island of Cyprus was home to a group of East Syriac Christians. On 7 August 1445, following the acceptance of the creed before Archbishop Chrysoberges of Rhodes by Archbishop Timotheos of Tarsus (Archiepiscopus Chalaeorum, qui in Cypro sunt), union was established between the Church of the East and Rome. Timotheos petitioned the Lateran to allow him to take part in the Council of Florence, and his request was granted by a bull. Since then the term ‘Chaldean’ has been used for those members of the Church of the East who are in union with Rome. Over the next centuries, there was much turmoil and changing of sides as the pro-​and anti-​Catholic parties struggled with one another within the Church of the East. The situation finally stabilized on 5 July 1830, when Pope Pius VIII confirmed Metropolitan Yuhannan Hormizd

See in particular the work by Camille Hechaïmé SJ, on Cheikho (1859–​1927): Louis Cheikho: Les savants arabes chrétiens en Islam, 622–​1300 (Jounieh [Liban]:  Patrimoine Arabe Chrétien , 1983); Louis Cheikho:  Les vizirs et secrétaires arabes chrétiens en Islam, 622–​1517, (Jounieh [Liban]: Patrimoine Arabe Chrétien, 1987); Louis Cheikho et son livre ‘Le christianisme et la littérature chrétienne en Arabie avant l’Islam’ (Beirut: Dar el-​Machreq, 1967). 33 Antoine Audo SJ was born in Aleppo in 1946; he entered the Jesuits in 1969. Ordained as a priest in 1979, he commenced his academic formation with a ‘licence de letters arabes’, University of Damascus, 1972; a doctoral these, Paris III, Sorbonne, 1979. He completed his philosophical and theological formation with biblical studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Rome). He was for a time professor in biblical exegesis at Université Saint-​Joseph and Université Saint-​Esprit (Kaslik). 34 V. Poggi SJ, ‘Arabismo gesuita nei secoli XIX–​X X’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali 65 (1991): 213–​45. The Jesuit contribution to education in Iraq had an important role across all sectors of society until their expulsion. See the study by Marisa Patulli Trythall based upon her doctoral thesis from the Pontificial Oriental Institute (Rome) ‘Edmund Aloysius Walsh:  la Missio Iraquensis. Il contributo dei Gesuiti Statunitensi al sistema educativo iracheno’, Supplement to Studi sull’Oriente Cristiano, n. 14/​2 , Rome 2010, pp. 1–​4 45. 35 Cheikho develops these themes in his correspondence with Louis Massignon; see Camille Hechaïmé SJ, ‘Lettres de Louis Massignon au Père Louis Cheikho’, al-​Machriq 64 (1970): 729–​55. 36 A. Audo, ‘L’Église Chaldéenne dans l’Église Catholique d’aujourd’hui:  identité liturgique et communion universelle’, in The Anaphoral Genesis of the Institution Narrative in Light of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, ed. Cesare Giraudo. Acts of the International Liturgy Congress. Rome 25–​26 October 2011 (Rome: Orientalia Christiana Analecta, vol. 295, 2013), pp. 101–​112. 32

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as head of all Chaldean Catholics, with the title of Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans, with his see at Mosul.37 The Church of the East’s early engagement with Muslims still influences the ‘canon’ of Catholic thought about Islam.38 The singular figure of Timothy I  of the Church of the East, in his exploration of encounter with Islam, is increasingly seen as an archetype in world Christianity for Muslim-​Christian relations.39 At the Asian Synod 1998, when discussing relations between Christians and Muslims, the Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Syria, and leading Eastern Catholic theologian, Antoine Audo SJ set out his vision: ‘To survive and develop as living churches in the Arab and Muslim world of the Middle East, Christian Arabs or Asians need a spiritual vision of their relation with Islam, seeing themselves as sent by Christ to be witnesses of love’, and that evangelization in these lands require Christians to live ‘within Islam, that is, to form an integral part of society, of the Arab and Muslim culture without complexes, but at the same time to be witnesses of the evangelical liberty in ways that go beyond this culture, seeking to read the language of the Qu’ran as a language of human relations.’40 Audo has suggested that one of the challenges faced by Eastern Christianity in the religious discourses of the Arabic and Muslim worlds revolves around the creation of an intellectual freedom to explore the text, for example, the comparative reading between the biblical and a qu’ranic account, such as the story of Joseph in Genesis and the same account in Sura 12 in the Qu’ran. This endeavour ‘may contribute to finding points of similarity and divergence with a view to interrogating each text on the subject of its theological basis. Moving from the example of the narration of the text can contribute to an

Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Chaldean Catholic Church in Modern Iraq’, in Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics (London: Melisende, 2008), pp. 105–​42. The Chaldean Church is mainly based in Iraq but with communities across the Middle East, although since the war of 2003 half of its members live outside the region, see A. Audo SJ, ‘Les chrétiens d’Iraq: Histoire et perspectives’, Études 40, 8 (2008): 209–​318. 38 S.H. Griffith, ‘Arabic Christian Relations with Islam: Retrieving from History, Expanding the Canon’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, pp. 263–​90. 39 Frederick W. Norris, ‘Timothy I of Baghdad, Catholicos of the East Syrian Church, 780–​823: Still a Valuable Model’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30, 3 (2006): 133–​6; H. Putman SJ, L’Eglise et l’Islam sous Timothée I (730–​823), Etude sur l’Eglise Nestorienne au temps des premiers Abbasides, avec nouvelle édition et traduction du dialogue entre Timothée et Al-​Mahdi (Beirut : Dar al-​Machriq, 1977). 40 ‘Declaration at the Asian Synod’, quoted in Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Chaldean Catholic Church:  The Politics of Church-​State Relations in Modern Iraq’, The Heythrop Journal 45 (2004): 435–​50 (p. 450). 37

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understanding of its sensitivities and a vision of god and of man’, divine-​ human relations being the central question of Christology.41 For Audo, mysticism is key to reading the text as an expression of God’s relations with man: Eastern theology in an Arab-​Muslim context cannot ignore the Arab and Muslim mystical tradition with its interest in the experience of God beyond all dogmatism, the rich Arabic vocabulary of mysticism, the location of a true appreciation by man of the absolute are further elements which can nourish theological reflection and make it a place of openness and dialogue with Islam. The figure of Jesus is given some weight among various Muslim mystics and may secure as a call to ask how Christ, in his way of being, constitutes the very question which one can pose on the truth of man and god.42

Paul Nwyia SJ was born into a Chaldean family at Ishniq (Iraqi Kurdistan) and his mother tongue was Soureth (Syriac). He joined the Society of Jesus in 1948 and ordained priest in 1955; in 1957, for his ‘third year’, he spent with l’Ordre antonin chaldéen de Saint-​Hormisdas; between 1958 and 1962)  he worked in Mosul.43 Between 1952 and 1954, Nwyia studied at Ecole des Hautes Etudes à Paris des études d’islamologie under the very well-​k nown French Islamicist Louis Massignon.44 He wrote his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne on religious language and mysticism in Arabic and Islam.45 His work was a significant contribution which sought to capture in a new way how we understand the connection between language, revelation and mysticism. Nwyia challenged the ideas of Massignon [+1962]46 and also the famous Spanish priest scholar Miguel Asin Palacios [+1944] on the origins of Islamic mysticism between the Qu’ran and Christianity.47 This entailed a dialogue with Antoine Audo, ‘Approches théologiques du récit de Joseph dans Gn 37–​50 et Coran sourate 12’, Proche Orient Chrétien 37 (1987): 268–​81. 42 Antoine Audo, ‘Théologie orientale dans un monde musulman’, in Quo Vadis, Theologia Orientalis? Actes du Colloque ‘Théologie Orientale: contenu et importance’ (TOTT), Ain Traz (April 2005), Université Saint Joseph, Textes et Etudes sur l’Orient Chrétien, no.  6, Beirut, CEDRAC (2008): pp. 107–​118. 43 Paul Nwyia SJ (1 January 1924–​5 February 1980), Mélanges de l’Université Saint-​Joseph 50 (1984):  37–​6 6; Henri Jalabert, Jésuites au Proche-​O rient (Beirut :  Dar el-​Machreq, 1987), p. 340. 44 Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Influence of the Life and Thought of Louis Massignon on the Catholic Church’s Relations with Islam’, The Downside Review 126, 444 (2008): 169–​92. 45 Paul Nwiya, Exégèse coranique et langage mystique: nouvel essai sur le lexique technique des mystiques musulmans (Beirut: Dal el-​Machreq, 1970). 46 Paul Nwyia, ‘Massignon ou une certaine vision de la langue arabe’, Studia Islamica 50 (1979): 125–​49. 47 Paul Nwyia, ‘Ibn ‘Abbad de Ronda et Jean de la Croix: à propos d’une hypothèse d’Asin Palacios’, Al-​Andalus 22 (1957): 113–​30. 41

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Ignatian spirituality as it emerged in its new scholarly form in the t­ wentieth century. Nwyia’s bibliography covers a wide range of significant issues in the encounter between Christianity and Islam, for example, the question of monasticism in Islam, the concept of humanity and the body and spirit in Muslim thought48 and Muslim mysticism.49 He had an eye on the importance of these subjects in dialogue between Islam and Christianity of which he was a very keen observer, especially as they related to the modern revivalist movement in Islam.50 Nwyia died tragically young in Paris in 1980. Nwyia, reflecting on his childhood, described in a very personal memoire his first contacts with Muslims: Searching far back in my memory, I rediscovered my first impression of my contacts with Muslims. Those contacts were frequent, for many Muslim religious leaders used to visit my family. But despite the real friendship on which these relations were based, I had a strong feeling that, in the eyes of these Muslim friends, we were and remained strangers: people who because of their religion were fundamentally different. What awakened this feeling in me was the superior attitude which these friends adopted, an attitude that only their religion could justify. They regarded themselves as followers of the true religion and manifested this conviction with such self-​ satisfaction and such contempt for others that they were the living image of those whom the Gospel describes as men with pharisaical traits. Many of them were very brave and their attitude towards us was often only unconsciously superior, but we always remained strangers in relation to them. This fact did not bother them; on the contrary, it made them feel that they were all the more faithful to their religion.51

Even as a child, Nwyia was sensitive to the tensions between Christianity and Islam. Not only is Islam different from Christianity; it sees itself as Paul Nwyia, ‘Corps et esprit dans la mystique musulmane’, Studia missionalia 26 (1977): 165–​89; Paul Nwyia, ‘Moines crétiens et monachisme en Islam’, Studia missionalia 27 (1978–​79): 337–​55. 49 See the following contributions to Mélanges de l’Université Saint-​Joseph:  ‘Abū Al-​Hasan ‘Alī Al-​Harrālī (m. 638/​1241)’, vol. 51 (1990) :  167–​238; ‘Al-​Hakīm Al-​Tirmidī et le Lā Ilāaha Illa Allāhu’, 49 (1975–​76):  741–​765; ‘Hallāg Kitāb Al-​Tawāsīn’, 47 (1972):  185–​237; ‘Kitāb al-​’urwa li-​l-​miftāh al fātih li-​l-​bāb al-​muqfal li-​l-​Qur’ān al-​Munzal’, 51 (1990): 257–​93; ‘Kitāb al-​tawsiya wa -​l-​tawfiya’, 51 (1990): 295–​309; ‘Language figuratif et figures bibliques dans l’exégèse coranique de Harrāli, suivi de trois traités Inédits de Harrāli: Kitab miftah al-​bāb al-​Muqfal li-​Fahm al Qur’ān al-​munzal’, 51 (1990): 239–​55; ‘Nouveaux Fragments Inédits de Hallāj’, 42 (1966): 221–​ 44; ‘Le Tafsīr Mystique –​Attribué à Ga’far Sādiq (Edition critique)’, 43 (1968): 181–​230; ‘Textes Mystiques Inédits d’Abû-​L-​Hasan Al-​Nūrī (m. 295/​907)’, 44 (1968): 117–​54. 50 Paul Nwyia, ‘L’appareil de l’ Islam’ Pouvoirs 12 (1979) : 47–​55. 51 Paul Nwyia, ‘Pour mieux connaître l’Islam’, Lumen vitae 30 (1975): 159–​71. 48

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positively abrogating Christianity. Muhammad is the ‘seal of prophets’; the revelation accorded to him supersedes all that came before.52 The previous passage continues as follows: One could easily have been tempted to react like them, to regard them as ‘strangers’, to transform the difference into indifference, or to meet their contempt with even deeper scorn. But this is precisely what my faith forbade me to do. To react thus would have meant doing away with the difference and, by that very fact, disowning my Christian identity. Hence I came to ask myself:  ‘How can I  turn these strangers into the neighbours of which the Gospel speaks? How can I resist the temptation to react as they do, so that my way of seeing them may be different from the way they look upon me?’ I understood that to achieve this I would have to discover, beyond the image they projected of themselves, certain things in them or in their religion which could help me regard them as neighbours whom one must love.53

Nwyia reflected on the different ways in which Islam characterized the religious other, and what these revealed about Muslim self-​understanding.54 For Nwyia, Islam’s relations with other faiths are shaped by the tension between two seemingly antagonistic principles: mutabilities and immutability, between the diverse, changing forms in which religious commitment is lived on the one hand, and the unchangingness of ‘Allah’ on the other. This tension has been operative since Islam began; it reflects the complex attitude of Muhammad towards the religious other: polytheists, Jews and Christians. Islam is faced with a crucial dilemma of how to find ‘the synthesis between historical and spiritual truth’.55 Antoine Audo highlights the significant contribution of Cheikho and Nwyia for the Chaldean tradition: Eastern Christians can, with Muslim thinkers, re-​read the history of Arab philosophy, recognizing the rational and critical dimension. Through this Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Vatican, the Catholic Church, Islam and Christian-​Muslim relations since Vatican II’ and John Flannery, ‘Christ in Islam and Muhammad, a Christian Evaluation: Theological Reflections on Tradition and Dialogue’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, pp. 291–​316 and pp. 331–​52. 53 Paul Nwyia, ‘Pour mieux connaître l’Islam’. 54 See the recent studies by Felix Körner SJ from an Ignatian perspective on Jesuit and Muslim understanding of belief and community, ‘Salvific Community, Part One:  Ignatius of Loyola’, Gregorianum 94 (2013):  593–​ 609; F. Körner, ‘Salvific Community, Part Two:  the Koran’, Gregorianum 94 (2013): 757–​72. 55 Paul Nwyia, ‘Mutabilités et immutabilité en Islam’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 63 (1975): 197–​213. 52

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work of the spirit, to which many Christians have contributed, the Muslim world can recover its national and universal unity, which will help it to free itself from fundamentalism and the call to violence leading increasingly to death. We have, in the history of the Chaldean Church and the Society of Jesus, such eminent figures of the Arab Renaissance as Father Louis Cheikho (1859–​1927) and Father Paul Nwyia (1925–​1980).56

A central concern for Nwyia was the origins of mysticism. He navigated the conflicting views between Asin Palacios and Massignon.57 Asin Palacios was a Spanish priest of great learning. His studies on Ibn Hazm, Ibn ‘Arabi, Ghazali and Ibn Abbad of Ronda are of interest even today.58 He, however, tended to read these authors with the eyes of a Christian and hardly hesitated to ‘Christianize’ the vocabulary of Muslim mysticism. The titles of his works are by themselves evidence of this. His academic research and teaching led him to pursue the comparative study of Islam and Christianity very far along the following lines: primitive Islam is deeply influenced by Christianity, particularly by Eastern monasticism; Islam systematizes and perfects Christian data pertaining to asceticism and mysticism; Western Christianity is influenced by Eastern Christianity through Islam and the impact of Arab influence on medieval scholasticism.59 Studying the Muslim-​Christian similarities in the fields of philosophy through St Thomas and Averroes, mystical theology through St John of the Cross and Ibn Abbad of Ronda, mystical confraternities through Shadhilis and the Illuminati, spirituality through Pascal and Ghazali, and eschatological poetry through Dante and Ibn ‘Arabi, Palacios, the Madrid priest-​professor, came to positively appreciate what he considered the dogmatic and mystical values of Islam.60 In a significant and key study , ‘Le personalisme musulman’, Nwyia reflects on the position of these two influential voices in Catholic thought on Islam: Antoine Audo, ‘Eastern Christian Identity: A Catholic Perspective’, The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, pp.19–​35 (p. 35). 57 Mikel de Epalza, ‘Massignon et Asin Palacios: une longue amitié et deux approches différentes de l’Islam’, in L’Herne Massignon, ed. J. Six (Paris: Éditions l’Herne, 1970), pp.157–​69. De Epalza (1938–​2008) was a leading scholar of Islam, the Qur’an and Spain’s relations with North Africa. He had joined the Society of Jesus in 1954. 58 José Valdivia Valor, ‘Un hombre de Nuestro Tiempo: Miguel Asin’, Encuentro Islamo-​Cristiano, no. 231 (1919): 1–​16. 59 Francisco de Borja de Medina SJ, ‘Islam and Christian spirituality in Spain’, pp.  87–​108, pp. 97–​100. 60 Mikel de Epalza, ‘Algunos juicios teologicos de Asin Palacios sobre el Islam’, Pensamiento 25, 97–​9 (1969): 145–​82. 56

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When in 1931 Asin Palacios, seeking to summarise his feelings with regards to the origins of Muslim mysticism, entitled one of his publications ‘El Islam cristianizado’ (Christianised Islam), the leading lights of French Orientalism shrugged their shoulders, regarding his proposal as ‘concordism’. This was the period when concordism was rightly coming to be considered in every field as a superficial view of things: he was accused of substituting the original and originating characteristics of one doctrine with the similarity it had to other doctrines, and from these similarities hastily drawing the conclusion that there was direct influence or borrowing. It was said of Asin Palacios that from a number of similar traits between ‘Sufism’ and Eastern monasticism, he concluded that Muslim mysticism was of Christian origin. Louis Massignon undertook the scholarly refutation of such concordism. By means of a careful study of ‘the origins of the technical lexicon of Muslim mysticism’ (the title of his study), he showed that the spiritual movement known as ‘Sufism’ had originated in Islam from assiduous meditation on the Qur’an, and that this movement owed nothing to external borrowings other than a number of terms whose original sense was transformed by Islam. Massignon’s view was soon taken up in the Orientalist milieu. The Qur’anic origin of Muslim mysticism and its technical vocabulary became an a priori which no one dared question, for fear of calling down the condemnation of someone who had become an ‘admirable Sheik’, but who was also a fearsome prophet. However, today still, the feeling remains that beyond all ‘concordism’, Asin Palacios’ intuitions remain true, and that perhaps because he was Spanish, the view of the great Spanish Arabist was correct. Certainly the meditation of the Muslim spiritual movement remains centred on the Qur’an; it is there that they find the major themes of their reflection; it is also from there that they borrow most of the vocabulary which they use to express their intimate experiences. But the Qur’an, even considered as the divine word, remains a book, and a book does not respond to questions put to it: the reader finds there what he seeks, he has already posited it. It is within him that the question he addresses to the Qur’an arises, and it is from the depths of his heart that the concern, the doubt or desire which impels him to ask the Qur’an for a calming or clarifying word arises. Like all Muslims, the mystics have meditated on the Qur’an, but they have not read it in the same way as other Muslims, and have found there what others consider as foreign to the Book of Islam. This is why the question posed by Asin Palacios remains valid: under what influences did this new reading of the Qur’an, the reading of the Sufis, come about, a reading which raised these new questions

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in their awareness and gave rise to new responses from the sacred text that they alone were able to understand and accept. Neither history nor Nature experience spontaneous generation: a new movement of ideas always arises in another movement, whether it perpetuates or opposes it. This is true in every field, whether in the arts, philosophy or science, and is why Asin Palacios was right to say that Christian monasticism was at the origin of the birth in Islam of a spiritual movement which nothing in the ‘Sunna’ of the Prophet or his way of living out the religion he founded suggests.61

Nwyia’s instincts about the relationship between Christian and Muslim mysticism continue to provoke. The Amercian Cistercian writer Thomas Merton (1915–​1968) read Nwyia’s work, especially on Ibn ‘Abbâd of Ronda. Merton used Nwyia’s texts and comments in his own book Raids on the Unspeakable in 1966.62 In a letter (dated 13 May 1961) to a Muslim friend, Merton wrote: The little article of your Syrian fried about St John of the Cross and the Moroccan mystic [‘Ibn ‘Abbad de Ronda et Jean de la Croix: à propos d’une hypothèse d’Asin Palacios’] was a distinct disappointment to me. It really said nothing at all. In any case this western habit of seeking causal relationships and ‘influences’ everywhere is largely an illusion. How much better it would have been to make a positive comparison of the inner riches of the two great mystics.63

Nwyia further developed this theme with a helpful outline of Massignon’s position on mysticism in Islam in relation to Asin Palacios: The absence of this same convergent guiding principle between Asin Palacios and Massignon, led the latter to write his first major article, which appeared in RMM, 1919, xxxvi, 40pp [‘Les recherches d’Asin Palacios sur Dante: le problem des influences musulmanes sur la chrétienté medieval et les lois de l’imitation littéraire’, Revue du Monde Musulman (Paris), 36 (1918–​19] (see O.M.,64 I, 57–​81). We have studied at length this article, one of the richest written by Massignon, and one of those most revealing of his Paul Nwyia [under the pseudonym Nabil Alam], ‘Le personnalisme musulman’, Travaux et jours, nos 14–​15 (1964): 57–​77, pp. 58–​60. 62 Paul Nwyia, ‘Ibn ‘Abbad de Ronda, Lettres de direction spirituelle (ar-​ Rasa’il as-​ sugrä)’, (Beirut: Dar el-​Machreq, 1974); Ibn-​’Abbad de Ronda (1332–​1390): un mystique prédicateur à la Qarawiyin de Fès (Beirut: Impremerie catholique, 1961). 63 Qtd in Patrick F. O’Connell, ‘A Son of This Instant: Thomas Merton and Ibn ‘Abbād of Ronda’, The Merton Annual 23 (2010): 149–​83 (p. 152); S. H. Griffith: ‘Thomas Merton, Louis Massignon and the Challenge of Islam’, The Merton Annual 3 (1990): 151–​72. 64 Opera minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut: Dar al-​Maaref, 1963; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969). 61

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genius, which he deployed with a power of thought and a prodigious degree of erudition for a young man barely emerged from the horrors of the war. In his La escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia, Asin supported the idea that Dante had been subjected to Arabic influence. The work provoked a storm, both among specialists in Dante studies and Orientalists alike. Similarly, in his Essai sur les orgines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane, completed in 1914 but never published, Massignon studied the problem of the origins of Sufism in depth, and definitively refuted the suggestions of those, including Asin, who considered such origins to be non-​Islamic, here too he reacted similarly and, for the same methodological reasons, rejected Asin’s argument, demonstrating that:  a) As long as direct material borrowing of Muslim elements had not been established –​ and it had not yet been  –​the similarities between the two eschatologies (the Muslim and that of Dante) could be explained by fortuitous coincidences, in view of the limited possibilities for human reason regarding a specific topic such as the study of the celestial architecture: in order to give a compositio loci, Massignon says ‘there is a geometry of situation which imposes its laws, such that there is only a limited number of models, of “maquettes”, by which heaven and earth can be represented’. Returning to the question in 1957, Massignon stated that there is a topic of the imagination which explains that architectonic similarities can be explained by the restricted number of alternatives available to the writer’s imagination (O.M. II, 475). b) The argument which Asin derives from (undeniable) similarities between some Andalusian poetry (the muwashshahât) and the poets who inaugurated the dolce stil novo, contradicts his thesis; for, not only have material borrowings not been proven –​had not then been –​but also, if one then goes beyond the metre (which is in fact similar in the two Schools of poetry) to the guiding principles of the Arab and Italian poets, it can be seen that it is not the poets of the muwashshahât who resemble the poets of the ‘sweet new style’65, but the ancient classical Arabic poets, the Udhrites who sung of Platonic love, whereas the Diwân of Ibn Guzman is cynical and obscene. Massignon here very closely analyses the different components of Platonic love-​something he had already studied with respect to Hallaj and Ibn Dawoud (d. 909)  –​in order to demonstrate its eminently personalist character and to stress the primordial role of the guiding principle. The conclusion is that Asin must choose between ‘a base plagiarist’ in Dante and the solution of a fortuitous parallelism which can 65

Tr. Note: The Dolce Stil Novo was an important literary movement in thirteenth-​century Italy. Dante Aligheri was a major exponent of the style in his Divina Comedia.

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be explained by ‘an analogy of another order’ (O.M. I, 65, 68). c) The laws of literary imitation operate in the opposite way to that claimed by Asin. Here Massignon delivers a well-​researched analysis of the phenomenon of encounter of cultures, examining in turn the social and scientific aspect of literal borrowing from one milieu to another –​the dialectical and aesthetic or analogical aspect of literary composition through logical contamination of a style from one individual to the next –​and finally, the historical mystical aspect in which there is a convergence of principal themes, unity of action between two writers who seek to point the reader in the same direction. While literal borrowing can be scientifically demonstrated, analogy in literary composition can be explained by fortuitous parallelism. As to the third aspect, in contradiction to Asin, it must be considered the most important when it comes to mystical poets such as Ibn Arabi and Dante. This historical-​mystical aspect cannot be studied according to the same methods as literary imitation: there must be a certain experience ab intra of what is at issue. In 1957, after many years of a dialogue of the deaf between Asin and himself, Massignon set out his thinking more explicitly, and if it seems that he gave such importance to Asin’s thesis, this is because, for him, it concerned the very method and spirit in which mystical texts should be approached:  ‘Asin believed that, in order to scientifically address the psychological problem of mysticism, it sufficed . . . to posit an axiomatic basis . . . from which reason then arrives at a number of correct deductions . . . in order to explain all the phenomena contained in the writings of the mystics’ (O.M. II, 475). Massignon believed that the similarities between the mystics could be understood only by going to the extent of an ‘anagogical’ reading of their works, a reading in which ‘coincidences’ become ‘intersigns’ (O. M. II, 477). We can see then that from a historical investigation of Massignon’s writing, and through his verdict on the writings of his predecessors, foreign Orientalists, we have deciphered the principal lines of his own method, and the spirit in which he carried out his analysis of mystical texts, especially those of Hallaj. This result justifies the time we have therefore devoted to studying his lesser known, if no less rich, articles.66

Antoine Audo was indebted to Nwyia for directing the trajectories of his own scholarly work, especially as it related to the question of language and mysticism in Islam. Both shared an interest in the Alawite tradition of Islam Paul Nwyia, ‘Mystique musulmane, École pratique des hautes études’, Section des sciences religieuses 85 (1976–​77): 275–​84, pp. 276–​9.

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especially in its mysticism. Nywia wrote of the great Alawite mystical poet Makzun al-​Sinjari: ‘Makzûn is an alawite poet, and his Sufism is an integral part of his religious alawite vision, he is not sufi and alawite, he is sufi because he is alawite’.67 The Jesuits of Syria undertook a mission to the Alawites in the interwar period.68 The relation between revelation, the identity of God and mysticism were central concerns of Louis Massignon –​ideas which are directly or indirectly mediated in the work and thought of Cheikho, Nwyia and Audo. Massignon states: The goal of Qur’anic revelation is not to expose or justify supernatural gifts so as to be ignorant of them, but, in recalling them to the name of God, to bring back to intelligent beings the temporal and eternal sanctions –​­natural religion –​primitive law, the simple worship that God has prescribed for all time –​that Adam, Abraham and the prophets have always practised in the same way’.69

Massignon founded his whole career on the conviction that it was orthodox Islam which was authentically spiritual and which carried mystery; however, over time he became himself more and more interested in the` marginal’ areas of Islam and the Muslim world.70 His interest in Islam originated from the discovery of a mystique, and while he recognized that the Qur’an emphasized very sharply the transcendence and inaccessibility of God, he did not find in it any less the presence of the idea of the mystical union between the human Paul Nwyia, ‘Makzûn al-​Sinjârî, poète mystique alaouite’, Studia Islamica, 40 (1974):  87–​113, p. 99. Some scholars have attempted to trace the relationship between the Alawite tradition and Christianity: Meir M. Bar-​Asher, ‘Sur les éléments chrétiens de la religion Nusayrite-​A lawite’, Journal Asiatique 289, 2 (2001): 185–​216. 68 Converts from the Alawite tradition to Catholic Christianity created a difficult dispute within the community over the question of religious identity in a complex and changing political context; see Kais M. Firro, ‘The Alawis in Modern Syria: From Nusayriyya to Islam via ‘Alawiya’, Der Islam 82, 1 (2005): 1–​31 (p. 21). Chantel Verdeil, ‘Une “revolution sociale dans le montagne”: la conversion des Alaouites par les jésuites dans les années 1930’, L’islam des marges: Mission chrétienne et espaces périphériques du monde musulman, CVIe-​X Xe siècles (Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2011), pp. 81–​106; C. Verdeil, ‘La mission jésuite auprès des Alaouites (Syrie)’, in Missions chrétiennes en terre d’islam (xviie-​x xe siècles). Anthologie de textes missionnaires, ed. C. Verdeil (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 365–​401. 69 Louis Massignon, Examen du ‘Présent de l’Homme Lettré‘ par Abdallah ibn Torjoman, Studi arabo-​islamic del PISAI, no.  5 (Rome:  Pontificio Istituto di Studi Arabi e d'Islamistica, 1992). 70 Anthony O’Mahony, ‘Louis Massignon: A Catholic Encounter with Islam and the Middle East’, in God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-​ Twentieth Century, ed. Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 230–​51. 67

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soul and its creator. Chosen figures such as Salman Pak, who was of Mazdean birth, converted to Christianity during his adolescence, captured and sold in slavery at Medina, during which he became a follower of Muhammad and the ‘Martyr Mystic’ Husayn ibn Mansur al-​Hallaj (d.922), emerged from the mass of the faithful and substituted themselves for men as a means of suffering, which is a sign of vocation in Massignon’s reckoning. Massignon discovered Shiite Islam among Shiite Holy Places –​Kerbala and Najaf –​during the course of his visit to Ottoman Iraq in 1908. It was in its Arab form that Massignon encountered the Shiite tradition. Two contradictory accusations have been levelled against Massignon concerning Shiism. On the one hand, some of his former pupils such as Corbin have criticized him for neglecting Shiism, for not emphasizing the thoughts of Avicenna and Ibn Arabi sufficiently and thus having been too respectful of Sunni orthodoxy. On the other hand, numerous Orientalists have accusing him of showing an intent excessive interest in secondary aspects of Islam, in the extremist and hermetic sects, such as the Yasidis, Qarmates, Nuseyris, Ismailis and Druze which, strictly speaking, do not stem from Shiism but are rather part of the larger Shiite family. It is his concept of history which is questioned: his detractors consider that an understanding of history as a witness and not as science, an attempt to make it ‘speak’ is meta-​history. Massignon’s chief concern was to demonstrate Islam’s mystical dimension, essentially to be found in Sunni Islam. The Shiite idea of the Imam, a person invested with divine right which was hereditary, was not based on the text of the Qur’an or on the political maxims of the prophet of Islam. The role of the Khalif was in fact different from that of the Shiite Imam; this ‘lieutenant’ of God on earth is only an administrator, a teacher for the Muslim community. Massignon considered that al-​Hallaj (who continued to profess respect for the law) had been implicated in the immanite conspiracies against the Caliphate or against those who held the ‘right to rule’. Nevertheless, he overcame the doubt because: In him [al-​Hallaj], devotion to the Islamic community was marked, not only by practical perseverance in the precepts of the law and submission to the actual authority but by the apostolate of hearts and the visiting the wretched; not only orthodox, but schismatics . . . not only Muslims, but infidels and idolaters, in his prayers he interceded, not only for his friends but his enemies. (Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, ‘Louis Massignou’, Paris, Éditions Perrin 2011, p. 249)

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The idea of intercession, so important in the spirituality of Massignon, can be found in a different form among the Shiites, while it was absent from the Sunnis. Massignon was aware that in the Sunni tradition ‘no one carries the load of another’ or that the idea of ‘sin’ was little developed (both these religious themes had held great importance for him). Massignon, however, considered that ‘the idea of these witnesses, who were completely ignorant of the mass of men, from generation to generation’ and who responded to ‘God in his world’, is the original idea of the Sunni which remains alive in the Shiite tradition. This new interest in Shiaism, which corresponded to Massignon’s personal evolution, appeared in his courses at the Collège de France and at the École pratique des hautes études. What he found in Shiaism was an appeal to heroism, a fight for divine justice, but also for justice on earth, as well as a disquietude on seeing anguish in the human condition, which he did not witness in Sunni thought. Massignon also saw an idea which was very dear to him: that of the restorative value of suffering. He would, in the future, be confronted with two great forms of Islam: a serene Islam, that of the masses, that of the perennial faith which nothing threatened, confident in divine justice, and Shia Islam, with its desire for human justice which attracted him but did not quite convince him. Louis Massignon’s interest in the Alawite-​Nusayris developed during the 1920s during his missions to Syria, and lead to a nourishment of friendship with some of its eminent members. He was attracted by the Alawites ‘not through a taste for hetrodoxy itself, but in order to find again the witness of the oppressed in a little group of Nusayris, beaten and still walled up today in their secret’.71 In 1908, in the desert of Kerbala and Nedjef, he had already been in contact with Shia pilgrims. The Nusayris, who were a minority, were despised and sometimes persecuted, came as transhistorical intercessors in the form of Salman Pak and Fatima. This revival of interest in minorities perhaps brought Massignon closer to his discovery of Eastern Christian minorities, who were on the defensive and were found throughout the Muslim world of the Middle East.72 Massignon would often develop new terms which would have a long reach in describing contemporary Islam, 71

Louis Massignon, ‘Les Nusayns’, in Opera minora. Beirut: Dar-al-Maaref; Pans: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960, p. 624. Pierre Rocalve, ‘Massignon et le shi’isme’, Luqmân (Tehran), no. 2 (1991):  53–​6 4; P. Rocalve, ‘Louis Massignon, Le Si’isme et les sectes’, in Place et rôle de l’Islam et de l’Islamologie dans la vie et l’Oeuvre de Louis Massignon Collection Témoignages et Documents, no. 2 (Paris: Institut Français de Damas, 1993), pp. 67–​84.

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such as the idea of a ‘Muslim World’ from his time as collaborator from 1921 with l'Annuaire du Monde Musulman later the Revue du monde musulman. According to Henri Lauzière, Massignon conceptualizing the term Salafiyya to describe a movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century in the Muslim World remains a very important category for framing Islamic revival and political identity today. In 1952 Massignon published an article titled, ‘The West Facing the East: The Primacy of a Cultural Solution’,73 in which he asserted that in the clash between Europe and the Muslim world, priority should be given to a cultural solution, ‘a solution of justice possible by means of exemplary names and maxims of wisdom; which the instincts of the masses understood’.74 Massignon was of the view that handing on of knowledge of God from one individual to another was the only significant process and therefore most deserving of study.75 The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 was one of the pivotal events of the late twentieth century. However, very few are aware of the impact Catholic political and religious thought had upon the thinking of leading modern Shi’ite thinker and political activist Ali Shari’ati, one of the principal ideological architects of this religious upheaval. How and in what ways did Shari’ati’s encounter with Catholic spirituality, theology and culture influence the thinking of this important thinker of the Islamic revival? Massignon encountered Shari’ati in Paris where he studied.76 Ervand Abrahamian, one of the foremost historians of Iran and a political scientist of the Islamic revolution, writes about other Catholic influences upon Shari’ati: Through Massignon, Shariati was exposed to a radical Catholic journal named Esprit Founded by Emmanuel Mounier, a socially committed Catholic, L. Massignon, ‘L’Occident devant l’Orient:  Primauté d’une solution culturelle’, Politique étrangère 17, 2 (1952): 13–​28. 74 Quoted in Fabio Petito, ‘In Defence of Dialogue of Civilisations: With a Brief Illustration of the Diverging Agreement Between Edward Said and Louis Massignon’, Millennium 39, 3 (2011): 759–​79 (p. 777). Massignon is often posited as a counterpoint to Edward Said’s anti-​civilization discourse, which itself is based on a secular imperative in the context of the encounter between Christianity and Islam. See Said on Massignon, ‘Islam, the Philological Vocation and French Culture: Renan and Massignon’, in Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, ed. Malcolm H. Kerr (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1980), pp. 53–​72; Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 263–​74. 75 Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 97. 76 Michel Cuypers:  ‘Une rencontre mystique:  “Ali Shari’ati  –​Louis Massignon”’, Melanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Etudes Orientales 21 (1993):  291–​ 330; Y. Richard, ‘Ali Shari’ati et Massignon’, Se comprendre, no. 98 (1998): 1–​7. 73

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Esprit in the early 1960s supported a number of left-​wing causes, particularly national liberation struggles in the Third World. It carried articles on Cuba, Algeria, Arab nationalism, economic, underdevelopment, and contemporary communion –​especially the different varieties of Marxist thought. Its authors included Massignon, Michel Foucault, Corbin, Fanon, radical Catholics, and Marxists such as Lukacs, Jacques Berque and Henri Lefebvre. Moreover, Esprit in these years ran frequent articles on Christian-​Marxist dialogue, on Left Catholicism, on Jaure’s religious socialism, and on Christ’s ‘revolutionary, egalitarian teachings’. Despite the influence of Massignon and Esprit, Shariati later scrupulously avoided any mention of radical Catholicism. To have done so would have weakened his claim that Shiism was the only world religion that espoused social justice, economic reality and political revolution.77

Michel Foucault, who knew of the encounter between Massignon and Shar’ati, in a reflective mood witnessing events in Iran in the autumn of 1978, said, How sensible for men living there [Iran] to seek, even at the cost of their life, something of which we in the West have forgotten the very possibility since the time of the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity: a political spirituality. Already I  can hear some Frenchmen laughing, but I know that they are wrong.78

Antoine Audo has been very concerned in his work to identify the relation between religious tradition and modernity, a very important issue for both Christians and Muslims in the Arab Middle East. Audo completed his doctorate, again at the Sorbonne, on the Alawite political and religious thinker Zaki Al-​Arsuzi: Arsouzi wants to view himself as laic, free from all confessional spirit and appeals with all his might to the unity of the Arab nation so that it might be free and modern at the same time. Now, in seeking this universal principle of unity, and using an Arabic vocabulary tinged with modern science and culture, Arsouzi uses mystical language: he needs the religious language of his own tradition to affirm this same unity.79 E. Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (London: I. B. Tauris 1989), p.108. Quoted in Yann Richard, Shi’ite Islam (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1995), p.  213 (emphasis in original). See Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Image of Jesus and Christianity in Shi’a Islam and Modern Iranian Thought’, in A Faithful presence: essays for Kenneth Cragg, ed. David Thomas with Clare Amos (London: Melisende 2003), pp. 256–​73. 79 Antoine Audo, Zakî al-​Arsouzî un arbe face a la modernité (Université Saint-​Joseph, Faculté des letters et des sciences humaines, Collection Hommes et Sociétés du proche-​Orient, Beyrouth, Dar el-​Machreq, 1988), p. 7. 77 78

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Audo was also concerned about the plurality of religious expression as a continuing element of Christianity and the Islamic tradition  –​revelation, mysticism and alterity are central elements in his thinking. In the context of Syria, he writes: First of all, the rejection of all confessional discourse, showing that communion is a force of love, a dynamic of solidarity for the good of each and all. Arab Muslim history gives us examples of minorities acceding to power. This is an undeniable historical phenomenon. And in view of this, we must have the courage to interpret the current situation positively and resolve it rationally, and accept the accession to power of the Alawite minority at this moment in the history of the country.80

The plural ecclesial reality of Christianity in the Middle East is in fact the culture from which theological reflection is undertaken. Paolo Dall’Oglio SJ, an Italian Jesuit who founded the monastic community of Dayr Mar Musa al-​ Habashi (St Moses the Ethiopian) in Syria, which is dedicated to ecumenism and relations between Christian and Muslims, considers this ecclesial plurality as an essential aspect of maintaining a religious and political plurality in the Middle East region today.81

Antoine Audo, ‘The Current Situation of Christianity in the Middle East, Especially Syria, after the Synod of the Middle East’s Final Declaration (September 2012) and the Papal Visit to Lebanon’ in the Living Stones Yearbook 2012 [Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in modern History, Politics and Theology] (London: Melisende 2012), pp. 1–​17 (p. 14). Leon Goldsmith in his recent study has suggested that the difference and integration into the mosaic of Syrian society have been the principal trajectories of Alawite political thought; see ‘ “God Wanted Diversity”; Alawite Pluralist Ideals and Their Integration into Syrian Society 1832–​1973’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40, 4 (2013): 392–​409. The question of the borders of Islam ‘orthodoxy’ remain a highly charged religious-​political question; see Yvette Talhamy, ‘The Fatwas and the Nusayri/​A lawis of Syria’, Middle Eastern Studies 46, 2 (2010): 175–​94. 81 P. Dall’Oglio, ‘Eglises plurielles pour un Moyen-​Orient pluriel’, Mélanges de sciences religieuses 68, 3 (2011)  :  31–​46. Dall’Oglio is the principal founder of the contemporary monastic community Dayr Mar Musa al-​Habashi in Syria, which is dedicated to ecumenism and relations between Christian and Muslims. The monastery, while it has its own modern rule, is in an ecclesial expression of the Syrian Catholic Church. The community should be considered as an aspect of monastic revival, which has taken place across the region, but also as a novel expression of Syriac Christianity, from within the Eastern Catholic tradition based upon the life and eremitical endeavour of Charles de Foucauld and the religious ideas of Louis Massignon for Christian relations with Muslims and Islam. P. Dall’Oglio, ‘La refondation du monastère syriaque de saint Moïse l’Abyssin à Nebek, Syrie, et la Badaliya massignonienne’, in Badaliya au nom de l’autre (1947–​1962) –​ Louis Massignon, ed. M. Borrmans and F. Jacquin (Paris : Éditions du, 2011), pp. 372–​4; P. Dall’Oglio, ‘Louis Massignon and Badaliya’, Aram:  Society for Syro-​Mesopotamian Studies 20 (2008)  :  329–​36; P.  Dall’Oglio ‘Massignon and Jihad, through De Foucauld, al-​ Hallaj and Gandhi’, in Faith, Power and Violence, ed. J. J. Donahue and C. W. Troll [Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 258 (1998)], pp. 103–​14. 80

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As the Syrian Civil War started to unfold, the Jesuits of Syria, on 3 June 2011, ‘gathered in Damascus to pray and reflect on the nation’s current situation’ after which they issued an important statement on the crisis: We, Jesuits in Syria are distressed by the recent events that have taken place in this country, a country which is so dear to us. We have met together to pray for this country of ours, to intercede for it and to reflect on what is happening in it. The following text, the fruit of our prayer, we desire to share with you. Syria, an agent of civilization: Syria, a country of multiple civilizations which arrived one after another on our land and have enriched its patrimony. A great part of this richness comes from the interrelation and the harmony between the peoples of a different culture, religion and spirituality. Together, these peoples have formed a unity which we are proud of and to which we hold fast. This lays on us a grave responsibility to preserve this grand heritage. The history of our country is distinguished by its hospitality and its openness to others, whosoever they be. The spirit of hospitality, the search for unity in the difference, as also all the efforts leading to the formation of the national unity are, without doubt, at the basis of the Syrian society and form a beautiful and lively mosaic. The priority of national unity: What characterizes a human community is the diversity of its components. There is no social life if there are no differences. A truly national peace cannot be built if one part of the population is excluded in favour of the other part; on the contrary it supposes a true life in common. This life is not possible in the negative perception of the presence of the other, in a simple existence ‘side by side’; it requires a true conviviality where each member has an effective role to play in society . . . Without doubt, is it not true to say that we, Christians, consider national unity as a guarantor of our very existence, and that the loss of this unity is a threat for our disappearance . . . This is why we intend to take on the role which allows us to strengthen our national unity, reactivating those values which to us seem essential. Dialogue and freedom of expression: It is not possible for us to mention all the causes of the present crisis, but we ask ourselves how to go beyond this dolorous situation and arrive at a sincere tentative dialogue between all the parties. This dialogue is not an easy matter for it presupposes trust on one side towards the other and listening to what the other has to say. We should also seriously consider the ideas of the other side even if these ideas differ from ours. There is no true dialogue without previously acknowledging that ‘no one has the full truth’. This means that the essential aim of a dialogue is the common search for what comes

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closest to the truth; the common search supposes that all parties, with no one excluded, are invited to participate. Such a dialogue makes it necessary for everyone to be sufficiently self-​conscient so as not to be driven astray by different channels of tendentious information. The Christian adult frees himself from his negative preconceived ideas; he tries by the dialogue, by the humility of dialoguing and listening, to acknowledge the objective data in order to build a bridge between the antagonistic currents existing within the society. The Christian adult is an efficient actor in the construction of modern public opinion, an essential condition for a successful reform.82

Audo has made a significant contribution to retrieving and articulating a Christian religious vocabulary in the context of scriptural dialogue with Islam in the Qu’ran.83 To form a Christian theology in relations to Arabic has been central to his work, seeking to establish Eastern Christian religious thought anew in the contemporary Middle Eastern context. Both Nwyia and Audo, apart from their important scholarly contribution to the study of Islam, also brought to their work a very distinctive Eastern Christian ecclesial and theological culture.84 Both understood that religious language, particularly that of spirituality or mysticism, was an important point of encounter between Christianity and Islam, especially as mysticism had often been marginal in the political resurgence of Islam in modern times. Both instinctively understood that religious language carried great theological importance in sustaining a dialogue between faith and modernity which avoided the totalizing instinct of political ideology. They might both be considered as important political theological thinkers speaking out of a distinct Jesuit tradition, Eastern Christianity, especially marked by their Chaldean Catholic culture, and Christian scholarship on Islam in dialogue with the modern Middle East. Nwyia and Audo stand as witnesses to what David Walsh has stated as our contemporary dilemma: Even the discovery of God does not lift us out of this world. For as long as he wills it we must remain in this life to work out as best we can the

http://​w ww.zenit.org/​en/​a rticles/​statement-​of-​jesuits-​in-​syria. Audo, ‘Approches théologiques du récit de Joseph dans Gn 37–​ 50 et Coran sourate 12’, pp. 268–​81. 84 Audo, ‘Issac of Ninevah, John of Dalyatha and Eastern Spirituality’, One in Christ: A Catholic Ecumenical Review 44, 20.2 (2010): 29–​48. 82 83

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meaning and direction we must follow within it. The light of transcendent illumination is a piercing beam from beyond, but it does not illuminate the surrounding area. The mystery of the whole remains. The difficulty of articulating the consequences of revelation for the modern secular world is evident in the confusion concerning the relationship between religion and politics.85

The Catholic Patriarchs of the East have issued a series of important letters on the religious, political, economic and cultural situation and challenges of the region. In the third part of the letter, ‘Together for an egalitarian society’, written in 1992, they state: No one can remove religion from public life or limit it to the liturgies and devotions; because religion is dogma and life that has to do with the whole of human existence, private and public, individual and social . . . To link citizenship to religious values is not an evil. On the contrary, religious values give a soul to citizenship. But in this case it is necessary that religion should orient the person totally to God, to the perfect respect of the creature of God and of every religious conviction, especially when we have to do with the religion of a minority in a given society or nation. The laws of the state must guarantee the rights of the minority religion with the same rigour as it guarantees those of the majority or of the religion of the State.86

Audo made an explicit connection between the conclusion of the final declaration of the Synod for the Middle East (September 2012), Benedict XVI’s papal visit to Lebanon and the so-​called Arab Spring.87 Audo quotes the declaration, summing up the profound desire for a reordering and reorientation of religious thought towards a new understanding of the political in the David Walsh, Guarded by Mystery. Meaning in a Postmodern Age (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), pp. 98–​9. 86 Quoted in Christian Troll SJ, ‘Changing Catholic Views on Islam,’ in Islam and Christianity: Mutual Perceptions Since the Mid–​Twentieth Century, ed. Jacques Waardenburg (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), pp. 19–​77. 87 Antoine Audo, ‘The Synod of Bishops:  The Catholic Church in the Middle East’, One in Christ:  A  Catholic Ecumenical Review 44, 20.2 (2010):  196–​200; Antoine Audo, ‘Between Christians and Muslims a Pathway of Communion’, The Restless Middle East. Between Political Revolts and Confessional Tensions, ‘Oasis’ 13 (2011) http://​w ww.oasiscenter.eu/​node/​7149, in which he states: ‘When listening to the demands of the people one cannot fail to notice a mysterious link between the final appeal of the Synod of the Catholic Church of the Middle East and everything that these societies ask for today:  justice and freedom. Evidence of a historic opportunity.’ 85

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context of religious freedom as a key theme to understanding conversion and mission: Religious tolerance exists in a number of countries, but it does not have much effect since it remains limited in its field of action. There is a need to move beyond tolerance to religious freedom. Taking this step does not open the door to relativism, as some would maintain. It does not compromise belief, but rather calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between man, religion and God. It is not an attack on the ‘foundational truths’ of belief, since, despite human and religious divergences, a ray of truth shines on all men and women. We know very well that truth, apart from God, does not exist as an autonomous reality. If it did, it would be an idol. The truth cannot unfold except in an otherness open to God, who wishes to reveal his own otherness in and through my human brothers and sisters. Hence it is not fitting to state in an exclusive way: ‘I possess the truth’. The truth is not possessed by anyone; it is always a gift which calls us to undertake a journey of ever closer assimilation to truth. Truth can only be known and experienced in freedom; for this reason we cannot impose truth on others; truth is disclosed only in an encounter of love.88

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No. 27: http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/nf_ben_ exh_2012-0914_ecclesia-in-medio-onente.html (visited on 06.01.2017).

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Autonomy, Dignity, Human Rights Correcting a Popular Error Patrick Riordan SJ

Do I have human rights because I am rational, an autonomous person capable of choosing my way in life? Or do I have human rights because I am a human being, a member of a species which is characterized by the capacities for reason and freedom? These two questions have parallels in terms of human dignity. Is my dignity as a human person due to my own attributes of rationality and responsibility for my life, so that without those attributes I would lack dignity? Or is my dignity as a human person to be explained in terms of my being a member of the human species, the characteristics of which include freedom and reason? The popular error referred to in the title is to overlook the difference between the two questions and to think that in each of the pairs the second one referring to the human species is not substantially different from the first. The error is easily made in the popular mind because of the key role played by reason and freedom in both cases. However, the error is not only a popular one; it is made by philosophers who deliberately avoid any mention of natural kinds, species or human nature, because of the desire to avoid associated dangers. I begin this chapter by reviewing a discussion of why the modern discourse on human rights has avoided addressing the question of human nature. The desire to avoid essentialism explains the reluctance of theorists to write of human nature, but this is seen by many to deprive the discourse of important resources. The dangers of essentialism are thought to include cultural imperialism and the failure to appreciate the particularity and distinctive histories and cultures of non-​Western peoples. Philosophers such as James Griffin and

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Ronald Dworkin, while treating of human dignity and human rights, have attempted to avoid these criticisms by bypassing consideration of human nature. As a consequence it becomes possible to say that while human infants or demented elderly persons have moral rights, they do not have human rights. Recovery of the role of human nature in relevant arguments, especially in discussion of Martha Nussbaum’s account of human capacities, enables a correction of the error identified. If this philosophical clarification is successful, it challenges the human rights community to say whether the important exclusion of discrimination so central to the culture and meaning of human rights also requires a correction to this proposed reading of human rights.

Human rights and human nature Does an adequate account of human rights require an explanation in terms of human nature? Chris Brown, in a volume of essays devoted to discussing outstanding problems concerning human rights, identifies this as a difficult question.1 Brown is a competent commentator with several books on human rights to his credit. He argues that many difficulties encountered in the understanding and application of human rights derive from the deliberate exclusion of the question of human nature. Among these difficulties are familiar criticisms that the human rights regime is carried by a Western, and also particularly masculine, perspective on the world, and that the judgments made in its name reflect a distinctively Western and liberal philosophy. Defenders of human rights are sensitive to these charges of cultural particularism and attempt to secure the claimed universality for human rights. These attempts are ever only partially successful. According to Brown, difficulties arise, because ‘the international human rights regime has been established without the employment of a coherent account of human nature’.2 Brown suggests that human rights rest on an account of the good life for human beings formulated in universal terms, but there is a reluctance to admit this fact, so that the charges of cultural imperialism remain plausible. Standard ploys to avoid discussing the good for humans, which would require addressing Chris Brown, Human Rights:  The Hard Questions (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 23. 2 Ibid. 1

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human nature, include the appeal to positive law (human rights have become the currency of international law due to conventions and treaties) and also the pragmatism of what works (human rights are seen as useful, and even useful fictions). The problem with these approaches is that they cannot ground a moral obligation for anyone who disputes the usefulness of human rights or the moral validity of a global imperialism. The refusal to consider the topic of human nature in the context of these debates leads Brown to observe that ‘arguments from human nature appear to have been de-​legitimated in contemporary discourse’.3 He lists various factors which explain ‘how human nature has become a myth’. Of course, there never was a universally agreed account of what it was to be human –​a key point in illustrating this is the fact that not all human cultures accept that human beings have just one life to live. I add emphasis to the term ‘account’ to highlight a distinction between affirming a common humanity and explaining in what exactly the communality consists. But, Brown elaborates, even if there were a possibility of establishing a shared account of humanity, many dispute the implications for prescriptions on how people ought to live. A significant moment in the history of the concept of a common human nature was the encounter with the other in the colonization of America. Brown draws on Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Conquest of America:  The Question of the Other in formulating the emergent challenge. ‘The point Todorov drives home is that the available formulations for understanding the Indians were “essentially the same, and equal” or “different and inferior” –​ crucially, “different but equal” was not an available answer to that question of the Other.’4 The inability to recognize equality in difference was not a weakness of European cultures alone, but seems to be a common feature of indigenous cultures which typically distinguish between ‘us’ (human, people, persons, men) and ‘them’ (inhuman, non-​people). In defence of the European experience, he points out that a ‘distinctive feature of European approaches to the Other was not that the latter were often seen as inferior, but rather that they were sometimes seen as equal’.5 Whether the strangers were recognized as the same and equal, or as different and inferior, both perspectives relied Ibid., p. 24 Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 27; Roger Ruston, Human Rights and the Image of God (London: SCM Press, 2004), pp. 143–​56.

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on a single description of human nature. When accounts of human nature were reviewed from the perspective of ideas fashionable in the twentieth century, Brown points out that the two perspectives were conflated since based on the same account, and the failings and abuses of the ‘different and inferior’ stance were blamed equally on the ‘same and equal’ conception. This suited the interests of various ideologies, from scientific and popular racism, to Social Darwinism with its advocacy of eugenics, and Marxism’s location of the universal in something other than human nature. In the twentieth century, sociologists learned from Wittgenstein that ‘forms of life’ were simply given, and that there could not be any standard outside of them according to which they could be evaluated. Each society would have its own standards but they ought not be measured by the standards of another society, even if it were the learned society of human scientists. Brown judges that the ambition of Peter Winch’s study, which propounds this stance, may be self-​defeating. By undermining the universal account of human nature with the intention of combating racism and intolerance, it ‘simultaneously undermines the reason for thinking that intolerance and racism are unacceptable’.6 If the challenge is to explain how people from various cultures and histories are both different and equal, then there is a need to find a level of communality which sustains and accommodates the differences. This requires that the observer avoid the over-​hasty reaction to differences which often appear to be contradictory and irreconcilable. Brown cites familiar examples from Herodotus’s descriptions of how different cultures treat the bodies of their deceased members. Usually interpreted to establish radical incommensurability –​some burning, and others eating the corpses –​Brown argues that at the appropriate level of generality all the forms of treating the dead can be seen as ways of expressing respect. The challenge in developing a workable conception of human nature for contemporary purposes is to find the right level of generality. This intellectual challenge was avoided by scientists and philosophers in their adoption of the ‘scientific rejection of essentialism’. While rejecting all the deficient accounts of human nature they avoided the difficult task of constructing an adequate account. The lack of such a defensible account has Brown, Human Rights, p. 30.

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rendered universal human rights defenceless against the challenges of cultural imperialism. Brown’s main concern is to underline the need for such an account, and while he does not elaborate one in great detail, he points to developments in anthropology and evolutionary psychology which may provide sufficiently robust conclusions to warrant asking the further question: if there is so much evidence of communality, may we not posit a shared human nature? If not, how else are we to make sense of the extent of convergence? To posit a shared humanity is not to claim that it is completely known or understood: it leaves open the possibility of discovery and also the self-​correcting process of learning.7 Brown concludes:  ‘The twentieth century rejection of human nature was a reaction to Social Darwinism and the political implications of notions of scientific racism, but there is good reason to think that the genuinely scientific study of the human animal will not lead to such reactionary conclusions.’8

Recognizing a common humanity Brown is not alone in his objection to the fashionable anti-​essentialism in the academy. While he sees its impact on the lack of grounding for human rights in an account of human nature, Martha Nussbaum bemoans the prevalence of anti-​essentialism among some of those concerned with development. She has devoted a number of publications to development issues, in particular the objectives of development policies in The Quality of Life (1993, edited jointly with Amartya Sen) and the role of women in development in Women in Human Development (2000). A number of articles have been devoted expressly to countering the anti-​essentialism she has encountered among professional colleagues.9 She can accept the concerns which have led some to abandon any appeal to a determinate account of human beings –​the desire not to impose one’s own perspectives or values on others and the desire to be sensitive to the distinctive culture, experience and language of those who are recognized as different. But, she argues, the appropriate response Bernard Lonergan, Insight (New York: Philosophical Library, 1970 [1957]), pp. 36–​7. Ibid., p. 37. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice:  In Defence of Aristotelian Essentialism’, Political Theory 20,2 (1992): 202–​46.

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is not to abandon all determinate accounts of humankind, but to generate one which is appropriately sensitive to cultural particularity and to difference. She argues very persuasively that the lack of an adequate account of the human would undermine two essential attitudes which are the precondition for all development work: compassion and respect. Without a sense of the other, no matter how different, as nonetheless like oneself in fundamental respects, it is difficult to see how genuine compassion for the other who is suffering or needy could be maintained. A patronizing pity such as might be had for suffering animals would be possible, but compassion requires a sense of equality so that there can be a kind of identification with the situation of the other. The related attitude of respect similarly requires a recognition of those features of the other which are so valued that they can evoke the commitment to protect and foster and not to harm. Since her target audience is first of all the community of those concerned with development work, Nussbaum’s appeal is to their own presupposed motivations of compassion and respect, which inevitably would be undermined by the anti-​essentialism they espouse. Accepting the challenge of formulating an adequate account of being human, Nussbaum attempts to elaborate on the basis of observation and of reflection on the stories told within many different cultures a list of features of human functions. This has become well known and widely cited in the literature, so I will not attempt to reproduce it in this short discussion.10 Her intention is to produce a historically sensitive account of the most basic human needs and functions. This results in a list of ten aspects of human functioning, to which correspond human capacities, and it is in relation to the basic capacities that development policies should be formulated. The task of development would be to facilitate people in their various situations and cultures acquiring the capacities to a certain threshold level so that they would be empowered to function in their contexts and communities. She claims that her approach in delineating these features of being human is an essentialism of a kind, but which is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms adopted by the anti-​essentialists. Acknowledging that their objections to essentialism are legitimate, she undertakes to show that they do not apply to her account of humanity in terms of basic capacities.

Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Douglass, M. Bruce, M. Gerald and H. S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990); Women and Human Development. The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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The first objection is that essentialism neglects historical and cultural differences by proposing an account supposedly applicable to all times and places.11 Nussbaum defends her account of human capacities against this charge by stressing that the identification of the capacities does not entail that they will be brought to function in any determinate cultural form. They are open to being realized in myriad cultural forms and historical contexts. Bodily need, for instance, means that humans require nourishment and appropriate shelter from heat and cold, wet and dry, but does not specify what form the food, clothing or housing need take. The second objection is that essentialism neglects human autonomy. This objection is that, ‘by determining in advance what elements of human life have most importance, the essentialist fails to respect the right of people to choose a plan of life according to their own lights, determining what is most central and what is not’.12 Against this, Nussbaum points to the project of strengthening and fostering people’s capacities to make such choices, but without specifying how people are to exercise their choice. The third objection is that the application of essentialist ideas is inevitably prejudicial to some. The experiences and values of some people are discounted or ignored altogether since they don’t correspond to the pattern formulated in the essentialist account. This is not a danger with her capacities approach, according to Nussbaum, since there is no prejudgment of how any of the capacities is to be realized, and the account enables the observer or analyst to attend to the particularities of each individual or each group.13 Nussbaum’s essentialism focuses on human capacities for functioning, and she distinguishes this from what she labels as extreme metaphysical realism. She is prepared to concede that the criticisms advanced by the anti-​ essentialists succeed against this form of realism, but without actually examining the case. At this point we can ask whether Nussbaum’s essentialism will answer the need identified by Chris Brown for an account of human nature. Before I pursue this question, however, I turn to an alternative proposal to provide for some of the same deficiencies in the international human rights regime as identified by Chris Brown.

Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice’, p. 208. Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 209. 11

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Griffin on reforming human rights James Griffin has identified some of the same difficulties in international human rights discourse as mentioned by Brown. Lacking clear existence conditions, the term human right has become nearly criterion-​less, with a resultant ‘debasement of contemporary human rights discourse’.14 At the same time there has been an inflation of human rights claims, without any clear procedure for determining the validity of the claims raised. The discourse on human rights seems to lack ways of determining the content of rights and of establishing their relative weights in situations in which various rights compete for satisfaction. Griffin develops some proposals to regulate the use of the language of human rights with a view to overcoming these problems. He contrasts a ‘top-​down’ or systematic approach to understanding human rights with a more ‘piecemeal’ approach. He attempts the latter, hoping to construct an adequate account of human rights talk from the usage of the language in the emergent international human rights tradition.15 He avoids a systematic approach because in his view all such attempts to date have failed, but also, the task of stabilizing the discourse of human rights and repairing the deficiencies can be completed without a systematic theory. That task is to understand the notion of human rights that is at the centre of an ongoing public discourse of human rights in ethics, law and politics.16 Pursuing his piecemeal approach, Griffin assembles elements of the notion of human rights coming from the Enlightenment tradition. First, they are seen as moral rights that we possess simply by virtue of being human; second, no specialized rationality but simply ordinary moral reasoning is all that is required to determine the existence and content of human rights. The third aspect, and the most controversial element of his approach, is his assertion that the notion of humanity, by virtue of which any of us is said to possess human rights, is our status as normative agents. Finally, he generates a list of paradigmatic rights. He insists that rights are not to be identified with interests, but they are protections of certain key human interests.17 Central among

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James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14. James Griffin, ‘Human Rights: Questions of Aim and Approach’, Ethics 120 (2010): 741. Ibid., p. 743. Ibid., p. 746.

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these interests is the interest in autonomy, liberty and the minimum welfare required for the maintenance and exercise of moral agency. A central move in his argument is to tie the attribution of human rights to the notion of personhood, understood as the possession of normative agency.18 This, according to Griffin, is the notion of humanity, by virtue of which we possess human rights. Normative agency is not merely the capacity to act deliberately and to take responsibility for one’s actions; it is more fundamentally the capacity to choose one’s own conception of the good and to shape one’s life accordingly. An obvious implication of this strategy is that human beings without the capacity for normative agency, such as infants and the demented elderly, would not be subjects of human rights. Griffin insists that we would still have obligations towards infants and the senile, for example, constraining what might be done to them, but not because they possessed human rights. ‘My belief is that we have a better chance of improving the discourse of human rights if we stipulate that only normative agents bear human rights –​no exceptions: not infants, not the seriously mentally disabled, not those in a permanent vegetative state, though we have weighty moral obligations to all of them.’19 As John Tasioulas comments, the torture of the senile or of infants would be a moral horror, but not a violation of their human rights. ‘To say . . . that the murder of non-​agents violates their rights, but is not a human rights violation, is to rely on what looks, from an orthodox point of view, like an artificial distinction between universal moral rights and human rights.’20 Griffin’s notion of personhood, understood as a capacity for normative agency, echoes Nussbaum’s emphasis on determining human being by reference to characteristic capacities. Another parallel also emerges in her acknowledgement that those individuals who fail to exhibit the relevant capacities would be deemed to live a less than human life. Nussbaum’s approach is refreshing for its reliance on the fact that people can recognize others as human even across historical and cultural boundaries. She attempts to identify the bases for these recognitions by mapping

Griffin, On Human Rights, p. 36. Griffin, ‘Human Rights’ p. 749; On Human Rights, ­chapter 4. John Tasioulas, ‘Human Dignity and the Foundations of Human Rights’ in Understanding Dignity, ed. C. McCrudden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 303 (emphasis added).

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out those features that are thought to constitute a life as human, namely, the capacities she lists. However, she also appeals to ‘a broadly shared, general consensus about the features whose absence means the end of a human form of life’.21 This formulation allows for an ambiguity, since ‘human form of life’ might be read prescriptively rather than ontologically. In other words, it might refer to situations in which human beings have to endure conditions which are unworthy of their human dignity. However, immediately following this she relies on a reference to the human kind indicating an intention to refer to human nature. ‘In medicine and mythology alike, we have an idea that some transitions or changes just are not compatible with a being’s continued existence as a member of the human kind.’22 Death is an example of the kind of change intended here which the ontological reading would suggest. But dementia, or other debilities? ‘As far as capabilities go, to call them part of humanness is to make a very basic sort of evaluation. It is to say that a life without this item would be too lacking, too impoverished, to be human at all.’23 Nussbaum warns of the dangers which arise from the power to determine which individuals qualify as possessing the requisite conditions and which do not, and she underlines the point that absence of an obligation to provide all possible supports for the functioning of those individuals who lack the capacities does not entail the absence of all moral obligations towards them. ‘Certain patients with irreversible senile dementia or a permanent vegetative condition would fall into this category, as would certain very severely damaged infants. It would then fall to other moral arguments to decide what treatment we owe to such individuals, who are unable ever to reach the higher capabilities to function humanly.’24 The ability to decide for oneself how one wishes to live and what image of good life one wishes to realize in one’s own personal story is precisely that aspect of autonomy that was at the heart of the liberation agenda and which is the tradition of human rights. To respect this autonomy, liberty must be secured for persons so that they are free from coercive interference from the state or other bodies, and have the space to live the life they choose for themselves. Autonomy so understood was thought to be jeopardized by 24 21

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Nussbaum ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice’, p. 215. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 228

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essentialism, and Nussbaum was committed to upholding this value in formulating her account of essentialism.

Human nature, dignity and human rights In specifying the characteristics of personhood, Griffin invokes a common theme among liberal philosophers in placing the emphasis on autonomy and normative agency.25 It does seem plausible to pick out the capacity for reasonable and responsible action with regard to the living of one’s life as the characteristic which marks off the dignity of the human individual and grounds her entitlement to respect. On first sight it also seems a plausible strategy in an Aristotelian idiom. In the Aristotelian tradition it makes sense to look for those defining characteristics which mark off a kind from other species. Hence, humankind was understood as a rational animal, marked off from other kinds of animals by the possession of rationality. Aristotle’s remark, for instance, in his Politics that it is the capacity for reasoned speech which makes humans political animals, does not deny the fact that many other gregarious animals rely on voice to communicate. We humans are of such kind that we rely on reason for a good functioning social order. This capacity for reason and for the purposeful ordering of our lives according to what we know and believe is what distinguishes us from the animals. This point might be sustained, even if we concede, as many now demand, that other animals are also rational in their own way. Isn’t Griffin doing something similar in picking out the characteristic of capacity for normative agency? The similarity is so obvious that it might obscure the fundamental difference in approach. Where Aristotle asks about kinds, about species, Griffin asks about individuals. On the Aristotelian approach, the attempt is to understand humanity as a kind, a species of animal. Hence the role of terms such as ‘nature’ in this tradition, which simply labels that which is to be discovered and known.26 Understanding human nature involves a process of comparison of specimens of this and other comparable species and the identification of precisely those characteristics which mark off this kind of

For example, Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ­chapter 9. 26 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 36–​7. 25

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being from others of a similar or related kind. For instance, an important feature in current discussions even about rights is the capacity for pain. Humans are not unique among animals in possessing the sensitivity to pain. This will not be a useful characteristic for generating a definition of human nature. Philosophers along with anthropologists and zoologists have explored other features as possible defining characteristics:  the capacity for humour or to laugh, the making and use of tools, a sense of fairness. Is it too much of a generalization to say that the features which seem likely to function well as distinguishing characteristics are those which include a rational dimension? At any rate, the point of such an approach to the Aristotelian tradition is to generate an understanding of the species, of human nature. To this extent, Nussbaum’s reconstruction in terms of human capacities is consistent with the tradition in its concern to determine what belongs essentially to human beings. However, because she wants to avoid metaphysical realism, she resists taking the further step to determining what belongs to the nature of the kind. The use of ‘step’ here is deliberate, since the traditional metaphysical method begins by distinguishing objects (the visible circle from the intelligible definition). The second step is to distinguish acts corresponding to the distinguished objects (seeing distinguished from understanding). The third step moves from acts to potencies, recognizing that what is done corresponds to what can be done. So corresponding to the act of seeing is the capacity for sight, sightedness, corresponding to the act of understanding is intelligence, the capacity for insight. Nussbaum makes it to the third step in her argument, identifying the capacities which belong to humans in every culture and by which human beings can recognize their fellows. The fourth step, the one which Nussbaum chooses not to take, is to distinguish natures according to different sets of capacities. Humans typically exhibit a set of capacities distinguishable from those found among other animals, so the metaphysician is entitled to posit a human nature, but without thereby being entitled to say exhaustively in what it consists.

Not a source of criteria for testing individuals Does a characterization of a nature provide a criterion for determining whether or not a particular individual possesses this nature? A  popular error is to assume that it does, and then various difficulties follow, since any

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particular individual may evidently be a human being, in the sense of a member of the species, and yet lack capacities such as a sense of humour, or tool making skills, or rationality or capacity for normative agency. The lack may be temporary (due to sleep, or incapacitated with illness, or too immature to have developed to the point of exercise) or it may be permanent (due to malformation, or dementia, or the effects of previous illness), but the ordinary common-​sense observation –​on which Aristotle would also rely –​is that the individual in question is a human being, although immature or deformed or incapacitated in some way. One becomes a member of the species simply by coming into being as a child of human parents, a product of human reproduction. To be recognizable as a man or a woman, a human child or a human infant, does not depend on the application of some precise criterion. Of course, there may be unusual cases, such as anencephalic infants. But even here it is not a question of the individual being a member of some other species: it is simply a case of disruption or distortion of the normal course of the reproduction process appropriate to the human species such that a defective organism emerges. An account of human nature does not directly provide criteria for determining whether this or that individual is a member of the species. Such criteria, usually based on common sense, are sourced elsewhere. Similarly, an account of human nature may provide an understanding of the dignity of all human beings, which is sometimes said to be the ground of their rights claims, as, for instance, in the two international covenants. But there is no basis in such an account of human nature and human dignity for discriminating between different human individuals, attributing rights to those who pre-​eminently exhibit the defining characteristic and denying rights to those who do not.27 In addition, the language of the Universal Declaration and of the Covenants emphasizes the equality of all as entitled to the prescribed respect, ‘without discrimination’. This equality is intended by the reference to dignity, whether as in the Declaration, where dignity is simply paired with rights, or whether it is named as ground of those rights as in the Covenants. Dignity as a concept seems rooted in a hierarchical view, and when dignity is asserted as the ground of human rights, it is intended See, for instance, Glenn Hughes, ‘The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ Journal of Religious Ethics 39, 1 (2011): 1–​24.

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to stress that all human beings are on the same level of dignity. Jeremy Waldron draws attention to further nuances and tensions in the application of the term, but equality of status persists.28 Putting it negatively, it also stresses that any subordination or subjection of human individuals making them inferior in dignity to others is a violation of their proper status. For the Aristotelian, then, the identification of defining or distinguishing characteristics leads to the understanding of human nature, and it is this nature which grounds the assertion of dignity of all members of the species, simply by being human. In this approach, therefore, there is nothing comparable to Griffin’s distinction between those on the one hand who possess personhood in the sense of normative agency, and therefore have human rights, and those human beings on the other hand who lack personhood in this sense, and have moral rights, but not human rights, such as infants and the demented. What is more, the Aristotelian account, which considers the species as a whole in determining the grounds of dignity, would reject any such division of members of the species, and would stress that each and everyone, by virtue of their humanity understood simply as instancing human nature, have equal dignity and related rights. This Aristotelian account, and not Nussbaum’s, may be more faithful to the actual usage of human rights in the current tradition, giving greater weight to the first thesis presented by Griffin: human rights are the rights we have simply by virtue of being human, which requires no sophisticated theory of personhood, but simply membership of the species.

Conclusion Human rights, human dignity, personhood, normative agency, liberty, autonomy –​all these terms refer to important realities. But as is evident from the foregoing discussion, they are also terms which can be understood differently, depending on one’s basic philosophy. One is either willing to consider the reality of natural kinds and natures, or one avoids such consideration for 28

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Citizenship and Dignity’, in Understanding Dignity, ed. C.  McCrudden (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 327.

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fear of contamination from essentialism or from metaphysical realism. We have seen how arguments, appealing to important values of autonomy and normative agency, can lead to conclusions, which seem startling to someone who upholds the values of autonomy and normative agency, but nonetheless identifies common humanity rather than individuals’ attributes as the basis of human rights.

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Liberal and Authoritarian Approaches to Raising Good Citizens Stephen Law

How do we raise good citizens? How do we raise people who will be morally decent, who will do the right thing, even when times are tough? Looking back over the twentieth century, we find great moral progress (especially in terms of our attitudes towards women, gay people, non-​white people and other species), but also moral catastrophes –​from the killing fields of Cambodia, to the Gulags, to Auschwitz, to the Rwandan genocide. If we wish to raise decent citizens who will stand up and do the right thing, who will exhibit significant immunity to the siren voices of those tempting them towards such horrors, what is the most effective approach? I recommend a highly Liberal approach to moral and religious education. By a Liberal (with a capital ‘L’) approach, I mean an approach that emphasizes the importance of encouraging young people to think independently and make their own judgments on these important matters. Liberals believe young people should be helped to recognize that what is right or wrong, true or false in any religion, is ultimately (and unavoidably) the responsibility of each individual to judge for him or herself. I recommend an approach to moral and religious education that emphasizes the importance of helping individuals develop the kind of intellectual and emotional maturity they will need to discharge this responsibility properly. A Liberal approach lies at the opposite end of the scale to what I term an Authoritarian (with a capital ‘A’) approach. Authoritarians place greater emphasis on encouraging an attitude of deference to external authority. Authoritarians suppose children should be raised to realize that what is right or wrong, religiously true or false, is not for them to judge –​rather, they should defer to those who know.

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Note that one can be more or less Liberal or Authoritarian. There is a wide range of positions one might adopt, from Extremely Liberal to highly Authoritarian. Western societies have become rather more Liberal, particularly over the last half-​century or so. However, some believe we have drifted too far in the Liberal direction and that we need to reintroduce some Authority back into the classroom. Some traditional forms of moral and religious education have been Authoritarian, with emphasis placed on policing not just behaviour but also thoughts. A colleague of mine who taught in a Catholic school in the 1960s recalls being punished merely for asking why the Catholic Church took the position it did on abortion (she did not reject the view, she merely wanted to understand what the reasoning behind it was). Some regimes have been brutally Authoritarian, meting out severe punishment to those who dare to question or express doubt. Some of these regimes have been religious (even today there remain several theocratic regimes that will execute anyone who dares to leave their faith). But, of course, atheist regimes can be at least as brutally Authoritarian. Totalitarian atheist regimes have demonstrated an Orwellian obsession with ruthlessly policing not just what people do, but also what they say and think. Contemporary Western societies and schools tend to be fairly Liberal, certainly compared with the past. Citizens of the West are free to make their own judgments about which religion, if any, is true. Most religious schools in the UK pay at least lip service to the thought that children should be permitted to question and think for themselves on issues religious and moral (though whether this is something such schools positively and unrestrictedly encourage is another matter). UK citizens are certainly free to make their own moral judgments. Of course, that’s not to say that citizens are free to do whatever they want. Citizens of the UK are not free to drive at 150 miles per hour down the motorway. Still, they remain entirely free to believe, and publicly express the view, that they should be free to do so. It’s this freedom of thought and expression with respect to moral and religious questions that Liberals with a capital ‘L’ defend, not an anarchistic liberty to do whatever we want. Contemporary Liberal thought draws heavily upon, and is historically at least partly rooted in, that period of our intellectual history known as the Enlightenment. The French intellectuals Diderot and d’Alembert define the Enlightenment thinker as one who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition,

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universal consent, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself ’.1 The importance of think for yourself is a core Enlightenment value. Kant came up with one of the most quoted characterizations of Enlightenment: [Enlightenment is the] emergence of man from his self-​imposed infancy. Infancy is the inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of another. It is self-​imposed, when it depends on a deficiency, not of reason, but of the resolve and courage to use it without external guidance. Thus the watchword of enlightenment is: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use one’s own reason!2

Interestingly, ‘Sapere’ and ‘Aude’ are the names of two philosophy for children (P4C) organizations. P4C is obviously in keeping with an Enlightened, Liberal approach to moral and religious education. In arguing that children should be raised to be autonomous, independent critical thinkers, proponents of P4Cpromote a central Enlightenment value. But is it really a good idea to raise young people to think critically and independently about moral and religious matters? Here are a few of the more obvious objections that might be raised: Objection 1:  Doesn’t such a Liberal approach promote moral relativism? Doesn’t it encourage the idea that there is no objective fact of the matter about right and wrong that every moral point of view is equally ‘true’? And isn’t relativism a dangerous philosophy? Doesn’t it lead us down the road to an ‘anything goes’ society, in which lying, cheating and even murder are moral for those who deem it so?

This is a perennial concern. In 2004, the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) proposed that all children be exposed to a range of religious faiths and atheism and be taught to think critically about religious belief. The IPPR’s recommendation was that ‘[c]‌hildren with strong religious beliefs would be encouraged to question them and to ask what grounds there are for holding them . . . Pupils would be actively encouraged to question the religious beliefs they bring with them into the classroom.’3 Quoted in Melanie Phillips, All Must Have Prizes (London:  Warner Books, 1998), p.  190. My emphasis. Immanuel Kant, quoted in the entry on ‘Enlightenment’ in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 3 http://​w ww.melaniephillips.com/​d iary/​a rchives/​0 00330.html. 1

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Many religious people were entirely comfortable with this proposal, but others were not. The columnist Melanie Phillips’s response to the IPPR’s Liberal suggestion quoted approvingly from a Daily Telegraph editorial: As [this] Telegraph leader comments, this is nothing other than yet another attempt at ideological indoctrination: ‘It reflects the belief that parents who pass on the Christian faith are guilty of indoctrinating their children, and that it is the role of the state to stop them. The IPPR and its allies in the Government are not so much interested in promoting diversity as in replacing one set of orthodoxies by another: the joyless ideology of cultural relativism.’4

Phillips’s response is confused. To suppose children should be encouraged to think and make their own judgments in order to figure out what is true is obviously not to promote the relativist view that whatever belief they arrive at is as ‘true’ as any other. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that a Liberal view that by thinking things through an individual might be able to get closer to the truth actually stands in stark contrast to the kind of crude relativism that says that every moral point of view is as ‘true’ as any other. For if relativism were true, the view one arrived at after careful deliberation will be no more ‘true’ than the one you start with. So there would be no point in such careful deliberation, at least not so far as getting nearer to the truth is concerned. Indeed the reasons why moral relativism is untenable is something Liberal teachers might explain to their pupils. Teachers can spell out the reasons why they believe relativism is untenable, even while allowing their pupils the freedom to dissent, to argue the contrary, to make their own judgment. Teachers are free to take a position and argue a case even within a Liberal regime that encourages individuals to make their own judgments. Ironically, ensuring children have the courage to think for themselves and apply their own intelligence, rather than just uncritically accept, is not, as Phillips, claims, just another form of ‘ideological indoctrination’, but rather one of their best defences against it. If we want young people to have some immunity to intellectual snake oil, we need to ensure they have both the intellectual ability to spot it when they are presented with it and the intellectual confidence and courage to say ‘no’. Ibid.

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Objection 2: Children are insufficiently mature to be able to think critically and independently about such Big Questions.

This objection is contradicted by a growing body of evidence that suggests that not only are children able to engage fruitfully in collective rational discussion about philosophical topics (including moral and religious questions), but they also benefit a great deal from doing so, not just intellectually but also socially and emotionally. There have been a number of studies and programs involving philosophy with children in several countries. Here are a few examples. In 1997, a small Australian primary school near Brisbane was introduced into a philosophy program in which children collectively engaged in structured debates addressing philosophical questions that they themselves had come up with. The effects were striking. There was marked academic improvement across the curriculum. A report on the program says, [f]‌or the last four years, students at Buranda have achieved outstanding academic results. This had not been the case prior to the teaching of Philosophy. In the systemic Year 3/​5/​7 tests (previously Yr 6 Test), our students performed below the state mean in most areas in 1996. Following the introduction of Philosophy in 1997, the results of our students improved significantly and have been maintained or improved upon since that time.5

The report indicated ‘significantly improved outcomes’ in the social behaviour of the students: The respect for others and the increase in individual self esteem generated in the community of inquiry have permeated all aspects of school life. We now have few behaviour problems at our school (and we do have some difficult students). Students are less impatient with each other, they are more willing to accept their own mistakes as a normal part of learning and they discuss problems as they occur. As one Yr 5 child said, ‘Philosophy is a good example of how you should behave in the playground with your friends’ . . . Bullying behaviour is rare at Buranda, with there being no reported incidence of bullying this year to date. A visiting academic commented, ‘Your children don’t fight, they negotiate’ . . . Visitors to the school are constantly making reference to the ‘feel’ or ‘spirit’ of the place. We believe it’s the way Buranda State School Showcase 2003 Submission Form.

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our children treat each other. The respect for others generated in the community of inquiry has permeated all aspects of school life.6

In 2001–​02, the psychologist Professor Keith Topping studied the effects of introducing one hour per week of philosophy on eleven-​to twelve-​year-​old pupils at a number of upper primary schools in Clackmannanshire. Teachers received two days of training. The study involved a battery of tests and a control group of schools without a philosophy programme. Benefits of the programme included: ●●

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The incidence of children supporting opinion with evidence doubled, but control classes remained unchanged. There was evidence that children’s self-​esteem and confidence rose markedly. There was evidence that class ethos and discipline improved noticeably. All classes improved significantly in verbal, non-​verbal, and quantitative reasoning. No control class changed. Children were more intelligent (av. 6.5 IQ points) after one year in the programme.

When the same children were tested again at age fourteen, after two years at secondary school without a philosophy programme, their CAT scores remained the same while those of the control group scores went down. Three secondary schools were involved and the results replicated themselves over each school.7 Such pilots lend considerable weight to the claim that not only can children of this age think philosophically, but it is also educationally very good for them. There is evidence (from Burunda and elsewhere) that there are benefits to introducing such programmes with even younger children. Objection 3:  But such an approach to moral and religious education is incompatible with raising ones child within a religious tradition, which is surely every parent’s right.

Liberal approach to moral and religious education is compatible with raising a child within a religious school. They key to a Liberal approach is allowing young people to question, think for themselves and make their own judgments. But this is clearly consistent with explaining to young people what Buranda State School Showcase 2003 Submission Form. From private correspondence with Paul Cleghorn. The preceding information in this paragraph comes from: http://​w w.aude-​education.co.uk/​others.htm.

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a particular religion involves, what the school believes its virtues are and so on. Teachers and schools need not be gagged, unable to express or argue for a particular point of view. Many religious schools embrace a Liberal approach to moral and religious education, encouraging children to make their own judgments and exposing them to a range of points of view (even while making the case for their own particular religion). For example, in response to the IPPR’s proposals concerning critical thinking about religion (discussed previously), Chris Curtis, director of the Luton Churches Education Trust, said, ‘Christianity stands head and shoulders above the rest . . . therefore I’m not afraid. I want young people to understand the different varieties of faith and choose the Christian faith by informed choice, rather than because it’s the only thing they came across.’8 But aren’t parents entitled to have their child school-​educated in whatever manner they see fit? Suppose a parent wants their child educated in an Authoritarian way. They want they child to display passive, uncritical acceptance of whatever they are told about morality and religion. They want their child drilled in certain religious or atheistic beliefs, and to be made fearful of raising difficult questions or expressing doubts. Is this not their right? I think most of us recognize that, say, political schools that selected pupils on the basis of parents political beliefs, that started each day with rousing political anthems, that encouraged passive uncritical acceptance of certain key political tenets, that strongly discouraged dissent, would be an unacceptable blight on our cultural landscape. These are the kind of schools we find under totalitarian political regimes. The appearance of Marxist or Thatcherite (and so on) schools in this country would be seen as a threat to a healthy democracy, would be frowned upon and indeed very probably –​I think justifiably –​banned. But then why are the religious equivalents of such schools any more acceptable (particularly given that religions are themselves often very political organizations, promoting political views on, for example, the role of women, charity, state weddings and so on, and engaging in political lobbying)? Consider the Chinese cultural practise of foot-​binding, which was carried out for thousands of years and which typically produced physically crippled http://​w ww.cfnetwork.co.uk/​news/​wk117x.asp.

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children. This is a practice that would, rightly, be prohibited in the UK, irrespective of whether some parents wanted to engage in it or not. Children ought not to have such a crippling practice inflicted on them, whatever the view of their parents. But then can a similar case not be made for preventing parents psychologically crippling their children by mentally straightjacketing their thoughts and shutting down their critical faculties? Perhaps this is an unfair analogy, but there are clearly limits to what parents can impose on their children educationally (the state insists on schooling for literacy, for example), and it is arguable that highly Authoritarian schooling –​be it religious or atheist –​places unacceptable psychologically stunting restrictions on children’s minds. Objection 4: Surely we have a duty to communicate what we know to the next generation, not just concerning physics and chemistry, but about morality and even religion. If we don’t inform young people about right and wrong, and ensure they believe it, we will leave them without a moral compass. Again, this is a dangerous outcome. Who knows where their thoughts might lead them to, morally speaking?

As should be clear by now, a Liberal approach to moral education does not require a hands-​off strategy in which no views are ever defended or arguments ever given. Teachers can still educate children about morality, and also make a case for certain moral and religious points of view. A  Liberal approach merely requires that young people be raised and encouraged to think critically and independently and to take on responsibility for making their own judgments on matters moral and religious rather than attempt to hand responsibility over to some external authority. Let’s examine the analogy drawn between morality and a science such as physics or chemistry. Clearly, in a chemistry class, the teacher cannot reasonably be expected to justify every last claim to the satisfaction of the students. If progress is to be made, much must simply be accepted by the child on the teacher’s or textbook’s say-​so. But if this is true of chemistry, then why not of morality and religion? Why shouldn’t children similarly be expected to accept certain moral and/​or religious views simply on the say-​so of a textbook or teacher? To begin, I  note that if a child asks why they should accept that the Earth is round or why their body contains much carbon, such curiosity

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is healthy and should be fostered, not cut off at the knees. True, too much questioning of this kind would disrupt a class, but a good teacher might, say, direct the child to resources that would answer the question, or offer to explain after the class. Only a poor chemistry teacher would say: ‘It is not your place to question or think independently about such things; just accept what you are told.’ Also note that when what is being taught is a matter of controversy, it would certainly not occur to any good chemistry teacher to give only one side of the story, censoring and restricting access to data and arguments that challenged what he or she decided the children ought to believe. And of course, when it comes to issues moral and religious, a great deal is a matter of controversy. Furthermore, morality is, in at least one vital respect, unlike chemistry. Suppose a chemistry professor tells novice chemistry students to drop a large piece of caesium into a bucket of water and observe the result. There is an explosion and someone is killed. Are the students responsible for what happened? Of course not –​they just followed the orders given them by their professor, whom they trusted to know best. But now suppose some students are told by their religious and moral authority that it is their religious and moral duty to explode a bomb in a crowded supermarket. They do as instructed, and someone dies as a result. Are those students responsible for what happened? Can they justifiably say ‘We’re not to blame –​we trusted our moral and religious teacher to know best.’ Of course not. We each have a responsibility to make our own moral judgments, including judgments about whether we ought to follow the advice of any supposed expert. This responsibility is unavoidable. Convenient though it might be if I could just handover the responsibility for making tough moral decisions to some external authority, the fact is that responsibility has a boomerang-​like quality. I might try to pass it to someone else, but it always comes back. Others can be a source of good moral advice and wisdom, but it always comes back to you, the individual, to make your own judgment, including the judgment whether you should follow whatever advice you have been given. But then, given the unavoidability of this responsibility, surely it’s a good idea both to raise individuals to recognize that they have it and to ensure they possess the intellectual, emotional and other resources they’ll need to discharge it properly.

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Objection 5: What if young people end up believing the wrong thing, morally or religiously speaking? Anarchy and chaos may ensue.

Of course, if you allow people to make their own judgments, you run the risk that they will make the wrong judgement. However, how likely is it that young people raised to think independently and make their own judgments will end up convincing themselves that they ought to, or can justifiably, act in, say, an entirely selfish bullying, way? Schools that run P4C programmes appear to produce young people who are at least as moral as other children. Moreover, even if some children do end up concluding that they’re entitled to behave in such abhorrent manner, that’s not to say we must then allow them to do so. What Liberals encourage is freedom of thought and expression, not freedom of action. Indeed, Liberals can, in principle, be as strict as Authoritarians when it comes to behaviour. A Liberal approach does not entail anarchy, not even if, as seems highly unlikely, some young people end up developing pernicious views. In any event, Liberals are free to challenge and argue against such views. Objection 6: Religion is a necessary or at least important social adhesive, and the effect of a critical, questioning approach is to dissolve the important social bonds that religion forges.

In his book Isaiah Berlin, John Gray says about Count Joseph de Maistre (1753–​1821), one of the Enlightenment’s most trenchant critics, that, when he represents reason and analysis as corrosive and destructive, solvents of custom and allegiance that cannot replace the bonds of sentiment and tradition which they weaken and demolish, he illuminates, better perhaps than any subsequent writer, the absurdity of the Enlightenment faith (for such it undoubtedly was) that human society can have a rational foundation. If to reason is to question, then questioning will have no end, until it has wrought the dissolution of the civilization that gave it birth.9

The thought that religion forges important social bonds is often expressed in defence of religious schools. Even the atheist philosopher Simon Blackburn acknowledges that ‘[O]‌ne of the more depressing findings of social anthropology is that societies professing a religion are more stable, and last longer than John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Fontana, 1995), p. 125.

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those that do not. It is estimated that breakaway groups like communes or new age communities last some four times longer if they profess a common religion than if they do not.’10 Objection 7: Isn’t unfettered independent critical thought likely to threaten such religiously forged bonds?

I have stressed that a Liberal approach to moral and religious education is compatible with religious schooling, and indeed welcomed by some religious schools. They do not see unfettered philosophy in the classroom as a threat to religious faith. If this view of the compatibility of philosophy in the classroom and robust religious belief and culture is correct, then the former is no threat to the bonds forged by the latter. In fact, there may be advantages to the introduction of philosophy within a religious setting. As Blackburn acknowledged, there is evidence to suggest that religion is a particularly effective social adhesive, binding people together into communities in an effective way. But, as Michael Ignatieff reminds us, there is a downside to such religious bonds: ‘[T]‌he more strongly you feel the bonds of belonging to you own group, the more hostile, the more violent will your feelings be towards outsiders.’11 As we glue individuals together more tightly by applying the social adhesive of religion, we may well end up creating far deeper divisions between such social groups. Contrast philosophy in the classroom. As we saw earlier, there is some evidence that P4C programmes generate a more harmonious atmosphere and greater mutual respect and social cohesion within school communities. Perhaps such programmes are not as effective at forging social bonds as are religions, but they appear to have a positive effect, would appear to offer a form of social adhesive that comes without the risk associated with the application of religious social adhesive –​that divisions between religiously bonded social groups are likely to exacerbated. Objection 8: Drawing on tradition is unavoidable. We cannot intellectually figure out what is good without drawing on some tradition or other. And in Britain our moral and cultural tradition is essentially rooted in the

Simon Blackburn, ‘Religion and Respect’ (revised version August 2004), p. 18. Available online at: www.phil.cam.ac.uk/​~swb24/​PAPERS/​religion%20and%20respect.pdf. 11 Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (London: Viking, 1993), p. 188. 10

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Judeo-​Christian tradition. Thus it is with that Judeo-​Christian tradition, rather than autonomous, independent intellectual activity, that contemporary moral teaching should usually start.

That autonomous critical thinking is not where moral education should start –​it is a late stage that should be reached only after proper immersion in a religious faith –​is a view expressed by, for example, the former UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks acknowledges the importance, in a mature citizen, of a critical, reflective stance towards his or her own tradition. But Sacks emphasizes that one must first be fully immersed in that tradition. He also stresses the importance of deference to Authority in the early stages of assimilation. Sacks believes that ‘autonomy –​the capacity to act and choose in the consciousness of alternatives –​is a late stage in moral development . . . It is not where it begins’.12 Sacks believes that before we can properly criticize a practice, we need to set foot within it, ‘finding our way round it from the inside’. But this, Sacks says presupposes distinctive attitudes: authority, obedience, discipline, persistence and self-​control . . . There is a stage at which we put these rules to the test. We assert our independence, we challenge, ask for explanations, occasionally rebel and try other ways of doing things. Eventually we reach an equilibrium . . . For the most part . . . we stay within the world as we have inherited it . . . capable now of self-​critical reflection on its strengths and weaknesses, perhaps working to change it from within, but recognizing that its rules are not a constraint but the very possibility of shared experiences and relationship and communication . . . autonomy takes place within a tradition.13

In defence of this view, Sacks cites philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, who is well-​k nown for his critique of Enlightenment thought and in particular the view that reason is itself dependent upon tradition. MacIntyre argues that it is impossible for individuals to conjure up morality out of thin air, independent of any tradition, because whatever forms of reasoning we employ will themselves be born of and dependent upon some tradition. We cannot reason our way to moral truths without drawing on some tradition or other, Ibid., p. 177. Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), pp. 176–​7.

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for ‘all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought’.14 I cannot ‘step outside’ of all tradition and think from a tradition-​free perspective, for what I am ‘is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition’.15 But isn’t a Liberal, P4C-​based approach to moral and religious education, in which children are encouraged to establish moral and religious truths autonomously and independently of any tradition, hopelessly naïve? Isn’t Sacks right to insist that moral and religious education should begin with more or less uncritical, passive acceptance of a religious tradition, with autonomous critical thinking put on hold until some ‘late stage’? I believe the above objection involves a misunderstanding. MacIntyre may be correct that reason cannot be applied independently of any tradition. It does not follow that certain areas should be deemed off-​limits to autonomous, critical investigation until some late stage. As I have pointed out, a Liberal approach can be applied within a religious school that draws heavily upon traditional religious thinking. A Liberal need not suppose that reason can be applied independent of all tradition. They suppose only that reason, in the form of autonomous critical thinking, should be applied to traditional thinking –​including the tradition upon which reason itself draws. In fact, even MacIntyre agrees that ‘nothing can claim exemption from reflective critique’.16 In applying reason, we may look to and draw upon a tradition. MacIntyre may be correct that we have to. But that’s not yet to establish that we should be encouraged, at any stage, blindly and unquestioningly to accept our tradition’s cultural religious, moral values.17 Given that P4C programmes –​in which children, even quite young children, are encouraged to think critically and autonomously about life’s Big Questions, including Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (2nd edn, London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 222. Ibid, p. 221. 16 John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.), After MacIntyre (Notre Dame, Indiana:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) p. 289. 17 I am not suggesting that MacIntyre thinks otherwise. While MacIntyre is a well-​k nown critic of ‘liberalism’, it’s less clear to me to what extent he would wish to be critical of Liberalism-​w ith-​a-​ capital-​L . See the appendix to this chapter. 14

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moral and religious questions, appear to be successful in fostering ethically sophisticated and mature young adults, Sacks contention that, in the absence of largely passive, uncritical acceptance of traditional views until some late stage, significant moral dangers loom is not only un-​evidenced, but also runs contrary to evidence. Sacks suggests that ‘the very possibility . . . of communication’ is dependent on a prior framework of authority, obedience, discipline and so on. Clearly, learning a language, certainly one’s first language, involves immersing oneself in the linguistic practice, simply accepting that those using the language know what the words mean and they use them appropriately. Without such faith in, and disciplined adherence to, the linguistic rules governing the meaning, language learning and communication break down. But is the same true of moral and religious belief? Must one uncritically place ones faith in various moral and religious beliefs long before one is in a position to engage in communication and critical thought about them? Clearly not. ‘Stealing is wrong’ may indeed express a rule, but it does not express a linguistic rule in the way that ‘triangles have three sides’ does (as G. E. Moore famously pointed out –​see his ‘open question’ argument in §13 of his Principia Ethica18). Yes, you must accept what the latter expresses before you can communicate fully and effectively with others about triangles. But you need not accept what is expressed by ‘stealing is wrong’ in order to engage in a meaningful, critical conversation about the rights and wrongs of stealing. Studies suggest even fairly young children are capable of engaging in quite sophisticated discussions about why stealing is wrong, whether it is always wrong and so on. They are already quite capable of communicating effectively on such themes. But then such discussions need not be put off until some late stage. It is no less obvious that longstanding, uncritical acceptance of religious belief is an unavoidable precursor to independent, critical thought about religious matters. Here I  have anticipated a number objections to a Liberal, and indeed broadly philosophical, approach to raising good citizens, though there are, of course, many more (for further examples see my book The War For Children’s Minds (Routledge, 2007). I conclude by flagging up one reason for favouring a Liberal, philosophical approach to raising good citizens. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (New York: Digireads, 2012).

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The most obvious risk involved in Authoritarian approaches to raising good citizens is that they are more likely to produce moral sheep. Of course there can be advantages to a society within which a powerful moral Authority is at work. If all individuals have a strict moral code drilled into them from a young age, and if the questioning of their moral Authority is not tolerated, then a society in which crime hardly exists may emerge and the streets may be litter free. But let’s hope that this Authority remains benign. If it evolves into or is replaced by a more malignant Authority, individuals raised to defer more or less uncritically to whichever Authority they are presented with will lack the inner resources they will need to stand up and be counted when this Authority takes a sinister turn. Research has been conducted into the backgrounds of those who saved Jews, often at considerable risk to themselves, during the Holocaust. Pearl and Samuel Oliner conducted extensive interviews with and research into the childhood backgrounds of rescuers and drew some striking conclusions. In The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, they report that the most dramatic deference between the parents of rescuers and non-​rescuers lay in the extent to which their parents placed greater emphasis on explaining rather than on punishment and discipline: ‘Parents of rescuers depended significantly less on physical punishment and significantly more on reasoning.’19 ‘It is in their reliance on reasoning, explanations, suggestions of ways to remedy harm done, persuasion, and advice that the parents of rescuers differed from non-​rescuers.’20 Oliner and Oliner add that ‘reasoning communicates a message of respect for and trust in children that allows them to feel a sense of personal efficacy and warmth toward others’. According to Oliner and Oliner, non-​rescuers tended to feel as ‘mere pawns, subject to the power of external authorities’.21 They also found that while religiosity played some role in motivating rescuers, it ‘was only weakly related to rescue’.22 Professor Jonathan Glover, director of the Centre for Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London, has also conducted research into the P. Samuel and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality  –​Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 179. 20 Ibid., p. 181. 21 Ibid., p. 177. 22 Ibid., p. 156. 19

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backgrounds of both those most eager to join in killing in places like Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Bosnia, and those who tried to save lives. In an interview in the Guardian, Glover says: If you look at the people who shelter Jews under the Nazis, you find a number of things about them. One is that they tended to have a different kind of upbringing from the average person, they tended to be brought up in a non-​authoritarian way, bought up to have sympathy with other people and to discuss things rather than just do what they were told.23

Glover adds, ‘I think that teaching people to think rationally and critically actually can make a difference to people’s susceptibility to false ideologies’. Such research provides some support for the view, defended here, that if we want to give new citizens some immunity to the moral horrors and catastrophes that blighted the twentieth century, our best bet is to adopt a Enlightened, Liberal approach, indeed a broadly philosophical approach, to moral and religious education. We should aim to raise individuals who will both recognize their own individual responsibility for making moral judgments and possess the kind of skills and maturity they will need to discharge that responsibility properly. The dangers of raising moral sheep are only too obvious.

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Jonathan Glover, ‘Into the Garden of Good and Evil’, The Guardian, 13 October 1999.

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Stewardship as Welcome and Respect for the Dignity of the Vulnerable An Essay in Bioethics Agneta Sutton

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of personhood and two related concepts of human dignity. One concept of personhood relates to functional characteristics of our species that distinguish us from animals. The other concept is applicable to the individual human being. With reference to the Gospels, this chapter outlines an understanding of stewardship in terms of what it means to be a servant of God and neighbour. It argues for an unconditional welcome of the most vulnerable members of the human community. In Book 2, Chapter  27, in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, of 1694, John Locke famously defined a person in terms of certain intellectual characteristics. He wrote: We must consider what a person stands for: which I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.1

Locke’s is a secular philosophical concept of personhood. It defines personhood in terms of functional characteristics. And it is noteworthy that he John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. R. Woodhouse (London:  Penguin Books, 2004), p. 302.

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is speaking of an intelligent being, not of a human being. So his is a non-​ biological definition of personhood. It is not applicable to any particular natural kind, such as the human species.2 This is a purely functional definition. Peter Singer, today probably the most well-​k nown spokesperson for a Lockean and functional understanding of personhood, does not ascribe personal status to human babies. But he does ascribe it to healthy adult chimpanzees and other apes, as well as to competent adult humans. He does not ascribe it to babies, because ‘they are not born self-​aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time’.3 Therefore, according to Singer, they do not have the same moral status as a rational and self-​aware adult. Indeed, in Singer’s view, ‘life without consciousness is of no worth at all’.4 This shows that on Singer’s understanding the term ‘person’ is not a merely descriptive term. Indeed, no concept of personhood is merely descriptive. Persons are typically thought to have a different moral status than non-​persons. They are typically thought to have a special dignity. The term ‘human dignity’ is typically associated with the moral standing of somebody regarded as a person. Typically, persons are also thought to have special rights. Since on Singer’s account, as on Locke’s account, babies, unlike competent adult humans, are not persons, it follows on their accounts that babies lack the dignity applicable to persons. I begin this chapter by spelling out a very different account of personhood than the Lockean and functional one proposed by Singer. This is one which ascribes individual personhood, and therefore human dignity, on the basis of our relationship with God and neighbour. This latter understanding of personhood recognizes a neighbour and the likeness of God, and therefore also human dignity, in every single human being. Furthermore, this is a holistic account in terms of which earthly human life is understood as one of body and soul united from beginning to end. In the second part of this chapter I discuss the Christian concept of neighbourliness towards the most vulnerable in our society, such as the very young, the unborn, the very old, the disabled and the poorest or most socially alienated. I conclude the David Wiggins suggests that the term person ‘collects natural kinds under a functional or systemic specification’ for, as he says, ‘a human being is our only stereotype for person’. See Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 174. 3 Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 210. 4 Ibid., p. 190. 2

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chapter by contrasting the Christian concept of human dignity with a secular and popular understanding of dignity in terms of independence and mental capacities. This is a concept associated both with the human species when distinguished from animal species and with the archetypal, competent and socially accepted adult.

The body and soul of the human person ‘Life without consciousness is of no worth at all’, Singer says.5 This is because, on his account, moral status and value, and thus human dignity, or the dignity that goes with personhood, depends on ‘consciousness, the capacity for physical, social and mental interaction with other beings, having conscious preferences for continued life, and having enjoyable experiences’.6 These are what Singer regards as the prime ‘ethically relevant characteristics’, which ‘make a difference to the regard and respect we should have for a being’.7 That said, it may be noted that Singer does allow that there other ‘relevant aspects’ such as ‘relationship of the being to others, having relatives who will grieve over your death, being so situated in a group that if you are killed, others will fear for their own lives’, which make a difference to how we should treat a being.8 These considerations do not, however, relate to the being itself, but to the respect due to the relatives or the others with whom ‘the being’ stands in some sort of relationship. Since babies are not the only humans who lack those intellectual characteristics that Singer deems to be the sine qua non required for personhood, it follows on Singer’s account that babies are not the only humans whose moral status is inferior to that of a competent adult human being. For example, old people affected by very severe dementia or people with severe brain injuries do not, on Singer’s account, have the moral status of a mature and healthy human individual. Indeed, since it is possible to possess the aforementioned intellectual characteristics to a higher or lesser extent, it follows on Singer’s understanding, that ‘the worth of human life varies’,9 and so that some 7 8 9 5 6

Ibid. Ibid., p.191. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 190.

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humans have a lower moral status than others. In other words, human dignity will seem to be relative, a question of more or less. Hence, on a Lockean and functional understanding such as Singer’s, according to which human life is valued or judged on the basis of mental abilities –​and therefore also on the basis of personal achievements –​some lives will seem less worthy of welcome and protection than others. Indeed, some lives may be regarded as dispensable altogether. By contrast, in a Christian understanding, not only is all life a gift from God, human life is special and the dignity of human life is derived from our special relationship with God, as spelled out in the Scriptures. Indeed, in the first book of Genesis we are told that the first humans were created in the image of God. Moreover, in the fifth book of Genesis the son of Adam is said to be created in his father’s image, which tells us that the son of Adam is also created in the image of God. This account points to a relational understanding of personhood, to one according to which we are all created in the image of God simply by virtue of being of human origin. Also, from the first, the understanding that we humans are created in the image of God is linked to the concept of stewardship. Verse 27 of the first book of Genesis, which tells us about the creation of humans, man and woman, in the image of God, is immediately followed by the passage that tells us about the divine blessing of the first humans and the command that they should be fruitful and ‘fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over everything that moves on the earth’.10 Thus from the very first the Biblical account of our role in creation declares that we humans have a special position. We stand in a special relationship to God and also to the rest of creation. Indirectly, as the story of Noah tells us, through us, all living creatures are placed in a covenant relationship with the Creator, a covenant relationship entailing special responsibilities on the part of humans as caretakers.11 Thus, with reference to St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians,12 John Paul II observed in his Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1 January 1990,13 that through Christ, who is calling for human discipleship, the Father reconciled Gen. 1.28 (English standard Version). Gen. 9.7–​8, 12. Col. 1.19–​20. 13 John Paul II, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1 January 1990, para. 4. 10 11

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to himself all things whether in earth or in heaven. Indeed, the Letter to the Ephesian likewise tells us that through the healing life and work and death of Christ, the Father has made ‘known to us the mystery of his will . . . as a plan for the fullness of time, to unify all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’.14 Our stewardship derives from our being created in the image of God and for a special relationship with our triune God. It is also noteworthy, as John Paul II pointed out in his theology of the body lectures, published under the title The Theology of the Body:  Human Love in the Divine Plan, our very creation as man and woman is symbolical of our relational nature. The second Genesis story which speaks of the creation of Adam depicts him not only as superior to animals inasmuch as he is given the task of naming them, but it also tells us of his need of another with whom he can communicate on a personal level. Seeing the creation of Eve as a helpmate for Adam as sign of our relational nature in the image of our relational triune God, John Paul II said in his lecture on 14 November 1979: Man became the ‘image and likeness’ of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman right form right from the beginning. The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right ‘from the beginning’, he is not only an image in which the solitude of a person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons.15

The understanding of the human individual as a relational being in the image of our triune God bestow a special dignity of every human being. In addition, according to a Christian understanding, human value and dignity also derive from the Incarnation. Taking human form and uniting Himself with us humans as one of us, God bestowed, as we Christians recognize, a special dignity on the human creature. As the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith puts it in Dignitas Personae of 2008: ‘by becoming one of us, the Son makes it possible for us to become “sons of God” (Jn 1.12), “sharers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1.4)’.16 In virtue of the Incarnation, then, each and every Eph. 1.9–​10 Ibid., p. 46. 16 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae, 2008, para. 7. 14

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one of us, as a child of God, possesses a special dignity. ‘Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this’, as John Paul II wrote in his Encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae of 1995.17 It is, however, noteworthy that over the centuries, Christian theologians have expressed different understandings of what it means to be a person. And they have had different understandings of when personal life begins. Traditionally the question of personhood has been linked to some theory of animation, that is, some theory about the time at which the human body receives a personal soul. And there have been different theories about the timing of animation, the moment when human life comes into possession of an individual personal spiritual and rational soul. Thus we may distinguish between two main types of animation theory among Christian thinkers: the traducianist theory and the creationist theory.18 On the traducianist theory, animation is immediate and the soul is transmitted with the male seed. On the creationist theory, the soul is created independently of the body and therefore not necessarily at the time of fertilization. The very early Church tended to favour the first view, as testified by a number of early Church Councils. But in the Middle Ages it was often thought that animation –​the time of the infusion of the human and personal soul –​coincided with the completion of foetal formation. On that understanding, the foetus was not considered to be a person until it was fully formed. Therefore, the destruction of the early embryo was not regarded as homicide. This is the type of theory espoused by Thomas Aquinas. It should, however, be noted that St Thomas did hold that the human organism has a soul from the very beginning. Like Aristotle, what he understood by ‘soul’ was the form or life principle of a live organism. And like Aristotle, he held that the human soul passes through three different stages: the vegetative stage, the sentient stage and finally, the rational stage.19 On this understanding, the soul of the nascent human organism, and therewith the organism in total, is gradually acquiring more and more capacities and/​or potentialities. So the rational soul possesses all the powers and potentialities of the two lower souls, plus the potentiality of reasoning, hand John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 1995, para 9. See Agneta Sutton, Prenatal Diagnosis: Confronting the Ethical Issues (London: Linacre Centre, 1990), pp. 86–​94. See also David Albert Jones, The Soul of the Embryo (London, New  York; Continuum, 2004), pp. 102–​40. 19 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 74–​8; Summa contra Gentiles, Book II, q. 56. 17 18

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in hand with which goes the potentiality of freedom of the will. St Thomas thought that it is only when the foetal body is fully formed that it can accommodate a rational soul, a soul inherent in which is the potential to acquire the intellectual ability of rationality. To turn to more recent thinking on the soul, Donum Vitae published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1987, said that no experimental datum can be in itself sufficient to bring us to the recognition of a spiritual soul; nevertheless, the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo provide a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of this first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?20

Saying this, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would seem to be thinking on Thomist-​like lines and proposing that, from the start, the human personal soul is the life principle of the human individual organism –​or what make the organism a live human person. The human personal soul is there from the time human life begins until the time it ends. This, then, is a holistic and non-​dualist account. And a holistic and non-​ dualist understanding is, as noted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gaining some support from science. Moreover, as I argue later, it is supported by the Christian belief and understanding of the Incarnation. From a biological point of view, it is certain that each one of us started human life at conception. For the product of human conception, the conceptus, is obviously human. It is also alive, with its own genetic make-​up formed by the coupling of male and female gametes. Its genetic make-​up is a programme for a continuous goal-​directed development oriented towards the formation of a foetus, a baby, a child and eventually an adult. If not marred by illness or succumbing to an inhospitable environment or deliberately killed, the human being will pursue its development until senescence takes its toll. Not even the oft-​cited argument about monozygotic twinning (splitting of an early embryo into two embryos) can refute this, since monozygotic twinning is genetic. There is a difference between embryos destined to twin and embryos not so destined. Hence, we might think of those destined to twin as two different but ‘intertwined’ conjoined 20

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae, 1987, Part I, 1.

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twins destined to split up even if their individuality is not yet visible. Saying this is not to reduce the soul to the genetic programme. That would be a form of materialism. It is merely to draw attention the observation that, from start to end, organic life is a continuous unidirectional process, the direction of which comes from within the organism itself. More important, on a Christian understanding, it makes sense to say that the early embryo is a person with potential, rather than a potential person. As recognized by John the Baptist when he leaped in the womb of his mother, as she greeted the pregnant Mary,21 Jesus himself started his personal mission in the womb. That Jesus began his personal mission and human life-​journey in the womb as a human embryo gives a special moral status to the human embryo. That Christ joined himself to humanity as one of us at an embryonic stage, points to the personal status of the human embryo. The understanding that human personal life begins in the maternal womb is also expressed in Jeremiah 1.5 where we read: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.’ It is likewise expressed in Psalm 138.13–​14, which says: ‘For you formed my inward parts you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’ According to Lockean philosophers, by contrast, neither the human embryo, nor the human baby or the very old and frail whose mental capacities are failing, are to be counted as persons. It should also be noted that the Lockean view represents a secular failure to recognize the sacramentality of the human body and our creation and redemption as bodily-​cum-​spiritual creatures. It represents a form of secular materialism, which reduces the body to mere physical matter. That humans are created in the image of God as corporeal beings and have been redeemed by Christ for resurrection in the body confers, however, a special dignity not only on the human person as a spiritual being, but also on the human body itself. As observed by John Paul II in his theology of the body lecture on 11 February 1981, ‘Christ has imprinted new dignity on the human body –​on the body of every man and every woman, since in Himself the human body has been admitted, together with the soul, to union with the Person of the Son-​Word.’22 And, as John Paul II notes, when in his Letter to the Romans, 21

Lk. 1.41. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, p. 254.

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St Paul refers to ‘the redemption of the body’,23 he means that the redeeming love of Christ witnessed in the Incarnation is directed at the whole man, ‘man constituted in the personal unity of body and spirit’.24 Thus interpreting the Letter to the Romans, which speaks of the redemption of the body and of the ‘bondage to decay’ that befell the whole of creation with the Fall of man, and from which the whole of creation is craving to be set free,25 John Paul II explains that what St Paul is telling us is that the human person, fallen and redeemed, ‘conceals within him not only “the bondage of decay”, but also hope’.26 John Paul II also refers to 1 Corinthians 15.45–​7 where it is written: ‘ “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-​giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.’ On John Paul II’s interpretation, St Paul’s ‘man of heaven’ is corporeal man in his completion and perfection, whose ‘prototype is the risen Christ’. On this interpretation of the Pauline anthropology, ‘every man bears in himself the image of Adam and every man is also called to bear in himself the image of Christ, the image of the risen One’.27 That is, every person is created in the image of the triune God and called to live with a view to his/​ her ultimate resurrection and union with God and the Saints in Heaven. We cannot separate our soul or intellectual capacities from our bodies. We are psychosomatic unities in this life and shall be so in the next. On this understanding of our very bodies as the physical aspect of our relational natures and part of our personal and relational being redeemed and imaging the divine, the body of a human being cannot lose its dignity and inherent value even when the human mind fails. However frail the body is, and whether or not the mind is that of a fully rational and self-​conscious adult, the human body deserves respect and protection, as that of a person, as long as there is life. For where there is a live human body, there is a spiritual soul. The dualism embraced by philosophers, such as Peter Singer who espouses a functional understanding of personhood, lends itself, however, to a very Rom. 8.23. Ibid. 25 Rom. 8.19–​22. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 23

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different understanding of the value of the body and person, when the mind of a person is failing. To give an example, on 18 September 2008, Mary Warnock gave an interview to the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work. In it she declared that people diagnosed with the first stages of Alzheimer’s should consider asking for help to die in order to avoid becoming a burden on their families and public services. What her view implies is that those in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, and whose minds are failing, are mere shells of their former selves, mere bodies, no more  –​and as such no longer bearers of human dignity. Such a view, according to which the body is mere materiality, lends itself to promotion of the culture of death denounced by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae. It results in a lack of solidarity with our fellow humans, especially those among us who are the most vulnerable and dependent.

Neighbourliness as stewardship and care for the vulnerable When we recognize the intrinsic dignity of another merely in virtue of his or her humanity, we recognize that this other is somebody like ourselves, that is, a neighbour. This calls for neighbourly behaviour. It calls for the behaviour exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan who helped the victim of the robbers.28 Neither the passing priest nor the Levite helped the injured man. Only the Samaritan did. Yet he was not counted as a friend by the Jews. Neither Priest nor Levite would make himself unclean by touching a bleeding man. But the Samaritan recognized a human person like himself in the victim of robbery and took pity on him and treated him accordingly. Did Jesus not say ‘as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’?29 And did he not also say ‘as you did not do it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did not do it to me’?30 To recognize the suffering or vulnerable other and act in a neighbourly way towards him is to identify with him and with his plight –​just as the Son of God identified himself with us when he became man. This is true neighbourliness. By contrast, from a Lockean and functionalist account of personhood which is elitist, it follows Lk. 10.25–​37. Mt. 25.40. 30 Mt. 25.45. 28 29

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that we do not, and cannot, identify ourselves with some members of the human family. Some humans are seen as having an inferior moral status. In some cases their lives are not even seen as worth living. On a Lockean and functionalist account it follows that some humans do not deserve our neighbourliness and care. The practice of prenatal diagnosis with a view to selective abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality is premised on the understanding that some humans have an inferior moral status and that their lives are not worth living. It is premised on the eugenic understanding that people with certain disabilities or illnesses ought not to be born. That said, many prospective parents opting for selective abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality would rather say that they want to spare their child a life of suffering. They may already have a child seriously affected by, for example, cystic fibrosis. In this situation it might admittedly be wrong to assume that they think of their unborn child as a child of lesser moral standing or as someone not worthy of life, even if they would say that their unborn child’s life would not be worth living. It is to be noted, however, that the very practice of prenatal diagnosis with a view to selective abortion is based and offered on the understanding that it is better that people with disabilities are not born. And this is not only or primarily for their own sake. Rather, their elimination is seen as justifiable on the understanding that some children would constitute a heavy burden on their parents and society. Their value is measured in terms of their social utility or lack of it. Therefore they are not deemed worthy of our respect and protection. Neither their human dignity nor their personhood is recognized and respected. The attitude displayed by this kind of reasoning is a far cry from that depicted in the story of Jesus’s welcome of the little children: ‘Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.’31 His was a welcome afforded each one of the little children. Not only do the words of Jesus suggest that children deserve a special welcome, but they suggest that the child deserves a special welcome because it is an innocent and dependent member of the human family. It needs protection, help and care. Like the man attacked by the robbers and helped by the Samaritan, the child is calling out for neighbourly love.

Mt. 19.3, see also Mk. 10.13.

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The practice of euthanasia, legal in some European countries, is premised on the same understanding as that of prenatal diagnosis. Some lives are neither considered worth living, nor deemed worthy of life. In some cases life may not be seen as worth living because of pain and suffering. This is why some people speak of mercy killing. Those who speak of mercy killing might not be associating life with pain and suffering with loss of dignity. Loss of independence and of intellectual faculties and dependence is, however, often associated with loss of dignity. Indeed, when a person’s life is said not to be worth living, because it constitutes a burden on other people, the statement is associated with an understanding of loss of independence and intellectual faculties, and so also with a loss of dignity understood in terms of functional criteria. While philosophical arguments in favour of euthanasia are often based primarily on the view that competent individuals have a right to autonomous choice, below the surface of this argument hides another thought. Those who, like Dame Mary Warnock, argue that people diagnosed with the first stages of Alzheimer’s ought to make an advance request for help to die are not thinking solely in terms of rights to autonomy. They are intimating that some lives constitute an undue burden on relatives and on social resources and that life with Alzheimer’s is an undignified existence. Not surprisingly, those who call for legalized euthanasia speak of death with dignity and say they want help to die before they lose their dignity. A very different view is presented by Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelium Gaudium, where he tells us, that ‘we are called to care for the vulnerable of the earth’,32 noting that among them are not only unborn children,33 but also ‘the homeless, the addicted, refugees, indigenous peoples’ as well as ‘the elderly who are increasingly isolated and abandoned’, migrants,34 victims of human trafficking35 and women who endure mistreatment.36 As Pope Francis, quoting John Paul II, says, ‘every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance in God and is an offence against the creator of the individual’.37 34 35 36 37 32 33

Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelium Gaudium, 2013, para. 209. Ibid., para. 213. Ibid., para. 210. Ibid., para. 211. Ibid., para. 212. Ibid., para. 213. The citation is from John Paul II, Post-​ Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles Laici, 1987, para. 37.

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With special reference to the poor, Pope Francis says:  ‘Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets clear limits in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality.’38 His is a call to be inclusive in our recognition and welcome of our neighbour. Unlike the elitist concept of human dignity inherent in the arguments presented by philosophers such as Singer and Warnock, the Christian concept of human dignity is inclusive. Not only may the dignity of the born and unborn be violated, but so too might that of those who are not yet conceived. Thus Donum Vitae, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1987, expresses concern about modern reproductive technologies bypassing spousal intercourse. This is for two reasons, one more convincing than the other. First, like Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, it proclaims that there is an ‘inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning’.39 The authority of this statement may be questioned on the ground that so many among the Catholic faithful follow their conscience and avail of contraception to limit their family. But the document also expresses concerns about the embryo wastage or deliberate embryo destruction usually accompanying in vitro fertilisation and about gametal donation. These are concerns about a failure to respect nascent human life and the child-​to-​be. To be sure, the Church’s concern that the embryo or child-​ to-​be created in vitro is increasingly treated as a manufactured object subject to quality control comes to the fore both in Donum Vitae and also in the 2008 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith document, Dignitas Persona, where it speaks of ‘qualitative selection’ and ‘a eugenic mentality’.40 Indeed, it may be noted that gametal donation, in particular, involves commodification of the child  –​even if there is no commercial transaction involved. For inasmuch as gametes are treated as exchangeable commodities, the child-​to-​be is also so treated –​at least indirectly. That donors often are chosen on the bases of certain characteristics reinforces the commodification of the child. It means that it is chosen in much the same way as you choose the make of your car. This is hardly in keeping with treating the child as our Ibid., para. 53. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae, Part II, B, 4, a. 40 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Persona, para. 22. 38 39

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equal in human dignity. Nor is it in keeping with giving it an unconditional welcome. ‘Thou shalt not’ also applies to technologies that ‘commodify’ the child. As Donum Vitae puts it, on a Christian understanding of human dignity, ‘no one may subject the coming of a child into the world to conditions of technical efficiency which are to be evaluated according to control and domination’.41

Two –​or even three –​different concepts of human dignity Derived from an understanding of life as gift from God, and of us humans as created in the image of God and for a special relationship with Him, as wells as from our hope for resurrection, human dignity is something that belongs to each one of us as human. Not so, if human life is valued in terms of intellectual abilities and achievements. As shown, when human dignity is so measured, some of us will be said to possess little or no human dignity. We are talking about two different concepts of human dignity. That said, as Christians we may acknowledge that humanity as a species possesses a special dignity over and above animals. For our species is, indeed, gifted with intellectual abilities not found in other earthly species. As Gilbert Meilaender would say, on one understanding ‘human dignity has to do with the powers and the limits characteristic of our species’ –​whereas on another ‘it is closely tied with our affirmation of human equality’.42 That said, it is noteworthy that our likeness to God as a species is linked to some of those human capacities or features that secular philosophers, such as Singer and Warnock, single out as criteria of personal human dignity. Indeed, we might say that our likeness to God as a species is linked to abilities that are typified by flourishing human adults. The understanding of certain intellectual characteristics as typical of humans, as distinct from animals, also has something in common with the philosopher David Wiggins’s understanding of our species. He suggests that the term person ‘collects natural kinds under a functional or systemic specification’. And, as he says, ‘a human being is our only stereotype Ibid. Gilbert Meilaender, Neither Beast nor God:  The Dignity of the Human Person (New York and London: New Atlantis Books, 2009), p. 8.

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for person’.43  Wiggins’s definition of personhood is partly functional, like those of Locke and Singer. He says that ‘a person is any animal the physical make-​up of whose species constitutes the species’ typical members thinking intelligent beings, with reason and reflection, and typically enables them to consider themselves as themselves, the same thinking things, in different times and places.44 What distinguishes Wiggins’s definition from that of a Singer or Locke is that, on his inclusive definition, every human being is a person by virtue of being a member of the human species, a species whose archetypal members are in possession of rationality and self-​consciousness. Now, those who speak of loss of human dignity when people have lost their mental faculties use the concept of human dignity as it may arguably be used to distinguish the human species from other species. Human dignity in terms of intellectual or mental abilities may be properly used when talking about our species. But this concept of human dignity could not be more different from that used when, as Christians, we say that each one of us possesses human dignity and that none of us can lose our human dignity. Actually, there is a third sense in which we may use the term dignity. This sense is linked to the recognition that we can diminish our own likeness to God by inhuman and ungodly behaviour. We can behave in ways that are undignified, dishonourable, ignoble or barbarian. Nonetheless, on a Christian understanding, we cannot lose that intrinsic human dignity that is ours by the grace of God, our Trinitarian God. We cannot lose that intrinsic human dignity that is ours because we are called to a special relationship with God –​and neighbour –​from which it follows that insofar as we are gifted with certain intellectual characteristics, we are morally responsible before God and fellow humans for our actions. As recognized in the Scriptures, among all God’s creatures only a human being is capable of knowingly and wilfully turning towards or away from God, of knowingly and wilfully seeking to do His will. This should make most of us stand before God with fear and trembling, even if we recognize our triune God as a God of love and mercy. But, of course, it is not necessary to believe in the Christian triune God in order to have a concept of moral responsibility, that is, a concept of moral responsibility before fellow humans. The concept of moral responsibility and 43

David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, p. 174. Ibid.

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related feelings of shame and guilt as a result of actions harmful or hurtful to others is part of our human social nature and our recognition of interpersonal relationships. Like possession of special intellectual characteristics, possession of a concept of moral responsibility is a feature of archetypal members of the human species. That said, even if violence and lack of love of God and neighbour diminish our likeness to God, on the understanding of human personhood and personal dignity presented here, every human life, from beginning to end, shares the same intrinsic moral and personal status and dignity. This is because the human individual possesses dignity by virtue of being created in the imago Dei and his relationship with God, who through the Incarnation, who in Jesus, united Himself with mankind and called us to follow the gospel call for love of God and neighbour. And on this understanding it follows that every human being is a neighbour worthy of our welcome, respect and protection –​ unless by acting as an aggressor repelling our welcome he makes that welcome, respect and protection impossible.

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Dialogue in a Pluralist Context Theological Ethics and the New Interest in Happiness Nicholas Austin SJ

There is today a new interest in happiness. In January 2006, Time Magazine devoted an issue to ‘The New Science of Happiness’, and 2013 saw the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, encompassing various fields of study and application.1 The ambitiously titled World Happiness Report now appears annually.2 This new interest has been propelled by the sense, confirmed in multiple social scientific studies, that the increase in prosperity in Western societies has not been matched by a corresponding increase in happiness; indeed, alcoholism, depression and crime are all significantly greater than in the 1950s.3 Politicians and governments in many countries are now therefore interested in measuring happiness to help steer public policy. As Prime Minister David Cameron put it, ‘It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB –​general well-​being.’4 Consequently, the National Office for Statistics now measures subjective well-​ being: apparently the ‘life-​satisfaction’ of people living in the UK in 2013 was, on a scale of 1–​10, about 7.5: an increase of 0.1 on the previous year.5 Susan David, Ilona Boniwell and Amanda Conley Ayers (eds), Oxford Handbook of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2 World Happiness Report (The Earth Institute, Colombia University, 2014) http://​eprints.lse.ac.uk/​ 47487/​(accessed 30 January 2014). 3 Richard Layard, Happiness:  Lessons from a New Science, 2nd edn (London:  Penguin, 2011), chap. 3, ‘Are We Getting Happier?’ 4 ‘Make people happier, says Cameron,’ BBC News, Monday, 22 May 2006, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​ hi/​u k_​politics/​5003314.stm (accessed 26 May 2015). I owe this reference to Rebecca Manning. 5 Office for National Statistics, Personal Well-​Being in the UK, 2012/​13, 30 July 2013, http://​w ww. ons.gov.uk/​ons/​rel/​wellbeing/​measuring-​national-​well-​being/​personal-​well-​being-​i n-​t he-​u k-​-​ 2012–​13/​sb-​-​-​personal-​well-​being-​in-​t he-​u k-​-​2012–​13.html (accessed 1 February 2014). 1

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This phenomenon coincides with a renewed attention to happiness in theological ethics. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and indeed much of Western ethics, derived from the ancient philosophers a ‘eudaimonistic’, that is, happiness-​oriented approach to reflection on how to live.6 Within the Catholic tradition, however, the focus on happiness declined from the early modern period onwards: whereas Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Morals in the Summa Theologiae begins with an extensive treatise on beatitude, the legalistic ‘moral manualist’ textbooks begin with human acts, conscience, law and sin; the treatise on happiness is conspicuous by its absence.7 In response to the Second Vatican Council’s call to reform moral theology, some have argued for a return to the eudaimonistic approach.8 Other Christian ethicists are more hesitant, on the grounds that ‘when Christianity is recommended as a religion of happiness it seems to lose any critical bite. It becomes a religion promising satisfaction for the well-​off such that the radical demands of the gospel are conveniently overlooked’.9 This confluence of cultural and theological discussion offers a valuable opportunity for dialogue. What can theological ethics contribute to, and learn from, the conversation about happiness? I shall look in turn at four representatives of the new interest in happiness, in roughly ascending order of value for consideration by theological ethics: the ‘how to be happy’ handbooks of popular psychology and self-​help; the happiness economics of Richard Layard; Martin Seligman and positive psychology; and finally, the insightful and challenging eudaimonistic virtue ethics of the philosopher Julia Annas. In the context of the concern for dialogue On Augustine’s ethics as eudaimonistic, see Bonnie Kent, ‘Augustine’s Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 205–​33. As regards Aquinas, Fergus Kerr states, ‘The best way of describing the moral considerations in the Summa Theologiae is not as virtue ethics, let alone divine command ethics, but as an ethics of divine beatitude.’ After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 133. 7 For a study and critique of moral manualism, see James F. Keenan, A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century:  From Confessing Sins to Liberating Consciences (London/​ New York: Continuum, 2008), chap. 2, ‘The Moral Manualists’. 8 Paul J. Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life:  An Introduction to Christian Ethics (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012); William C. Mattison, Introducing Moral Theology:  True Happiness and the Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI:  Brazos Press, 2008); Servais Pinckaers, The Pursuit of Happiness  –​God’s Way:  Living the Beatitudes (Staten Island, NY:  St Paul’s/​A lba House, 1997). 9 Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Robert Pinches, Christians among the Virtues:  Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 3. 6

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characteristic of the Jesuit tradition and many others, I shall end with some brief reflections on the methodological question: does this engagement with contemporary culture suggest anything about the best way to approach ethical dialogue in a pluralist context?

The ‘how to be happy’ handbooks Julia Annas observes that, due in part to the failure of twentieth-​century moral philosophy to consider seriously the nature of happiness and our final end in life, discussion on this issue has largely ‘migrated’ to popular psychology and self-​help manuals.10 These handbooks of happiness claim to offer practical guidance based on results of new social scientific research.11 Notwithstanding the purported scientific expertise claimed by their authors, the ethicist will want to ask some questions of this genre. One question concerns critical reflection on the nature of happiness and the alleged role it should play as an overarching goal in life. Often, popular psychology books claim to eschew any prescription about what we should be pursuing in life or what true success is like: that is left to individual choice and preference. This procedure is understandable in a pluralist culture that is sensitive to encroachment upon personal autonomy; it is also characteristic of the supposedly value-​free nature of psychology. As a result, however, is there not a failure to evaluate, and the danger of unselfconsciously endorsing, the life-​goals characteristic of an individualist, consumerist culture, in which money, status and personal satisfaction play an inordinate role? A second question concerns the nature of the practical guidance that is offered. At one extreme, we find in newspapers, magazines and blogs, articles that offer ‘10 daily habits that will make you happier’ or ‘Top 10 happiness quick fixes’. Advice ranges from common-​sense wisdom, such as ‘give thanks for three things that went well today’, to the banal, as ‘make your bed each morning’.12 The popularity of these lists needs little explanation:  it is difficult to guide one’s life in the right direction, and these recipes for happiness

Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 10. See, for example, Leo Bormans, The World Book of Happiness (London: Marshall Cavendish, 2011). 12 See, for example, the popular blog http://​w ww.lifehack.org. 10 11

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promise everything at little cost. However, that so many seem willing to swallow the ‘10 easy steps’ prescription, dispensed as it is in curiously moralistic tone by the happiness experts, may be a sign that, culturally, we are distanced from wisdom traditions and communities of depth. In quasi-​Aristotelian terms, the practical wisdom (phronēsis) about how to live well and happily differs significantly from the technical knowledge (technē) required, say, to bake a cake; to develop the former involves more than the ability to follow a list of instructions.13 Admittedly, the better books in the self-​help genre recognize the need for reflection on personal experience and what to aim for in life.14 However, the ethicist is likely to be sceptical that the how-​to-​be-​happy imperatives do justice to the complexity and depth of the rare human quality of practical wisdom. An even more fundamental question concerns the extent to which the happiness handbooks genre manifests what may be the besetting cultural confusion about happiness: the mistaken equation of happiness as a feeling or mood, with happiness conceived of as the goal of human life. The idea that we should value positive relationships, worthwhile work, social responsibility and religious practice, for example, because of the increase in subjective happiness that results, seems to get the axiological cart before the horse. The burgeoning ‘how to be happy’ genre raises more questions than it answers. However, its existence manifests a cultural search for wisdom about how to be happy, and that is, at least, a spur to theological ethics to enter the conversation.

Richard Layard and happiness economics In Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, the influential ‘happiness economist’ Richard Layard argues that science can now tell us with reasonable confidence what we should do in order to be happy, and that this knowledge should be applied to political and economic policy. But how to define happiness? The claim that, in today’s culture, technē is privileged at the expense of phronēsis is a common one. See, for example, Liz Bondi et al., Towards Professional Wisdom: Practical Deliberation in the People Professions (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). 14 See, for example, Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun (Ne w York: HarperCollins, 2009). 13

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Layard adopts a simple formula. ‘Happiness,’ he says, ‘is feeling good, and misery is feeling bad.’15 Our happiness or unhappiness, then, can and does fluctuate on any given day: one may be happy at breakfast and depressed by the time one gets to the underground. But this feeling of happiness can nevertheless be measured objectively. For example, one can ask people in a random sample, ‘Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, or not very happy?’16 Brain science confirms the objective nature of happiness, because brain activity and mood are directly connected.17 The sources of happiness can therefore be investigated empirically. Layard claims that the new science of happiness reveals that there are seven important factors: our family relationships, our community and friends, our work, financial situation, health, personal freedom and, interestingly, our personal values.18 How should one evaluate Layard’s contribution to thinking about happiness? Layard’s advocacy of values other than that of increasing personal income or promoting economic growth is encouraging. Wealth and welfare are not the same thing. This insight argues for businesses that are not just for profit, but are also dedicated to wider values; schools that not only prepare for the job market, but also offer formation in character; and so on. The emphasis on family relationships, friendship, meaningful work, the kind of strong philosophy of life that religion can bring, all of this is a step forward from the barren advocacy of economic well-​being. As Pope Benedict XVI argues in Caritas in Veritate (2009), economic progress of itself is insufficient:  we should be aiming at integral human development, that of the whole person.19 However, Layard shares with our culture the confusion between happiness as a feeling and happiness as the goal of human life. In addition to measuring happiness on a one-​dimensional scale of positive feeling, Layard makes the strong claim that such happiness is at the root of our motivation. ‘We want to be happy, and we act to promote our present and future happiness, given the opportunities open to us.’20 In other words, his moral psychology is hedonistic: ‘it is impossible to explain human action and human survival except by the desire to achieve

Layard, Happiness, p. 18. Ibid., p. 27. 17 Ibid., p. 32. 18 Ibid., p. 89. 19 Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), § 23. 20 Ibid., p. 40. 15 16

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good feelings’.21 The problems with both ethical and psychological hedonism are well known, despite the stubbornness with which they persist as widely held assumptions, especially in the social sciences.22 One compelling argument for rejecting hedonism of both kinds was offered by Robert Nozick in his famous ‘experience machine’ thought experiment.23 We would not want to plug into a machine that placed us in an illusory and lifelong virtual world, even one skillfully designed to maximize our pleasure. Indeed, there are several good reasons for not plugging in: first, because we want to live actively, not passively as mere recipients of experiences; second, we want to be a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of character, not an ‘indeterminate blob’; and third, we want to live in the real world. Agency, character, truth: there are goods worth valuing other than positive feeling. The world’s great literature also leads us to question a shallow identification of happiness and pleasure. In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the main character, who leads a life centred around his own comfort and status, is, early on in the narrative, very content with his life. He would score highly on Layard’s happiness measure. The narrator’s description of Ivan as ‘completely happy’, however, is dripping in Tolstoyan irony.24 It is only on his deathbed, when, after a long interior struggle, he finally faces his mortality, that Ivan undergoes at least a partial conversion away from his self-​centred existence. An ‘awful truth’ is ‘revealed’ to him in the night: ‘he saw himself –​ all that for which he had lived –​and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception’.25 Layard would simply be unable to account for such a moral revelation. If people rate themselves as being 9 or 10 out of 10 on the happiness scale, then they are, for Layard, correspondingly happy. The possibility of being mistaken about one’s happiness, and learning that what one had lived for is empty and vain, even though it brought comfort and positive emotion at the time, does not arise. Like his hero Jeremy Bentham, the originator of hedonistic utilitarianism, Layard’s desire is to develop a ‘felicific calculus’ that measures happiness Ibid., p. 40. One problem is that the reduction of motivation for one’s own pleasure sits uneasily with Layard’s advocacy of benevolent concern for others. His solution is to emphasize the pleasures of promoting others’ happiness: but what if, in a particular context, having concern for another is less pleasurable than living only for oneself? 23 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 42–​5. 24 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (London: Sovereign, 2013), p. 24. 25 Ibid., p. 31. 21

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scientifically.26 There is no doubt that the human sciences have much to contribute to our understanding of what makes people happy.27 However, Layard’s assumption that happiness is aggregative and one-​dimensional is an oversimplification.28 In desiring happy lives, we desire something more than what the philosopher Julia Annas rather devastatingly calls a succession of ‘smiley-​face’ experiences: we want our lives as a whole to go well.29 The question remains, for us and our pluralist society; what is that ‘something more’?

Martin Seligman and positive psychology The new movement of positive psychology, which attempts to shift the focus of its discipline from depression and mental illness to human well-​being and flourishing, offers another valuable case study.30 One of its notable contributions is the empirical study of the virtues in their relation to happiness and flourishing. It is claimed that a cross-​cultural survey of different virtue systems reveals that there are six virtues universal across all major religious and cultural traditions: 1. Wisdom and knowledge 2. Courage 3. Love and humanity 4. Justice 5. Temperance 6. Spirituality and transcendence Each of the six ‘core virtues’ of positive psychology are then divided into four ‘character strengths’, all of which can be empirically tested for their contribution to well-​being.31 Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, claims in his book Authentic Happiness that happiness consists Layard, Happiness, pp. 16–​17. Corey L. M. Keyes and Julia Annas, ‘Feeling Good and Functioning Well: Distinctive Concepts in Ancient Philosophy and Contemporary Science’, The Journal of Positive Psychology 4 (2009): 197–​201. 28 Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life (London: Allen Lane/​Penguin, 2012), chap. 4. 29 Julia Annas, ‘Happiness as Achievement’, Daedalus, 133 (2004): 45. 30 For an introduction to this field, see Kate Hefferon and Ilona Boniwell, Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications (Maidenhead: McGraw-​Hill International, 2011). 31 Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004). 26 27

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especially in the exercise of one’s ‘signature strengths’, and that by cultivating and exercising the virtues, one can lead a better and happier life. The exercise of the character strengths, according to Seligman, leads to the experience of what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi terms ‘flow’.32 ‘The metaphor of ‘flow’ is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives.’33 Flow is characterized, not by self-​awareness of pleasure, but rather by the full investment of attention in some activity. Flow activities are ‘auto-​telic’, rather than being dependent for their meaning on external rewards such as recognition, money or even positive emotion. For Seligman it is the exercise of character strengths, and the concomitant flow, that is central to authentic happiness. Here, then, is an approach that goes beyond feel-​good happiness. Seligman argues that, while positive emotion is intrinsically desirable, it would be wrong to rely on what he calls ‘shortcuts’ to happiness.34 ‘Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.’35 He claims that authentic happiness consists not only in the pleasurable, but also the good and the meaningful life: exercising the virtues in pursuit of a cause greater than oneself.36 A theological ethicist may find here much that is enlightening. The six core virtues bear a striking resemblance to the three theological virtues (faith, hope and love) and the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance). The underlying claim that authentic happiness is related to the exercise of the virtues is one that can be affirmed from within the Christian tradition.37 The insight that the exercise of character strengths often results in ‘flow’ helps to correct an overly dour Christianity that forgets that joy is one of the fruits of living according to the Spirit.38 Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 33 Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Finding Flow:  The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 29. 34 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness:  Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Free Press, 2002), pp. 8, 118, 120. 35 Ibid., p. 8. 36 Ibid., p. 14. 37 For example, for Aquinas, beatitude is the end of virtue. Summa Theologiae, Iia–​Iiae–​Q.131, a.1, ad 2. 38 Cf. Gal. 5:22–​3. For a helpful discussion of the place of joy in the Christian life, see Timothy Radcliffe, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), chap. 2, ‘Learning Spontaneity’. 32

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The claim that virtue is the path to happiness can sound moralistic and implausible to our modern ears, but one way of accessing the underlying insight is to ask what, at their best, parents really want for their children.39 I would suggest that something like the following answer is plausible. Good parents want their children to learn how to relate well to other people and to form good friendships. They want them to develop the capacity to make decisions with good sense; to be able to cope with failure and learn from mistakes; to meet the challenges of life without giving up; to enjoy the good things in life and to have many wonderful experiences, but without becoming self-​indulgent, addicted or superficial; to have a genuine self-​worth and sense of being loved; not to be self-​centred but to show care and compassion for others; they want them to be happy, not with an empty, smiley-​face happiness, but with the joy that comes from a deep sense of meaning and rightness in life, from giving oneself to something greater than self, and from knowing life as a journey of drawing closer to God. Is this not indeed what we should desire, not only of our children, but also for them (and indeed of and for ourselves):  a life that is lived humbly, justly, wisely, courageously, temperately, mercifully, faithfully and lovingly? Parents want their children to be happy, and, even though they may not express it in these terms, at their best they recognize that much of that consists in living virtuously. Yet, despite its recognition of the connection between virtue and human flourishing, there are also problems with the approach of Authentic Happiness (2002): in his later book, Flourish (2011), Seligman himself offers some pertinent self-​criticisms. He begins by expressing doubts about whether happiness is, after all, the goal of positive psychology. Notably, he concedes that the original approach was not entirely free from the confusion between life satisfaction and human well-​being: Happiness in authentic happiness theory is operationalized by the gold standard of life satisfaction, a widely researched self-​report measure that asks on a 1-​to-​10 scale how satisfied you are with your life, from terrible (a score of 1) to ideal (10). The goal of positive psychology follows from the gold standard –​to increase the amount of life satisfaction on the planet. It turns See the comments on the relation between parenting and the virtues in James Keenan, ‘Virtue Ethics’, in Christian Ethics: An Introduction, ed. Bernard Hoose (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1988), p. 86; Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 151f.

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out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question.40

To accept life satisfaction as the primary measure of human well-​being is to condemn ‘the 50 percent of the world’s population who are “low-​positive affectives” to the hell of unhappiness’.41 As Seligman points out, ‘this low-​mood half may have more engagement and meaning in life than merry people’.42 In Flourish, therefore, Seligman redefines the goal of positive psychology to be human well-​being. The basic criterion is now not life satisfaction, but rather un-​coerced choice:  what people choose for its own sake. Well-​being is then defined as consisting in five elements, not three:  positive emotion, engagement, meaning, accomplishment and positive relationships.43 Each of these is meant to be independently measurable and therefore mutually exclusive in relation to any other element. The new theory of well-​being, however, is not entirely convincing either. The three elements of positive emotion, engagement and achievement are supposedly chosen for their own sake. However, the ethicist will point out that there are vain or even positively vicious forms of each of them: it is an achievement to construct a profitable criminal organization; some might derive positive emotion in self-​indulgence at the expense of others; and one could find engagement and flow in a life pursuing extreme sports as much as exercising the virtues. Admittedly, each of these elements could be redeemed by being related to the category of ‘meaning’; but then what has happened to the theory that positive emotion, engagement, achievement and meaning, are mutually exclusive components of well-​being? More fundamentally, the underlying premise of Seligman’s new well-​ being theory is that human flourishing is to be defined in terms of what is chosen for its own sake. His view therefore has similarities with the ‘desire-​ satisfaction’ or ‘preference-​satisfaction’ views propounded by some philosophers, and intuitively accepted by many today.44 There is undoubtedly Seligman, Authentic Happiness, p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. 42 Ibid., p. 19. 43 Ibid., p. 20. 44 Peter Singer, for example, substitutes preference-​satisfaction for the classical utilitarian concern for happiness as the ultimate goal of morality. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, third edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 13. 40 41

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something right here:  something could not count as happiness or well-​ being if it were unrelated to the desires of its subject. Moreover, in a pluralist context, the desire-​satisfaction theory has the apparent advantage of offering a democratic and non-​authoritarian goal for human life. And Seligman does not want to violate the method of his discipline and prescribe what people should choose. Yet the classical theological tradition asks us to distinguish between desires for what is good, and what is merely apparently good. Augustine names the human propensity to the latter kinds of desire concupiscentia, an aspect of fallen human nature.45 Of course, Seligman rejects the doctrine of original sin, which he characterizes as a version of the ‘rotten-​to-​t he-​core dogma’ of human nature.46 But this is an exaggeration: the doctrine is not anti-​desire, but does warn of the need to discern desires. When Seligman talks, for example, of the desire to ‘win for winning’s sake’, we should ask, as Augustine would, whether this may not be a disordered desire for superiority that is corruptive of loving and just relationship. Augustine concedes that happiness is related to desire-​ satisfaction: ‘he alone is happy who has all that he wills’; but he adds one condition: that this person ‘wills nothing wrongly’.47 This insight, it seems to me, is crucial to an adequate eudaimonistic ethics, for to approve of the pursuit of desire-​satisfaction without the critical questioning of desire is to risk condoning, not a moral life, but an amoral life of egoistic indulgence. Julia Annas, on philosophical grounds, also insists that it is possible to make judgements about desires, and even see some of them as ‘defective’. Desires may be based on false information or inference, may be the result of an overpowering compulsion or addiction or may be distorted by internalized oppressive social pressures.48 Seligman’s well-​being theory fails to convince because of the absence of a distinction between what is in fact chosen for its own sake, and what is intrinsically choice-​worthy.

For a systematic discussion of some of the issues involved in the Augustinian idea of concupiscence, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1985), pp. 87–​96. 46 Seligman, Authentic Happiness, pp. xii–​x iii. 47 De Trinitate, XIII, [V, 8]: ‘Beatus igitur non est nisi qui et habet omnia quae uult et nihil uult male’, in Augustine: On the Trinity, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 113. 48 Annas, ‘Happiness as Achievement’, p. 46. 45

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Julia Annas and eudaimonistic virtue ethics It is well known that virtue ethics has undergone a significant revival in recent decades. Julia Annas, better than any other, has consistently reminded us that what we call ‘virtue ethics,’ at least in its ancient form, is standardly a happiness-​oriented or eudaimonistic ethical theory. Admittedly, some contemporary versions of the theory focus more exclusively on virtue.49 Annas warns, however, ‘if we focus on virtue alone and ignore its relation to happiness, we are missing a large part of the interest that study of the ancient theories can offer’.50 Annas’s perceptive critiques of hedonistic and desire-​satisfaction accounts of happiness have been noted above. However, her constructive eudaimonistic ethics is even more worthy of serious consideration, due in part to her research on a wide range of ancient moral philosophies (not merely that of Aristotle), which she sees as the best starting point for developing a contemporary eudaimonistic ethic. One aspect of her position seems especially noteworthy and provides an important point of dialogue for theological ethics: namely, her claim that classical eudaimonism requires nothing less than a transformation through virtue of the desires of the moral agent, and indeed of the very idea of happiness. Annas observes that the basic premise of eudaimonistic virtue ethics is that each human being has a final end: ‘some overarching aim in whatever we do’.51 In the ancient world, it was uncontroversial that this telos is happiness or eudaimonia.52 The debate concerned this: in what does happiness consist? For, as Aristotle pointed out, the views of the ‘wise’ and the ‘many’ conflict.53 The many would place happiness in some conventional good such as health, wealth, political influence, or in the state of pleasure; the philosophers, in contrast, would see happiness as largely concerned with living life in a certain way, that is, in accordance with virtue. Michael Slote, Linda Zagzebski and Christine Swanton all propound non-​eudaimonistic versions of virtue ethics. 50 Julia Annas, ‘Virtue and Eudaimonism’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 15 (1998): 37–​55 (p. 37). 51 Julia Annas, ‘Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism’, in Morality and Self-​Interest, ed. Paul Bloomfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 216. 52 For a succinct explanation of the term eudaimonia as found in ancient, especially Aristotelian ethics, see Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 9–​10. 53 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edn (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1999), p. 32. (1095a). 49

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The claim that the end of life is happiness, even if accompanied by the additional thought that the best way to get there is by living virtuously, can be interpreted as advocating ethical egoism.54 This criticism errs because it assumes happiness is a state distinct from, and consequent upon, virtuous action; rather, according to ancient eudaimonism, happiness is largely constituted by virtuous action. Hence, Annas says, ‘[I]‌t is a mistake to claim that the virtuous person’s motivation is egoistic because it is aimed at her flourishing and not mine, or yours. She aims at her own flourishing and not mine just in the sense that she is living her life and not mine.’55 Happiness is not ‘things, stuff, or passive states like pleasure’; rather it is ‘living in a certain way’, that is, according to virtue.56 And living justly, generously and courageously is hardly an egoistic way of life. Annas points out that there are two versions of the ancient philosophical claim that happiness and virtue are intrinsically connected. First, there is the Aristotelian view, that virtue is necessary for happiness: the life of eudaimonia consists in virtuous activity under favourable conditions (including the possession of certain external goods, a complete life time and freedom from terrible mishap). Aristotle finds it difficult to see how someone who dies by torture, for example, could be said to have led a happy life; he therefore admits that the absence of grave misfortune is required. Second, however, is the view expressed in some of Plato’s dialogues and by the Stoics that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Indeed, Annas claims that the main thesis of Plato’s Republic is that ‘the just person will be happy even if misjudged, tortured and killed’.57 She acknowledges that this thought, that virtue is sufficient for happiness, was ‘a hard saying’ even in ancient times.58 Despite this, Annas shows herself to be in a minority among contemporary virtue ethicists by her willingness to take seriously this latter, more demanding view.59 For Annas, the sufficiency thesis is intelligible once we acknowledge what she calls ‘the transformative role of virtue’:

Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 219–​57. Julia Annas, ‘Virtue Ethics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 522. 56 Ibid., p. 251. 57 Annas, ‘Should Virtue Make You Happy?’ Apeiron 35 (2002): 15. 58 Annas, ‘Virtue and Eudaimonism’, p. 42. 59 ‘I myself tend to the sufficiency position,’ Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford/​New  York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 168n. 54 55

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What the ancient conception demands is a transformation of our conception of happiness by a change in what is valued; Socrates and the Stoics think that you start thinking of happiness as getting what you want  –​ money, fame and so on –​and come to see that happiness really consists in a firm commitment to living virtuously. This is not just the replacement of one set of desires by another; it is a change in outlook based on reasoned reflection about one’s life as a whole.60

For Annas, then, virtue is of central importance because it brings about a deep reorientation towards a different set of values: ‘Virtue, in a word, can transform a human life. It can do so because it can transform your view of what happiness is.’61 The theological ethicist, I believe, has much to learn from Annas’s challenging version of eudaimonistic virtue ethics, which even invites comparison with the life and teaching of Christ; in particular, it is worth reconsidering our understanding of the Beatitudes. There is currently a lively discussion in theological ethics about how to interpret the ethical requirements of the beatitudes for today, and Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan SJ has argued that virtue ethics offer the best hermenuetic.62 Might a eudaimonistic virtue ethics also have something to offer here?63 Annas refers to the ‘strain’ of accepting classical eudaimonism’s claim that the one living virtuously is happy despite failure, ignominy and torture;64 is there not a similar ‘strain’ in accepting the beatitudes, since if someone can be blessed through insult and persecution, being blessed is not what we initially took it to be? To accept such a teaching would require a transformation of outlook and desire, admittedly not through ‘reasoned reflection about one’s life as a whole’, as for Annas and the ancient philosophers, so much as by a graced experience of conversion to Christ and the reign of God. Another point of dialogue can be taken from a foundational text in the Jesuit tradition, namely, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. The philosopher, Pierre Hadot, has used the Exercises to explain that the ancient schools Julia Annas, ‘Should Virtue Make You Happy?’ p. 14. Annas, ‘Virtue and Eudaimonism’, p. 49. 62 Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan, The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes: Biblical Studies and Ethics for Real Life (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), pp. 143–​7. 63 According to Chan, William Mattison is exploring this issue, following in the footsteps of Augustine and Aquinas. Chan, The Ten Commandments, p. 146. 64 Annas, ‘Should Virtue Make You Happy?’ p. 13. 60 61

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of philosophy also aimed at a ‘transformation of our vision of the world and the metamorphosis of our being’.65 The parallels, then, are worth exploring. Here we may note that, as with ancient eudaimonism (especially of the more demanding version that interests Annas), the ‘existential’ conversion of outlook and desire elicited by the Exercises relativizes the value of conventional goods and reorients our being. As the Principle and Foundation of the Exercises states, ‘for our part we should not want health more than sickness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one –​and so with everything else; desiring and choosing only what conduces more to the end for which we are created’ (Exx. 23).66 That end, for Ignatius, is the service of God, especially through participation in Christ’s mission, and ‘thus to save one’s soul’:  not something that would have been recognized by the Greeks. Nevertheless, the parallel with the ancient view, as interpreted by Annas, is striking: ‘If virtue is sufficient for happiness . . . why should the virtuous person have any interest in anything other than virtue? Why should he have any reason to choose health over illness, wealth over poverty?’67 Both approaches recommend a radical detachment in the face of conventional goods. At the same time, there are reasons to hesitate before identifying happiness with virtue. The strongest critique of Annas’s viewpoint has come from a theologian, Stephen Pope. Pope acknowledges that there is something to Annas’s claim that virtue is more closely linked to happiness or human flourishing than are external circumstances. In his view, an externally successful business person whose life is characterized by vice is indeed worse off than someone of good character living in difficult circumstances: ‘serious internal moral obstacles to flourishing are harder to overcome, and more profoundly defective, than external deprivation’.68 Yet, Pope thinks that an ethics based on an adequate theological anthropology will recognize that virtue alone is not sufficient for happiness: ‘Because Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Ira Davidson (Malden, MA:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1995), p. 127. Hadot claims, perhaps with some exaggeration, that ‘Ignatius’s Exercitia spiritualia are nothing but a Christian version of a Greco-​Roman tradition’ (p. 68). 66 Michael Ivens (trans.), The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (Leominster, England:  Gracewing Publishing, 2004), p.  12; Understanding the Spiritual Exercises:  Text and Commentary:  A  Handbook for Retreat Directors (Leonminster:  Gracewing Publishing, 1998), p. 23. 67 Annas, ‘Virtue and Eudaimonism’, p. 47. 68 Stephen Pope, ‘Virtue in Theology’, in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 393–​413 (p. 401). 65

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we are social and bodily beings, our flourishing depends not only on the goodness of our minds or wills, but also on having sufficient physical health and other basic goods.’69 No doubt influenced also by the tradition of Christian social thought, he recognizes that external circumstances do play a significant role, and that someone who is deeply loving and capable of joy even in the midst of suffering can nevertheless live in conditions that impede happiness. This perspective brings something of a reality check to Annas’s speculation about virtue and happiness, since it is not merely personal vice, but also structural injustice that causes much human diminishment and misery. The ethical implications of this realization are significant. If our aim is to promote human flourishing, what is required is not just character education, but also social justice. Indeed, just social conditions provide, not merely the external goods that form an integral part of holistic human flourishing, but also the very conditions under which people are more able to live virtuously. What those who live in socially deprived communities need more than exhortation to virtue, therefore, are the improved conditions that ‘expand the freedom and control of agents in a way that make the appeal to personal virtue more realistic’.70 This theological perspective therefore harmonizes with Annas’s critique of the common equation of happiness with wealth, power, status or pleasure, and her positive recognition of the role of virtue; yet it places these insights in a more realistic accent on the importance of working for structurally just societies, and above all stops short of seeing virtue as guaranteeing happiness. While virtue may open us to the gift of happiness, beatitude remains precisely that: not an achievement, even of virtue, but a gift.

Theological ethics and dialogue about happiness in a pluralist context We have seen that the new interest in happiness coincides with the beginning of the reconsideration of theological eudaimonism, and so offers an Ibid., p. 403. Ibid.

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important opportunity for dialogue. Like the ‘how to be happy’ phenomenon, theological ethics needs to respond in some way to the desire for wisdom about how to direct one’s life as a whole towards happiness, although at the same it should avoid a facile reduction of wisdom to simplistic technical knowledge. ‘Happiness economics’ is promising insofar as it attempts to guide politics and economics away from an excessive focus on economic well-​being towards a more integral human development. However, theological ethics, I have argued, should critique views that measure happiness in terms of life satisfaction or identify it with positive affect or desire-​satisfaction; at the same time, human flourishing does involve the joy or ‘flow’ of positive engagement and the satisfaction of ordered desire. Positive psychology and eudaimonistic virtue ethics remind the theologian of the intrinsic relation between virtue and the happy life. And at least one contemporary reading of ancient eudaimonistic ethics challenges the theological ethicist to recognize that the gospel also calls for a radical conversion of desire and outlook through virtue, by orienting a person towards service of God and neighbour rather than temporal goods. Indeed, like ancient eudaimonism, theological eudaimonism asks for a transformation in the very idea of happiness. Yet, there is more work to be done before eudaimonism is established as an overarching framework of Christian ethics, if that is indeed what is required. For the above argument has not yet touched upon certain important theological considerations, such as the tension between advocacy of happiness as the goal of life and a gospel –​and experience-​informed view of suffering; and the relation between eudaimonism and eschatology, both future and realized, in an authentically Christian view of happiness. It does also remain an open question whether ‘happiness’ is ultimately robust enough to bear the weight of naming the overall end of human life.71

71

Happiness could be rejected as the telos of human life, and yet a teleological structure similar to that of virtue ethical eudaimonism be preserved, by the thesis that the overall goal of life is meaning, which consists, for our part, in the life of virtuous activity, the rest being up to a provident and redeeming God. I use ‘meaning’ here somewhat as it is found in Leo Tolstoy or Victor Frankl, for example. See Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987); Viktor Emil Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

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Ethical dialogue in a pluralist culture Has the conversation so far taught us anything about how theological ethics should proceed? Many Jesuits and others aiming at engagement with culture have often de-​emphasized the specifically religious, precisely for the sake of ethical dialogue in a pluralist context where appeals to revelation or Church authority are perceived to clash with highly valued personal autonomy.72 While a full evaluation of this approach is not possible here,73 discussion on the topic of happiness does show, I  believe, that the Christian dialogical approach needs to be less self-​effacing. On the topic we have discussed, a theological perspective makes a helpful contribution by holding together a healthy tension between acknowledging that the pursuit of happiness can be undone by misperception and disordered desire, while affirming that the deepest desire of the human heart for happiness is ultimately not a vain one, since the God who gave us this desire wants it to be fulfilled. Admittedly, there are questions to be addressed about how theologians are to make themselves intelligible in a common conversation; but just as we would not want a secular Kantian ethicist, for example, to resort to a generic ethical language or divest herself of particularity in order to converse with us, so also we should not leave our Christian identity at the door along with our hat and gloves whenever we desire to enter the public forum. It seems to me, therefore, that a modest conclusion can be drawn: a more integrally theological approach is not a barrier to, but rather an enrichment of, Christian ethical dialogue in a pluralist, even secular, context.74

This is the predominant approach of the ethics of autonomy, whose proponents have included the Jesuits Josef Fuchs, Bruno Schuller, Gerard J. Hughes and Richard A. McCormick, as well as others. For a collection of classic articles on this question, see The Distinctiveness of Christian Ethics, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). 73 For a balanced evaluation, see James F. Keenan, A History of Catholic Moral Theology, chap. 7, ‘New Foundations of Moral Reasoning, 1970–​89’. 74 My thanks to Roger Dawson SJ, my student Charles P. Tajtelbaum and former student Rebecca Hedges for discussion on some of the issues explored in this paper. 72

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279

Index d’Alembert, Jean-​Baptiste le Rond 204 Alston, William P. 126–8, 129, 259 Christian mystical perceptual practice (CMP) 126 animation (human receipt of a soul) traducianist versus creationist accounts 224 Annas, Julia 236–7, 245, 246–50, 275 Anselm 74–5, 258 Apel, Karl Otto 127, 128, 259 Aquinas, Thomas on happiness and virtue 242, 275 on the human soul 224, 225, 274 Thomism 139– 40 Aristotle good as practical knowledge 68 happiness 236, 246, 247 human distinctiveness 197, 199, 200 human soul 224 Nichomachean Ethics 68, 246, 255, 256, 275 philosophia and phronesis 60 Politics 197 Arnold, Matthew 136 Arrupe, Pedro SJ 55, 149 Audo, Antoine SJ 167, 177, 185, 264–5 Chaldean tradition 171–2 Christian Muslim dialogue on texts 168–9, 184 on Paul Nwyia 171, 176 on religious plurality and modernity 181–2 Augustine of Hippo 1, 105, 106, 236, 253, 254 City of God 105, 258 Confessions 3, 10, 18 De Trinitate 4, 245 on God 70–1 on sin and grace 18–19 autonomy, ethics of 252 Axial age 137

Bacht, Heinrich SJ 162, 265 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 143, 157 Barnes, Michael SJ 123, 259 Barth, Karl 109, 255 Bellah, Robert N. 137, 259. See also Axial age Benedict XIV 140–1 Benedict XVI (Ratzinger, Joseph) 21, 44, 134, 157, 185, 255 Caritas in Veritate 25– 6, 28–9, 239, 254, 255, 275 Deus Caritas Est 254 Regensburg speech 133, 260 Bentham, Jeremy 240 Berger, Peter 135, 260 Bergson, Henri 144 Bettenson, Henry 19 bioethics as stewardship 219–34 Blackburn, Simon 212–13, 273 Blondel, Maurice 145 de Borja Medina, Francisco 164, 165, 265– 6 Bormans, Leo 237, 275 de Britto, John SJ 43 Brague, Rémi 124, 260 Brandom, Robert 127, 260 Brémond Henri 11, 253 Brock, Sebastian 160–1, 266 Brown, Chris 188–91, 193, 273 Buckley, Michael J. 94 At the Origins of Modern Atheism 95, 135– 6, 258, 260 philosophical approach to God 99, 100, 101 Bultmann, Rudolph 107 Butler, Jon 122, 260 Calvin, John 18 Cameron, David 235 Carmelite. See John of the Cross Carroll, Anthony J. 125, 130, 134, 260

280

280 Caruana, Louis SJ 59, 255 de las Casas, Ignatius SJ 163– 6 Catholic Patriarchs of the East 185 Catholicism Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales 120, 132–3, 260. See also modernity, Catholic de Certeau, Michel SJ 155 Chan, Yiu Sing Lúcás SJ 248 Cheikho, Louis SJ 167, 171–2, 177 Chenu, Marie-​Domenique OP 143, 157 China, Jesuit mission in 141 Christ, Jesus imitation of 3 poverty and kenosis of 7, 61 relation to the Father 3 teaching on self-​care 62 Christianity Eastern 159–86 Middle Eastern 160 world 159 citizens, raising good citizens 203–18 Liberal versus Authoritarian approaches 204–5, 209–13 moral sheep 217–18 Clooney, Francis X. SJ 123, 131, 156, 261, 263 Coakley, Sarah 94, 258 colonization 31, 44 Columbus, Christopher 31 Confucianism 140 Congar, Yves OP 121, 143, 157, 261 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 223– 4, 225, 231–2, 274 Copernicus 32 Copleston, Frederick SJ 147 Corrington Robert S. 91, 258 Cottingham, John 67, 256 Cronin, Vincent 43, 255 Csikszentmihály, Mihály 242, 275 Cusson, Gilles 6 Dall’Oglio, Paolo SJ 182–3, 266–7 Darwin, Charles 57 Darwinism 144 Daughrity, Dyron 159, 267 Davidson, Arnold 1 Davidson, Donald 86, 256 Davie, Grace 135, 261

Index Dawkins, Richard 89, 91, 119, 120, 258 New Atheism 147 The God Delusion 260 Delp, Alfred SJ 145 Dennett, Daniel 147 Descartes, René 56, 66, 75 Diderot Denis 204 Dirmeier, Ursula 26, 28, 254 discernment of spirits (see under spiritual exercises, Spiritual Exercises) Dulles, Avery SJ 156 Dupré Louis 133, 260 Dupuis, Jacques 156, 263 Dworkin, Ronald 188, 197, 273 Ebeling, Gerhard 105, 258 Ellis, Fiona 90, 258 Enlightenment 204–5 Epictetus 61 Erasmus, Desiderius 54 essentialism 193, 201 eudemonism 236, 250 European Union 45, 135 euthanasia 230 Farrugia, Edward G. SJ 161, 267 Feuerbach, Ludwig 71 Finke, Roger 122, 260 Fish, Stanley 13, 48, 253, 255 Fleming, David SJ 16, 17 Foot, Philippa 66, 256 Foster, Durwood 105, 108–10 Foucault, Michel 181 Francis, Pope 153 Evangelii Gaudium 230–1, 274 Frankfurt, Harry 79, 256 Frankl, Viktor 251, 275 Frege, Gottlob 128 fundamentalism 131, 133 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg 14 Gallagher, Michael Paul SJ 2, 156, 253, 263 Garaudy, Roger 147 Gauchet, Marcel 131, 261 Gebara, Ivone, 27, 254 Geffré, Claude 123, 261 globalization, economic and intellectual 45– 6 Glover, Jonathan 217–18, 273

281

Index God, thinking and talking about 66–7, 77, 86, 97, 100, 136–7. See also theism and atheism Good Samaritan (Luke chapter 10) 228–9 Gray, John 212, 274 Griffin, James 187, 258, 273 ‘expansive naturalism’ 90 human rights, reform of 194–5, 197, 200 Griffith, Sidney 159– 60, 168, 267–8 Habermas, Jürgen 127, 128, 134, 261 post-​secular age 117, 132 Hadot, Pierre 1, 3, 13, 14, 248–9, 253, 275 Hannay, Alistair 82, 85, 256 happiness, and theological ethics 235–52 Oxford Handbook of Happiness 235, 275 popular handbooks on 237–8 well-​being, Office for National Statistics (UK) on 235, 276 Hauerwas, Stanley 236 Hawking, Stephen 147 Hebrews, Letter to 81 Heelan, Patrick 139 Heft, James L. 120, 261 Hegel, G. F. W. 71, 72–3, 86, 109 Heidegger, Martin 94, 136, 145, 258 practical reason 68 Heythrop College 15, 31, 53, 93 Hick, John 120, 135, 261 holiness, contrasting concepts of 19–21 Hoose, Bernard 243, 275 Howells, Edward 4, 253 Hughes, Glenn 199, 273 human dignity 187, 219, 233– 4 Trinitarian grounding of 233– 4 human person functionalist and biblical understandings of 219, 221–3 human rights 187–201 autonomy as a ground for 187, 193, 196–7 Covenants of 199 essentialism 187–8 human nature and 187–91, 192, 199 normative agency and 195, 197 reason as ground for 187 Universal Declaration of 199 humanism 32–3 Christian 53, 63– 4

281

origins of 54 Renaissance humanism and Jesuits 33, 43, 140–1 Husserl, Edmund 86 Hutchison, John 100 Hyman, John 86, 256 Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatian spirituality 1–2, 4–9, 13–14, 15, 20, 253, 254 anthropology of 6 freedom in 18 Ignatian-​Carmelite conversation 11 spiritual exercises See also spiritual exercises, Spiritual Exercises Ivern, Francisco 150, 263 James, William 126 Jenkins, Philip 119, 262 Jesuits 15, 23, 28, 31, 237, 252 atheism, mission to 145– 6, 148–9 Constitutions of 15, 33, 36– 40 cultural engagement 155– 6 documents on Jesuit Pedagogy 46, 47–8 educational institutions 31, 34 educational vision 46–51 epistemology 139–57 Ethiopian Christianity and 161–2 Islam, Jesuit engagement with 162–86 promotion of social justice 148 suppression and restoration 34, 140 Thirty-​First General Congregation 145– 6 Thirty-​Second General Congregation 148–51 Thirty-​Fourth General Congregation 155– 6 See also under humanism: Renaissance humanism and Jesuits ‘Jesuitesses’ 23 Joas, Hans 119, 134, 137, 262. See also Axial age John XXIII John of the Cross Ascent of Mount Carmel 10–13 John Paul II 27, 132, 156, 222–3, 274 on Eastern Christianity 160 Evangelium Vitae 224, 226–7, 228, 230 Fides et Ratio 154

282

282

Index

Mulieris Dignitatem 27 Theology of the Body 223, 226 Veritatis Splendor 154 Jüngel, Eberhard 136, 262 Kafka, Franz 65, 256 Kant, Immanuel 57, 67, 78, 128, 145, 256 Enlightenment 205 moral freedom 68–9 Keenan, James SJ 236, 276 Kerr, Fergus OP 236, 276 Kierkegaard, Søren 65, 69, 73, 86–7, 256 becoming a self 80–5 Sickness Unto Death 81, 85, 256 Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing 82, 256 Klau, Kristoph 147 Knitter, Paul 130 Korsgaard, Christine 66, 71, 78, 85, 256, 257 Lainez, Diego SJ 42 de Laplace, Pierre Simon 56 Lash, Nicholas 93, 109–10 Layard, Richard 235, 236, 237, 238– 41, 276 de Lubac 143– 4, 156 (see also under theology: ressourcement theology) Law, Stephen 216 Lear, Jonathan 85, 257 Lee, Roger 16 Leftow, Brian 74, 75– 6, 257 Levering, Matthew 4, 253 Levinas, Emmanuel 102 Locke, John 219–20, 226, 228, 233, 274 Lonergan, Bernard SJ 139, 148, 153, 263, 273 Lonsdale, David 2, 253 Loyola. See Ignatius of Loyola Luther, Martin 32, 79 Maistre, Joseph de 212 Marechal, Joseph 145 Marion, Jean-​Luc 86, 136, 257, 262 Marx, Karl 71–3, 257 Marxism 146–7, 209 Massignon, Louis 174, 177–81, 268 McCabe, Herbert OP 110, 258 McDowell, John 90, 103, 114, 258, 259 McGhee, Michael 20

McGrath, Alistair 117, 136, 262 McIntosh, Mark 4, 253 McIntyre, Alasdair 214–15, 274 Masuzawa, Tomoko 124, 262 Meilander, Gilbert 232, 274 Mendel, Gregor 57 Michelangelo 32 Micklethwait, John 117, 262 Min, Anselm K. 111, 259 modernity, Catholic 120–1, 134–5 de Montcheuil, Yves 145 Moore, G. E. 216, 274 More, Thomas 54 Morris, Thomas 74, 75, 257 Murphy, Séamus SJ 147, 148, 263 Nagel, Thomas 71, 257 naturalism 89–91, 112, 113 scientific and expansive naturalism 90, 95–7, 101–2, 113–15 Neville, Robert C. 123, 262 Niebuhr, H. Richard 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich 92–3, 102, 136, 259 Noll, Mark A. 122, 262 Newton, Isaac 56, 57 de Nobili, Roberto SJ 43 Nussbaum, Martha 188, 191–2, 196–7, 198, 200, 273 Nwyia, Paul SJ 167, 169–71, 173– 4, 177, 184, 269–70 O’Connor, Flannery 70 O’Mahony, Anthony 159, 168, 270 O’Malley, John SJ 42, 255, 264 Ogden, Schubert 103, 107, 259 Oliner, Pearl and Samuel 217, 274 Ong, Walter SJ 155 Orchard, Gillian 17, 19, 26, 254 Orsi, Robert 124, 262 Orwell, George 204 Padberg, John W. SJ 146, 148, 155, 264 Palacios, Asin 172–3, 174– 6 participation, theology of 4 Paul, Saint 29, 222, 223, 227 Paul VI 145, 148, 231 addressing Jesuits at GC32 151– 4 Evangelii Nunciandi 20 pentecostalism 119

283

Index Perfect Being Theology (PBT) 70, 71, 73– 4, 75–7 Phillips, Melanie 205– 6, 274 philosophy 149–50 for children 205, 207, 213, 215 scholastic 140 theology and 31, 93, 110–14 theology and, in conversation with science 53, 55– 6, 63– 4, 147–8 Pinches, Charles Robert 236 Pius X, Pope and anti-​Modernism 153 Plantinga, Alvin 91, 127, 129, 259, 262 Plato 60–1, 68, 247, 255 Podmore, Simon 81, 257 de Polanco, Juan SJ 42 Pope, Stephen 249–50, 276 postmodernism, postmodernity 151, 154– 6 Potter, Vincent 139 practical reason, practical reasoning 65, 66, 77, 80–1 prayer 93– 4 Radcliffe, Timothy OP 242, 276 Radical Orthodoxy 120 Rafferty, Oliver SJ 123, 262 Rahner, Karl SJ 120–1, 145, 156, 254, 262 Ratio Studiorum 34, 40– 4, 64 (see also Jesuits, educational vision of) Ricci, Matteo SJ 43, 134, 141 Ricoeur, Paul 14 Ritchl Albrecht 109 Robinson, John 91, 259 Rorty, Richard 127, 128, 156, 262 Ruston, Roger 189, 273 Ryle, Gilbert 128, 263 Sacks, Jonathan 130, 214–15, 216, 263, 274 Salin, Dominique 11, 253 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 148 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 109 science impact on culture 58– 60 in conversation with theology and philosophy 53, 55– 6, 63– 4, 100, 147–8 scientism 90

283

Scheffler, Samuel 66, 257 Schloesser, Stephen 139, 264 secularity 117. See also modernity, Catholic; Taylor, Charles Seligman, Martin 236, 241–5, 276 Sen Amartya 191 Simmonds, Gemma CJ 16, 254 Singer, Peter 220, 244, 274, 276 functional understanding of personhood 221–2, 227, 233 Smith, John E. 94, 101, 259 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Socrates 157 Soskice, Janet Martin 20–1 Spidlik, Tomáš SJ 162, 272 spiritual classics 2–3, 10, 14 see also Tracy, David spiritual exercises, Spiritual Exercises 1–2, 4–9, 16–17, 18, 22, 29, 33– 6 ‘Call of Christ the King’ 21 ‘Contemplation for Attaining Love’ 21–2, 35 discernment of spirits 8–9, 36, 139– 40 early eastern fathers and 162 ‘Election’ 8–9 ‘First Principle and Foundation’ 19, 22, 35 Jesuit educational vision and 43– 4, 45 ‘Meditation on the Two Standards’ 21 theological ethics and Spiritual Exercises 248–9 theology of 8 See also Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatian spirituality stewardship . See bioethics as stewardship Stock, Brian 1, 3, 14, 254 Suarez, Francisco 139– 40 Swinburne, Richard 125– 6 Synod for the Middle East 185– 6 Tasioulas, John 195, 273 Taylor, Charles 117–37, 263 A Secular Age 117–18, 263 immanent frame in 120 social imaginary in 118, 126 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre SJ 55, 144 Tennant, F. R. 97, 99, 101, 259 Thatcherism 209

284

284

Index

theism and atheism 92, 94– 8, 102, 136–7 See also God, thinking and talking about theologies of religion 130–1, 133 comparative theology 123– 4, 130, 131 theology and culture 155– 6 liberation theology 149 myth and theology 102–10 philosophy and theology 31, 93, 110–14, 155 philosophy and theology in conversation with science 53, 55– 6, 63– 4, 100, 111–12 ressourcement theology 144–5 social sciences and theology 150 See also theologies of religion Thompson, Michael 66, 257 Tillich, Paul 91, 94, 99, 105, 259 Todorov, Tzvetan 189 Tolstoy, Leo 240, 251, 277 Topping, Keith 208 Tracy, David 2, 14, 254 Trent, Council of 15, 141, 142 Tugwell, Simon 93, 94, 259 UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) 2008 report 23–5, 27 Valignano, Alessandro SJ 140 Varro, Marcus Terrentius 105 Vatican II (Second Vatican Council) 131– 2, 139, 157

Dignitatis Humanae 132 Gaudium et Spes 22, 142–3, 254 Nostra Aetate 132 ‘signs of the times’ 141– 4 world church and 120–1 Vattimo, Gianni 156 Veale, Joseph SJ 5, 254 da Vinci, Leonardo 32 Waddell, Paul 236, 277 Waldron, Jeremy 200, 273 Walsh, David 184 Ward, Keith 123, 263 Ward, Mary 15–29 empowerment of women 22– 4, 25– 6 Spiritual Exercises 19 Vision of the Just Soul 16, 19, 22, 23– 4, 27, 28 Warnock, Mary 228, 230 Weber, Max 124, 134 Westphal, Merold 86, 257 Whitehead, A. N. 67, 257 Wiggins, David 90, 96, 111, 232–3, 259, 274 Williams, Thomas, 74, 257 Winch, Peter 190 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 128, 190 ‘forms of life’ 190 women, capacity for agency in the world. See UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) 2008 report Woodward, Alan 7 Wooldridge, Adrian 177 Wright, G. Ernest 106, 107, 259