Political Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology (Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics) [1 ed.] 0199646813, 9780199646814

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
The Argument
A Note on Terminology
Why This Book was Written
1. Politics and Emotions
I. Emotion and Religion in Contemporary Politics
II. The Cognitivist Turn in Theories of Emotion
III. Compassion as Paradigm: Martha Nussbaum’s Approach
Conclusion
2. Affections
I. Affections as the Participative Beginnings of Understanding
II. Enduring Affections
III. Affections and the End
Conclusion
3. Affections and Political Institutions
I. Martha Nussbaum’s Political Eschatology
II. Political Affections in Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts
III. Representation, Loyalty, and Law
IV. Compassion and Shame Revisited
Conclusion: Joy and Awe
4. Affections and Locality
I. Constitutional Patriotism
II. Local Affections
III. Constitutional Patriotism Revisited
Conclusion
5. Renewing Political Affections
I. Transmission, Trust, and Transposition
II. Faith in God as the Source of Joyful Praise
III. Joyful Praise as the Beginning of Political Ethics
IV. Sharing in Joyful Praise of the Cruci.ed and Risen Christ
V. Preserving Trust
Conclusion: The Return to Praise
Epilogue: The Joy of All the Earth
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
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Citation preview

OXFORD STUDIES IN THEOLOGICAL ETHICS General Editor oliver o’d onovan

OXFORD STUDIES IN THEOLOGICAL ETHICS General Editor Oliver O’Donovan The series presents discussions on topics of general concern to Christian Ethics, as it is currently taught in universities and colleges, at the level demanded by a serious student. The volumes will not be specialized monographs nor general introductions or surveys. They aim to make a contribution worthy of notice in its own right but also focused in such a way as to provide a suitable starting point for orientation. The titles include studies in important contributors to the Christian Tradition of moral thought; explorations of current moral and social questions; and discussions of central concepts in Christian moral and political thought. Authors treat their topics in a way that will show the relevance of the Christian tradition, but with openness to neighbouring traditions of thought which have entered into dialogue with it.

Political Affections Civic Participation and Moral Theology

JOSHUA HORDERN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Joshua Hordern 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–964681–4 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For my parents, Guy and Helen, in love and joyful hope

Acknowledgements I begin this book by remembering those who have taught and cared for me. There is no other way to begin than by acknowledging my parents, Guy and Helen. My father and late mother’s love, prayers, example, and vision have provided profound inspiration which continues to energize my daily life. By their enduring joyfulness, even amidst the profound adversity of my mother’s illness, they have demonstrated the real truth of Christian faith. Such faith grieves in hope and so keeps going to the end when life’s work is thoroughly finished, thereby yielding the true glory of God. ‘Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all”’ (Proverbs 31: 28–9). My father has remained an amazing source of wisdom and support throughout the years. In his steadfast and deep love, he has opened doors and encouraged me to venture through them, never pressing but always inviting. This book is dedicated to my parents in love and joyful hope. Through their love, I have had excellent friends from my earliest years. I acknowledge particularly an extended circle of godparents and especially Margaret Keighley and David Ford who have made good on their promises to me and my family. Margaret’s tender faithfulness remains precious today. David’s care has extended from early swimming lessons to more recent recommendations on aspects of this monograph. What my godparents promised and hoped for at my baptism, various churches have fulfilled throughout my life and I gladly acknowledge the influence on this book of public and private exposition of scripture, the practice of the sacraments, and the shared life of Christian fellowship. Along the way, I have benefited from a range of wonderful teachers. My first encounter with Augustine’s Confessions was in undergraduate tutorials with Robin Lane Fox at New College, Oxford. His playful but challenging analysis spurred me on towards postgraduate theological studies under the guidance of David Wenham, Mike Lloyd, and Bernd Wannenwetsch. In Edinburgh, I benefited from David Reimer’s astute instruction in Deuteronomy and Michael Northcott’s wise direction towards the work of Martha Nussbaum.

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From the wonderful community at Edinburgh’s New College, I am particularly grateful for Jolyon and Clare Mitchell’s insight and hospitality and for friendship and conversation with Adam Hollowell, Peter Comensoli, and Ian Clausen. My research has been very considerably enriched by the scholarly fellowship provided by the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, an institution generously funded by the far-sighted Kirby Laing Foundation and JW Laing Trust. Under the direction of Jonathan Chaplin and KLICE’s Advisory Council chaired first by Julian Rivers and then Jonathan Burnside, a new crop of moral theologians has been nurtured. Drafts of chapters of this book were presented at KLICE postgraduate research seminars and I am grateful for suggestions, criticisms, and encouragements from seminar participants, especially Jonathan Chaplin, Sean Doherty, Andy Draycott, Guido de Graaf, James Mumford, Christopher Orton, Jonathan Rowe, and Jim Salladin. I am particularly grateful to Christopher Orton for his insightful comments which have unpicked many a tangle and brought clarity amidst confusion. I am thankful too for Tyndale House which, through the efforts of Bruce Winter, Peter Williams, and members of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship Trust Board, has been instrumental in bringing KLICE to birth. Alongside financial support I have received through KLICE, I also acknowledge the support of Excelcis, the Sola Trust, the University of Edinburgh, and, during my postdoctoral Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. The last of these awards, made under the auspices of KLICE, has enabled me to bring this work to publication. In Cambridge, Samuel Kimbriel, James Orr, and Tom Simpson have offered robust ‘Tinklings’ with various parts of this book. The lively environment which Sarah Coakley has cultivated in the Faculty of Divinity has introduced me to authors and themes with which I was previously unfamiliar. I am particularly thankful for Simeon Zahl’s thoughtful responses to a D’Society paper and for the symposium on ‘Faith, Rationality and the Passions’, orchestrated by Professor Coakley, which has preserved me, I hope, from falling into a number of errors. I acknowledge the commendations and suggestions given by my doctoral examiners Nigel Biggar and Michael Northcott and, furthermore, the acute observations of Peter Sedgwick and Marius Felderhoff. Tom Perridge and Lizzie Robottom at Oxford University Press

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have patiently and expertly overseen the production of the manuscript and I am extremely grateful to the Press’s anonymous readers for their incisive comments which have improved the manuscript very considerably. I am sure that I have not satisfied all of those who have commented on this work and therefore hope that they will remain my conversation partners. Finally, I am glad to acknowledge the supervision and editorial guidance of Oliver O’Donovan. When he and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan ventured to leave Oxford for Edinburgh, I was only too glad to journey north and continue to benefit from their teaching and friendship. But the unexpected blessing of that move was first to glimpse and then come to know the beauty and wisdom of a wonderful woman whom I first truly saw in springtime, walking and singing by Highland lochs in the company of friends, and who has since become my best friend and beloved wife, Claire. The completion of this book owes more than I can say to her hard work, smiling patience, and enduring faith in Jesus Christ, through whom, in the company of the Holy Spirit, we now delight to acknowledge God our Father in songs of joyful praise. Ascension Day 2012 Cambridge

Contents Introduction The Argument A Note on Terminology Why This Book was Written

1 4 10 13

1. Politics and Emotions I. Emotion and Religion in Contemporary Politics II. The Cognitivist Turn in Theories of Emotion III. Compassion as Paradigm: Martha Nussbaum’s Approach Conclusion

16 16 24

2. Affections I. Affections as the Participative Beginnings of Understanding II. Enduring Affections III. Affections and the End Conclusion

61 62 93 119 130

3. Affections and Political Institutions I. Martha Nussbaum’s Political Eschatology II. Political Affections in Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts III. Representation, Loyalty, and Law IV. Compassion and Shame Revisited Conclusion: Joy and Awe

131 132 140 163 183 198

4. Affections and Locality I. Constitutional Patriotism II. Local Affections III. Constitutional Patriotism Revisited Conclusion

202 202 217 227 249

5. Renewing Political Affections I. Transmission, Trust, and Transposition II. Faith in God as the Source of Joyful Praise III. Joyful Praise as the Beginning of Political Ethics

251 252 266 269

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Contents IV. Sharing in Joyful Praise of the Crucified and Risen Christ V. Preserving Trust Conclusion: The Return to Praise

276 284 292

Epilogue: The Joy of All the Earth

295

Bibliography Index

298 307

Introduction Human affections are the focus of this enquiry. I will investigate the nature of affections, their role in morality, and their significance for political relations. In particular, I will explore how the nature and quality of affections bear upon the capacity of the people of nation-states and continental political unions to engage in reflective and deliberative moral reasoning. In democratic parliaments and congresses, elected political representatives and unelected officials act as foci for the discourse and concerns of the people at large, being authorized by the people to act on their behalf. However, the vitality of this arrangement is by no means guaranteed by the processes of democracy themselves. Both the quality of peoples’ participation in civic activity and the quality of political representation vary widely. The common lament over the ‘democratic deficit’ within the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and continental authorities such as the European Union testifies to this variability. One measure of such a deficit is voter turnout at elections. While not unimportant, it is hardly an exhaustive way of determining the quality of societies’ engagements with their own affairs. Voting is a measure of participation in civic life but arises at one moment in the overall process. Notwithstanding issues around voter registration and education, the level of voting is a symptom of the state of a political entity rather than an insight into the underlying causes of sickness and health. Describing more accurately and identifying the reasons behind a ‘democratic deficit’ is more complex. The rationale of this book is that a conceptual understanding of the affective dimension of people’s engagement with their political representatives and the wider political process will constitute an important step towards renewing the sources of civic participation which maintain internally diverse political societies in reflective, deliberative, and active pursuit not only of their own common good but also that of their neighbours.

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Such concerns have not gone unnoticed in political theory and have often focused on the viability of the nation-state as an economic and political entity. The hotly contested development of supranational political institutions such as those associated with the European Union has occasioned soul-searching around national identity and civic attachment, not least in relation to the economic challenges facing Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From a European perspective, Jürgen Habermas has explored ways in which universal constitutional principles may ‘link up with citizens’ motives and attitudes’.1 In particular, ‘constitutional patriotism’ attempts to address what he sees as a motivational deficit in contemporary political experience. Witness too Michael Walzer’s exploration of the significance of ‘passions’ and ‘passionate intensity’2 in politics, something which he believes political liberals have characteristically avoided. A core argument of this book is that philosophical and theological ethics have developed resources which enable these concerns to be more thoroughly conceptualized but that these resources have not been adequately incorporated into political thought. For example, Walzer’s project ‘to rationalize (some of) the passions and to impassion reason’ for the sake of liberal goals such as equality lacks the conceptual clarity about the nature of ‘passion’ which might make it more persuasive.3 By contrast, Martha Nussbaum has demonstrated that it is possible to integrate contemporary theories of emotion with political affairs. She argues for a philosophically sophisticated account of the place of ‘emotion’ in politics which examines specific emotions such as shame, disgust, and compassion. As we shall see, in so doing, she makes expansive and controversial claims about the nature of humanity which decisively shape her vision of nation-states’ emotional health.4 Both Nussbaum and Habermas have engaged with theological reflection on what makes for a flourishing and just political life and they will be the most prominent dialogue partners in the following 1

J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Theory of Law and Democracy (MIT Press, 1996), appendix II, ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, 499. 2 M. Walzer, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2004), xii. 3 Walzer, Politics and Passion, 126. 4 M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (CUP, 2001); M. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2004).

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chapters. The argument will focus in various ways on intersubjective political disagreement and agreement concerning value—how agreement is constituted and renewed, how it endures over time, and how disagreements are addressed. Such a focus seems likely to provide insight into questions of political legitimacy towards which talk of ‘democratic deficits’ gestures. For Habermas, such questions are concerned especially though not exclusively with the conditions of peaceful life in Europe after two world wars and the Holocaust. For Nussbaum, a Reformed Jew, her interest is in a more general emancipation of politics from, on the one hand, the slavery of dualistic philosophies which set at odds reasoning and emotion and, on the other, the anti-political logic of dualistic theologies which so direct people to the next world that they lose motivation to care for this one. What this book seeks is a concept of affectivity which both interrelates representation, the judiciary, and locality so as to enable a better discussion of national and post-national visions of flourishing societal life and addresses the dualisms which Nussbaum identifies so as to demonstrate the way that the good news of Jesus Christ remains good news for political societies today in Europe and elsewhere. To pursue this enquiry, I will turn to the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament and various traditions of moral and political reflection upon them. The resurgence of political theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has engaged extensively with contemporary political concerns but has, to this point, lacked a thoroughgoing examination of the affective dimension of political relations. Such an examination will, I believe, be welcome to both Nussbaum and Habermas. Their openness to theological conversation renders them superior conversation partners to those whom Habermas identifies with ‘the blinkered enlightenment which is unenlightened about itself and which denies religion any rational content’.5 Moreover, inasmuch as they, in distinct ways, deal with themes such as death, decay, and national identity, they are pressing into ‘eschatological’ territory. Taking their boldness as an encouragement, I will suppose that the theological discourse which follows is welcome in polities where there remains an interest in free and intelligent public debate. A turn to the Jewish and Christian scriptures is far from a flight into some private, irrational, religious world. Instead these texts offer 5 J. Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Polity Press, 2010), 18.

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powerful and intelligible insights into the affective dimension of humanity and other aspects of political life. The vision of reality which emerges from ancient Israel, the gospels, and the early Christian churches sheds light on the nature of affection, its relation to politics, and the interrelation of different affections. In so doing, it offers a distinctive interpretation of intersubjectivity, the nature of the deficit in contemporary democratic experience, national identity, and local sociality. Moreover, those texts shape the embodied life of local, national, and international churches which are thus enabled to energize not only the renewal of affectivity within their own communities but also a wider renewal of intersubjective participation in common life in the localities they serve. Such renewals seem worthy theological, political, and ecclesial goals. They may even be thought urgent, but that will depend on the view one takes of the state one is in.

THE ARGUMENT Chapter 1 begins from a point which is prima facie more accessible than the scriptures to a non-theological audience by discussing both popular uncertainties which surround affective phenomena at different levels of political life and the conceptual vagueness of much political theory, whether communitarian or liberal, with respect to these phenomena. The political landscape of the UK, Europe, USA, and the West in general is replete with affectivity and yet we lack the conceptual wherewithal to describe affections thoroughly and understand their political role. The chapter’s focus is on the democratic deficit observable in Europe today and, via the discussion around constitutional patriotism, on the wisdom of increasingly sublimating national identity to a European post-national consciousness. To account for the conceptual lacuna in this area, various political theories’ theoretical inadequacies are partially associated with the sidelining of theological reflection on political matters. But the inadequacies are addressed initially not through theology but through a tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature of what have variously been called ‘passions’, ‘sentiments’, ‘emotions’, or ‘affections’. This tradition has reached a measure of consensus through a turn to cognitivism in the late twentieth century, although the reasons for the consensus are not agreed. On the one hand, there is

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widespread agreement that the rationalist disavowal of the reasonableness of emotion and the empiricist fascination with physical sensation as an exhaustive explanation of emotions were mistakes. Instead, emotions’ intentional (object-directed) evaluative quality, combined with neuroscientific findings, suggests that emotions possess a cognitive aptitude of some sort. These developments resonate in a qualified way with older theological convictions about the reasonableness of affections. On the other hand, there is disagreement about the deeper historical causes of the dualisms which have made such a consensus so hard to attain. Christianity is blamed by some for the disparagement of emotions but credited by others with providing the conceptual resources whereby emotions are found to be vital and intelligent aspects of political life. From here the chapter turns to consider one particular ‘cognitivist’, Martha Nussbaum, who has combined the cognitivist turn with her distinctive political theory of mature interdependence closely associated with infant psychology. The discussion focuses on her description of compassion as the paradigmatic political emotion for an uncontrolled world. Her neoStoic vision of a world of upheaval in which events plunge as knives into our emotional wounds receives particular attention, as does the interrelation of political affections, such as compassion and joy, a theme which recurs repeatedly throughout the argument. I argue that the role of joy in political life is significantly underplayed by Nussbaum, that her indexing of compassion to judicial wisdom is by no means as secure a basis for a compassionate society as she believes, and that her account of compassion may not have sufficient traction to attract the kind of support she expects. Chapter 2 responds to the contemporary cognitivist turn by proposing a theological account of affections as participative understandings of the world which endure through the power of memory and the stability of the moral order and which are eschatologically conditioned to construe present objects in terms of their future orientation. Over against one interpretation of Aristotle in which the virtuous man begins moral reasoning from an already established comprehensive vision of the good and in which pathe are not integrated convincingly into moral reasoning, Jean Yves Lacoste argues for affections as the half-light and beginning of moral understanding. Elaborating on Lacoste, the discussion argues that affections are attracted, participative understandings of God’s good creation vindicated by the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ and thus play a significant role

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in political relations. Instead of solely analysing individual affective experience, the argument proceeds to explore how affections, as recognitions of value, become intersubjectively shared, discussed, and agreed upon aspects of political discourse. Such agreement must be more than momentary if it is to have political weight. Enduring affections are shown to be basic to the moral unity of political societies, since by them people are bound together in stable evaluations of common goods over time. Affective agreements come to endure stably through culturally mediated memory of the created moral order and, ultimately, memory of peace with God. Such stability is contrasted with the neo-Aristotelian appeal to virtue. In conversation with Robert Adams, Oliver O’Donovan, and Eric Gregory, it is argued that, while personal virtue has a real if fragile quality and while others’ virtue plays an important part in memory and moral reasoning, focusing on one’s own characteristic virtues and their formation in the pursuit of moral excellence typically prevents penitence in behaviour, affection, and political practice. Act and affection are considered to have epistemological priority over character. Therefore, making one’s virtue a project of habituation is a counter-productive move, fostering a false epistemological stability and undermining the deliberation and critical development of tradition which politics requires. Notwithstanding this analysis, virtues are recognized as gifts which play an important part in moral and political thought and practice. The final passage of the chapter develops these themes in an eschatological direction to show that, while affections are participative beginnings of understanding and endure through memory, they also have a construing and conclusive quality. To show how this is so, the chapter concludes by exploring Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of excellency to describe how people’s affections construe particular values in relation to the cosmic, future-oriented order. Chapter 3 takes the concept of affection developed in Chapter 2 and puts it to work in the specific political institutions of representation and law. To do so, the turn to eschatology is taken forward by exploring Nussbaum’s internally transcendent conception of death, decay, and mature interdependence amidst human fragility. Her rejection of much Christian ethical reflection as inadequately attuned to these human realities because of its commitment to external transcendence and her thoroughgoing critique of contractarianism’s deceptive qualities are explained in terms of her marginalizing of shame and disgust as politically beneficial emotions. For Nussbaum,

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both Augustinian Christianity and social contractarian thought fail to orient people to this world as it is, opting for the next one or some veiled world of independent adult choosers. Instead, she makes the controversial claim that her account of the human condition is the one which will produce a better quality of citizen and to which, therefore, all members of liberal polities, including all religious believers, should assent. Nussbaum’s beliefs are then scrutinized in conversation with an Augustinian political theology which describes the affective dimension of political institutions by building on the account of affections, memory, and eschatology developed in Chapter 2. Wisdom is sought from the scriptures which Nussbaum shares with the Christian tradition and especially the book of Deuteronomy, examination of which seems particularly appropriate to postHolocaust Europe. The earthy festivals of Israel’s life are shown to revolve around participative joy in the shared land which energizes, orients, and stabilizes the pursuit of just judgement among the people. The festivals thus preserve affectively rich theopolitical wisdom in ways which shape the practice of representation and law. The realism of the text concerning the stubbornness of the people also cautions against reading a virtue ethics of habituation into the Torah’s moral vision. Deuteronomy’s focus on festive joy is fulfilled in the affective wisdom of the New Testament’s gospel of Luke and book of Acts. The great joy which surrounds Jesus’ conception and birth signals the coming of a new humanity vindicating the moral order and bringing coherence to the human experience of it. The joy of the Kingdom permeates the narrative of Luke, giving shape to the gospel’s other characteristic political affections. That joy climaxes in the book of Acts as the Gentile–Jewish divide is overcome in the establishment of international Christian churches by the work of the universal Holy Spirit. The concept of affection, enriched by these scriptural resources, is then put to work amidst the institutions of representation and law through an extended conversation between Oliver O’Donovan and Nussbaum. The discussion of representation interrelates Christ’s representative status with the affective dimension of political loyalty as a form of shared, affective affinity between representatives and represented. Such loyalty is threatened both by an affective independence that encourages political stubbornness and by a proceduralism which fails to attend to the cries of the people. The task of the courts and legislatures is to give public reflective and deliberative shape to such cries. Their calling involves making judgements that discriminate

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between right and wrong to establish a new public context in ways which contrast sharply with approaches offered by Kant and Jonathan Edwards but which resonate with the common law tradition. The chapter closes with an Augustinian argument, simultaneously personal and public, about the nature of compassion and shame. In revisiting compassion, it is suggested that the resurrection of Christ offers deep resources for those working in healthcare institutions to answer questions around palliative care, assisted suicide, and ageing populations. In revisiting shame, I suggest that the Christian gospel in its proclamation of both human sinfulness and Christ’s Kingdom acts as an excellent protection against the tyranny of those who overreach their authority by failing to understand that their judicial service is not a replacement for the rule of God. The joy and awe of the gospel give definition to compassion and shame and all these together are recommended as vital political affections which will sustain and renew the life of political societies today. Chapter 4 brings the argument of the previous two chapters to bear on the democratic deficit in Western nation-states and Habermas’s response in the form of constitutional patriotism. Having reviewed the shape of Habermas’s argument, defended it from ungenerous criticisms but observed its deficiencies with regard to the affective dimension of politics, the discussion contrasts his approach with Roger Scruton’s view from Dover beach. Scruton’s lament for England raises the question of pre-political membership and the source of the first personal plural of intersubjective social experience. Whereas Scruton loves the life of the valleys over against the Kantian freezing heights and whereas Habermas lives the tension between facts and norms, the theologically formed account of the affective dimension of politics developed to this point demonstrates that affections may be politically intersubjective, deeply localized, and appropriately transnational. To show how this is so, the argument returns to Luke and Acts to uncover the unbalanced and unwise affective attitudes of the Roman Empire. In contrast to the participative, localized Israelite joy in the land which stimulates just judgement, Roman rule is depicted as powerless and unjust because of its lack of appropriate participation in the life of the land. The Roman universal, imperial legal structure and political culture prevented wise affective engagement and disabled effective, right judgement. This governmental imbalance is then contrasted with Nigel Biggar’s reaffirmation of national identity and national borders through reflection on the doctrine of

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Christ’s incarnation over against Richard Miller’s indiscriminate, Christian cosmopolitanism and Martha Nussbaum’s neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism. A critical national loyalty which takes particular form in gratitude towards those near at hand, both past and present, is articulated as a positive alternative which would provide substantial resources towards overcoming the democratic deficit and re-energizing civic participation. Constitutional patriotism is then reconsidered and found wanting on the grounds that universal constitutional principles fail to hold sufficient affective appeal to overcome the motivational deficit. Theological reasons are offered for this, not least the creaturely finitude of human experience instantiated in the limited givenness of nationality. While avoiding nationalistic idolatry, people are called to inhabit such national identity in discerning wisdom as exemplified by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s suffering return to Germany. Back on Dover beach, Roger Scruton observes how the English patriotic experience was formed by inheritance, obligation, and trust, mediated by the common law. It is argued that affective trust is a crucial element of the renewal of civic life which requires strong localized connections. In facing up to the international challenges to which Habermas rightly draws attention, a renewal of local belonging and affective trust, mediated by localized, affectively wise representation is recommended. For without such localized political experience, a genuinely democratic civic participation in international affairs will be unattainable. And yet, for such renewal to take place, patriotism must not slip into land mysticism—patriotism must be self-critical if it is to be Christian. The question follows as to how the renewal of theologically coherent, critically patriotic, localized civic participation is to be galvanized. Chapter 5 argues that local churches can play a uniquely important role in the renewal of localized, affective, political wisdom. By attending to a series of theologians local to the United Kingdom, the argument shows that Habermas’s invitation to religious groups to be involved in the work of transmitting moral insight to the political level is inadequate to the phenomena of affective social trust and churches’ role in meeting the trust deficit. Instead, following Bernd Wannenwetsch’s lead, the Lutheran notion of transposition is adopted to describe churches’ vocation in society. The transposition of Christians into their neighbours’ need and plenty is made possible by the prior gracious work of Christ which frees Christians to see their lives as a surplus to be given away in compassion, joy, and other forms of affective participation. Such a social movement is only

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possible through faith in the God of Jesus Christ which yields the strange stability of provisional rest and peace amidst shared, hopeful, joyful praise. Transposing this intersubjective hopeful joy in public is a service which churches may render not only to meet the deficit in trust but also to challenge prevailing political loyalties. The discussion then turns to consider how the grace of God received by faith brings constant renewal to churches. The preached word and the sacraments summon churches to know the power of the cosmic Christ’s resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings. The second letter to the Corinthians is combined with Paul’s teaching of justification by faith to describe the work of the Spirit weaving people into Christ and the preservation of trust and consensus through joy. The strange stability of Christian affections is embodied in a localized life of joyful, praising, intersubjective, reconciled communion amidst temporal politics which witnesses to the Christ who will one day descend to bring ultimate peace, reconciliation, and justice to the world. This approach is contrasted with Stanley Hauerwas’s focus on the formation of the self and interpretation of the sacraments as quasi-Aristotelian practices. The back and forth of simul iustus et peccator is shown to energize the active life of churches as the movement between law and gospel strengthens the churches’ marriage to Christ and transposes them outwards in joy to the world. In this sense, it is only through churches having no need to regard their own righteousness that they are freed to live a righteous social life of affective wisdom. Praise frames temporal politics in a way which addresses the need for overcoming the democratic deficit by renewing the sources of attachment to the goods which are local, national, and international. The public intersubjective verification of affections, mediated by Spirit-filled local churches who worship the Christ of the everlasting Kingdom, is proposed as a response to the neglect of the affective dimension of political discourse and the need for the renewal of civic participation.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY Terminology is difficult in this field. The argument which follows will largely adopt the language of ‘affections’ as a term which seems more useful for making progress in our topic than either ‘emotions’ or

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‘passions’. There are two particular advantages which this terminological preference bestows. The first relates to the problematic history of the word ‘emotion’. Thomas Dixon has argued that the category of ‘emotion’ was substantially a nineteenth-century invention, the chief responsibility for which lay with Thomas Brown, for whom emotions were ‘mere feelings . . . to be contrasted with actual intellectual judgments’,6 ‘connected, together with sensations and thoughts, in chains of cause and effect modelled on Newtonian physics’.7 This new notion of ‘emotion’ effectively ‘replaced the passions and affections of a classical Christian soul’, the disappearance of which categories contributed to the ‘infamous problems of definition that have beset philosophers and psychologists of emotion from the early nineteenth century onwards’.8 Dixon’s claim is that the single word ‘emotion’ was unable to take account of the distinctions maintained by the older categories which had allowed for diverse moral subtleties pertaining to the reasonableness or unreasonableness of affections and passions. Through a variety of both Christian and non-Christian, theological and philosophical writings, a widespread, albeit not universal, assumption of the non-rationality of ‘emotions’ arose and, with that, the disappearance of the idea that ‘emotions’ were suitable objects of moral appraisal. Increasingly, ‘no one wrote about “evil emotions”’.9 And so, lacking these moral cadences and distinctions, the term ‘emotion’ subsided eventually into confusion. To Dixon’s list of thinkers beset by definitional problems, we should add ‘political theorists’, for the loss of the older subtleties has meant that ‘emotions’, as murky and probably irrational features of political relations, have received less conceptual attention in political thought than they might have done. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a sea-change in philosophical ethics whereby ‘emotions’ became widely thought of as in some way ‘cognitive’, bringing a measure of clarity to the terminological debate and a renewal of political theorizing about ‘emotion’. Nonetheless, ‘emotion’ still retains popular and scholarly associations with non-rationality and, 6 T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (CUP, 2003), 125. 7 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 118. 8 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 25. 9 T. Dixon, ‘Revolting Passions’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011), 306; cf. J. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire’, Augustinian Studies, 36/1 (2005), 195–217, on the mistaken conflation of passion and emotion.

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since this enquiry will be concerned with examining in what way joy, compassion, shame and the rest might be aspects of moral and political reasoning, ‘affection’ seems the more useful term. The second advantage relates to past theological usage. When ‘affection’ is used today, it commonly means something like ‘kindness’ or ‘goodwill’ but would rarely include phenomena such as ‘anger’. But in past theological discourse, ‘affection’ and its cognates covered a range of phenomena such as envy, fear, anger, joy, and hatred among others and interplayed with concepts such as will, grace, and sin. Jonathan Edwards’s account of natural and gracious affections is a case in point. Edwards in turn drew on Augustine who addresses the theme of ‘affectus’ or ‘affectiones’ when challenging rival accounts of the role of passiones, perturbationes, and motus in the life of the wise man. Augustine’s approach is not to hold tenaciously to any one term but rather to focus attention on the nature of the phenomena themselves and especially on what Christian revelation has disclosed. He is particularly concerned to move the discussion of the phenomena away from whether any particular soul experiences passiones (or motus or affectus) and towards why and in relation to what the soul has the experience.10 The concern is thus with the cause or object of affections in order that the affections may be rightly oriented.11Accordingly, Augustine is not convinced that passio (or, by implication, affectus) is itself, as some Stoics and Platonists would claim, an essentially vicious aspect of human nature which requires control, subjection, and even extirpation.12 For Augustine, a ‘right will (voluntas recta) or a good love (bonus amor) would issue forth in appropriate affections, but a wrong will (voluntas perversa) or a bad love (malus amor) would produce sinful affections’.13 Augustine will not tolerate the dismissal of affections as essentially vicious because of the doctrinally unsound roots of such a rejection either in a Platonic devaluation of the body, wherein passiones were thought to reside,14 or in a Stoic 10 Dixon, ‘Revolting Passions’, 300, ‘Augustine was suspicious of those movements of the appetite that he considered misdirected passiones, perturbationes, libidines or even, in Stoic vein, morbos; but he took a more positive stance towards higher movements of the will given milder designations such as motus, affectus, affectiones or simply voluntates, acts of will.’ 11 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 29. 12 Augustine, City of God, 9.5. 13 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 40; cf. Augustine, City of God, 14.7. 14 City of God, 14.5.

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rejection of certain features of human life, such as sorrow. For such affections are seemingly commended in scripture, not only in the lives and teachings of Paul and Jesus but also throughout other biblical texts.15 In the end, although he is happy to use the terms passio and motus, especially though not exclusively when in dialogue with rivals, he more often favours affectus or affectio in constructive phases of his writing.16 In the present discussion, we should follow Augustine’s lead and avoid quarrelling unnecessarily about words. What is at stake is not any particular word but the meaning which the word bears. Nonetheless, there is a need for terminological clarity. A return to the term ‘affection’, held lightly and for pragmatic, historical reasons but maintained consistently, is a promising move. The combination of its present relative disuse and prior theological usefulness makes it a good candidate for the cup of meaning17 we need. In what follows, I will reserve the term ‘affection’ for the concept which this research is aiming to elucidate but will continue to use the term ‘emotion’ when discussing those theories and popular discourses which utilize that terminology.

WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN This book was written because of a conviction that ultimate questions about the human condition must be kept at the heart of political discourse. Politics routinely involves conflict, compromise, and consensus concerning deeply held beliefs about reality and yet this vital and ever-present dimension of political experience is always in danger of being concealed from view by technocratic political cultures. By examining affections such as joy, compassion, sorrow, fear, shame, and hatred as aspects of national and international political activities, the argument that follows attempts to show that political practice must not ignore or obscure the very humanity of the people it

15 16 17

City of God, 14.8–9. City of God, esp. 14.9. Augustine, Confessiones, ed. M. Skutella (Teubner, 1996), 1.xvi.26.

14

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serves. Jan Muller describes the ‘historical learning process [which] relies on the emotion-national versus rational-supranational doctrine which practically everyone in debates around the EU takes for granted’ but ‘without much evidence of any kind’.18 And yet the deeply affective cries of the peoples of Europe and further afield ‘that arise from the intensities of life—in joy, suffering, recognition, wonder, bewilderment, gratitude, expectation or acclamation’, cries ‘for what they most desire—love, justice, truth, goodness, compassion, children, health, food and drink, education, security’19—these stand as evidence which must be considered. For these cries remind us that citizens are mortal, timely beings, who live and work, suffer and die. For both national patriot and post-nationalist visionary, the course of wisdom involves deep, participative reflection on human mortality and human purpose. Commonly it is the death of those near at hand or close to one’s heart that inspires such reflection. This is true of key protagonists of this book including St Augustine and Martha Nussbaum who both reflect publicly on the death of their mothers. At Ostia, shortly before Monica’s passing, Augustine meditates upon the fourth Psalm in search of the One who will show humanity any good. He acknowledges to God that ‘as I first began to meditate my renewal: there you began to be my delight and you gave “gladness in my heart”. And I cried out loud.’ Having read ‘the following verse I uttered another cry from the bottom of my heart: in peace . . . I will go to sleep and have my dream [for] . . . Death is swallowed up in victory.’20 This ‘cry uttered by Augustine . . . is prolonged and echoes from the plains of Milan to the shores of the Mediterranean’.21 It is a cry of this earth for the ears of this earth and the company of heaven. Far from being so heavenly minded as to show no earthly good, the testimony of history and contemporary global experience is that faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ may interpret such cries and the cries of all people in such a way as to shape common

18

J. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton University Press, 2007), 130. D. Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (CUP, 2007), 5. 20 Augustine, Confessions, 9.iv.11, tr. H. Chadwick (OUP, 1998); Psalm 4: 7–8, 1 Corinthians 15: 54. 21 P. Henry, The Path to Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in Saint Augustine, tr. F. F. Burch (Pickwick, 1981), 39. Tr. from P. Henry, La Vision d’Ostie: Sa place dans la vie et l’uvre de saint Augustin (J. Vrin, 1938). 19

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life and political discourse for the benefit of all. For such was the practice of Christianity’s Nazarene founder who brought joy to the widow at Nain, wept with two sisters at Lazarus’ tomb, and rose from the dead, banishing gloom, proclaiming good news, and bringing renewal to all the peoples of the earth.22

22

Luke 7: 11–17; John 11.

1 Politics and Emotions I. EMOTION AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS Contemporary discourse in Western democracies displays diverse opinions about the role of ‘emotion’ in political relations. On the one hand, emotions are commonly reckoned as dangerous in political life, threatening our ability to deliberate about and perform duties to self and society. Public figures are accused of manipulating people through appealing to emotions, whether in the carefully managed public appearances and crafted speeches of a British Prime Minister or US President or the demagoguery of street-fighting, racist nationalists. The charge suggests that appealing to people’s emotions is antidemocratic because emotions bypass rational thought and draw people into easy approbation or disapprobation of political plans. It targets political leaders whose speeches stimulate frenzied adulation, electoral activism, and, all too often, the stigmatization of some despised minority. The widespread suspicion that the early twentyfirst century’s controversially named ‘War on Terror’ was partly designed to keep US and UK citizens fearful and therefore dependent on the state and military infrastructure is a further case in point. Political power was, on this view, used to manipulate emotions rather than win people over by the force of rational argument and evidence. Suspicion of emotion as anti-democratic, anti-rational, and manipulative also works in the other direction, from people to politicians. It is said that authorities should be uninfluenced by mass emotion in reaching their judgements over the formulation of legislation and the prosecution of crime. British Home Secretaries may be criticized if they are swayed either by popular disgust at crimes such as child abuse or by the remorse of a hated child-abuser, such as the

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iconic Myra Hindley. Jurors are warned by judges not to allow sympathy for victims of crime to cloud their judgement over the accused’s guilt or innocence. For to attend to the people’s, the victims’, or the criminal’s emotions is to risk distorting public judgement. Popular fear and anger surrounding reviled and public crimes, such as those committed in the riots around the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011, should be hermetically sealed from official judgements. The clear-thinking application of law and sentencing guidelines should not be muddied by media-enflamed, popular rage. Put bluntly, emotion should not be admitted to the work of the judiciary or legislature. The responsible cast of mind is one of cool, well-informed, rational thought. The model democratic citizen, judge, or elected official scrutinizes the facts, considers relevant rational arguments, weighs the options, and makes a decision. ‘Religion’ is problematic for such an approach. For religion is often closely associated with passion and even fanaticism. It is thought to have ‘a dangerous tendency to provoke and exacerbate violence wherever it is not domesticated and removed from public power by the secular state. According to this line of thought, religion has this lamentable tendency because it is an essentially non-rational impulse, a passion that frequently eludes or exceeds the attempts of reason to tame it.’1 If religion is like this, then the suspicion of emotion and passion as subrational and therefore dangerous applies in the same way to religion. The attempt here to explore the theological significance of politics’ affective dimension would be doubly impolitic. However, alongside suspicion of emotion, popular discourse also suggests that emotions play a constructive and reasonable role in political institutions, identities, and shared activities. On this view, public inquiries, committees, and parliamentary debates should express public concern about injustice. Public demonstrations, characterized by ‘passionate intensity’,2 awaken emotions and effect change. The government official who ignores strong local feelings about housing development on green-field areas is considered a poor representative. Moreover, when politicians behave badly in public office, popular anger is often explicitly recognized. The 2009 crisis over the integrity of the UK Westminster parliament, following the revelation 1

W. Cavanagh, ‘The Invention of Fanaticism’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011),

226. 2

M. Walzer, Politics and Passion (Yale University Press, 2004), p. x.

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of some elected representatives’ expenses claims attitudes, is characteristic of political scandals which attract public ire. The revelations evoked indignation, shame, and embarrassment from both innocent and guilty parliamentarians, public reflection about the quality of politics, and deliberation about what should be done. Emotion seemed to have had some positive role in the affair. Similar examples of corruption, anger, and shame are available in every polity today. In recent British history, there was the infamous ‘Millie Dowler moment’, when it was discovered that a dead girl’s phone had been hacked by a journalist and the nation awoke in horror to media corruption. Beyond domestic affairs, emotions seem to play a role in international politics. In the Arab spring of 2011, one Tunisian street vendor’s frustrated self-immolation represented the feelings of many fellow Tunisians, attracted sympathy across the world, and energized emotions in nearby polities such as Libya where hatred of the Gaddafi regime, built up over decades of wrongdoing by public officials and state authorities, united disparate groups sufficiently to act together. The end of the regime galvanized reflection and deliberation about future constitutional arrangements, but popular anger only reached its goal in the death of Gaddafi himself. The scenes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria witness to ways in which joy, sorrow, and anger bind peoples together and drive them apart. The mixed international emotional response which Gaddafi’s death and public display of his corpse attracted outside Libya testify to the difference which culture makes to political emotions. The recent renewal, in theory and practice, of an avowedly compassionate, humanitarian rationale for military action in places such as Kosovo and Libya further complexifies the debate. This development depends on the plausibility of caring for suffering people by military assault on corrupt authorities, a notion which recalls an older tradition in which sorrow, shame, neighbour-love, self-love, and justice in armed conflict were to some extent reconcilable. From a British military perspective, the rationalization of historic army regiments into larger, less locally linked but more efficient units evoked popular outcry in Scotland where the famed Black Watch regiment was threatened with the loss of independent identity. Emotional connections with the military claim to be somehow intelligible, community-strengthening features of life, which require government protection. A combination of military and memorial emotions emerged during the early twenty-first century in the English town

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of Wooton Bassett whose people routinely lined the streets to mark the return of dead British service personnel via the nearby airfield. The townspeople acted as representative mourners, repeatedly jolting the nation awake to the continuing experience of loss. Wooton Bassett’s behaviour reflected wider patterns in British life whereby monuments, memorials, days of remembrance, and museums are established to give institutional shape to past sorrows and joys. War memorials in almost all villages, towns, and cities in the United Kingdom are particularly powerful ways of localizing and recalling communal emotions. Although these institutions are accepted, it remains unclear how and why emotions should influence military and political affairs. Proposals to inaugurate a yearly ‘British day’ analogous to the United States’ Independence Day and summon schoolchildren aged 16 to participate in a citizenship ceremony might support a certain kind of patriotism. But it remains somewhat opaque both how this happens and whether, more fundamentally, producing national loyalty or patriotism is politically prudent in a cosmopolitan world or the job of government in the first place.3 The suspicion of non-rationality and political inadmissibility hover unresolved. Clues about how such suspicion might be scrutinized appear in a variety of political institutions. In the UK National Health Service, citizens, as healthcare workers, patients, and administrators, experience life’s most acute forms of emotion. If care is poor, patients may become objects of disgust and shame to themselves, their relatives, and healthworkers or, amidst suffering and perhaps healing, may understand themselves and be understood afresh as people of dignity, participants in compassion, joy, and sorrow. The meaning of these emotions, especially compassion, is naturally contested and we shall return to this theme in due course. But that the quality of the emotional experience matters seems intuitively reasonable. The subtleties of such political emotions are further illustrated in practices such as broad-based community organizing whereby, through multiple face-to-face meetings, sympathetic connections form between people and allow concerns around common objects to become organized. A shared fear that the government will not protect a good somehow generates social cohesion so that diverse groups hold together in a common

3

Cf. J. Chaplin, Multiculturalism: A Christian Retrieval (Theos, 2011), 88ff.

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enterprise. When successful, their joy in a good such as affordable housing, a living wage, or a pleasant public park binds them together to face the next challenge.4 On the economic level, a major feature of the modern world is the ever-present, daily update on the current mood of the markets and of business, whether fearful, anxious, joyful, or, occasionally, ashamed and embarrassed. These emotional changes are then received as a daily plebiscite on the future of all our goods, both common and private. And in ecology, people dispute whether fear of danger or joy in new lifestyles will be the more effective in generating widespread behavioural change to meet the challenges the planet faces. Finally, consider the way that the death of public figures, such as Diana, Princess of Wales, both reflects and shapes societal norms. Closer to the heart of the democratic process, consider Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s suspension of normal political affairs in 2009 when Ivan, the son of David Cameron, then leader of the Opposition, passed away. It was disputed whether the cancellation of Prime Minister’s Questions represented an appropriate incursion of family grief in an arena which, some said, should be free of such private emotions and focused solely on public concerns. Grief at Diana’s death was certainly quite different from Gordon Brown’s sombre sympathy for David Cameron and his family. Yet it is not clear just how either is qualified to play a reasonable part in the political process. That grief does play some part is beyond doubt. The extreme grief-stricken behaviour of North Koreans after the death of Kim IlSung and Kim Jong-Il displays the power of emotions in forming political identity. And yet, despite this observation that emotions clearly do play a political role—whether in North Korea, the United Kingdom, Libya, or the USA—there remains uncertainty about whether they should, strictly speaking, be allowed an entrée into rational public discourse.

Public affections, shared understandings, and democratic deficits We have seen that emotions play a part at many levels of political life—in law, healthcare, international affairs, political and cultural 4 Cf. http://www.citizensuk.org, an organization committed to ‘reweaving the fabric of society’.

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leadership, economic activity, and local activism—but that there is uncertainty as to their nature and role. This uncertainty is mirrored by a conceptual inadequacy in political theory, whether conservative, communitarian, or liberal. Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton appeal to ‘public affections’5 and ‘deeper emotions’6 in their accounts of political life. Burke believed that affections could be beneficial but also held that ‘in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection’.7 An older distinction between passions and affections, more opaque to contemporary than eighteenth-century readers, is visible here. In contemporary liberalism the notion of ‘affect’ is sometimes addressed, as in debates around constitutional patriotism. But Patchen Markell notes that modern discussions of patriotism have ‘treated “affect” very flatly and have not addressed differences among affects, much less the possibility of a plurality of affects towards a single object’. Beyond discussions of patriotism, Markell observes that this is ‘in large part true of political theory more generally’.8 Similarly, Michael Walzer has observed liberalism’s difficulties in accommodating passion since it is ‘commonly . . . the product of our attachments and belongings’, aspects of life which are not, in his view, highly valued by much liberal theory. Instead, Walzer hopes for a liberalism which is ‘politically more engaged, sociologically more informed, and psychologically more open’9 and for ‘conviction energized by passion and passion restrained by conviction’.10 These comments suggest that contemporary Western political theory has been somewhat reticent on the topic of ‘emotions’ or ‘passions’. Walzer argues that ‘deliberative democracy [which] is the US version of German theories of communicative action and ideal speech’,11 requires reinterpretation to accommodate the ‘passions’ as 5

E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1794), 115; (OUP, 1999), 77–8. R. Scruton, England: An Elegy (Continuum, 2006), 49–50. 7 Burke, Reflections (1794), 89. 8 P. Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?: On “Constitutional Patriotism” ’, Political Theory, 28/1 (2000), 54; cf. J. Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, Political Studies, 50 (2002), 944–58; J. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1994), 107–48. 9 Walzer, Politics and Passion, xii. 10 Walzer, Politics and Passion, 120. 11 Walzer, Politics and Passion, 90. 6

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ever-present aspects of the demonstrations, bargaining, lobbying, and corruption of regular political experience. Public demonstrations do not display ‘quiet deliberation’ but ‘show the world the force of . . . people’s concern, their passionate commitment and solidarity, their determination to achieve a particular political result’.12 However, Walzer leaves the interrelation of passionate commitment, deliberative democracy, and, by extension, communicative action ill-defined, thereby illustrating Markell’s observation. Walzer’s own distinction between a moral community and a legal community can help here. Justine Lacroix helpfully expounds the former as ‘the social, geographical and cultural unit in which individuals are united by their shared understandings’ and the latter as that which ‘defines the scope of policy measures that legally bind a community of citizens’.13 According to Lacroix, a philosopher who has worked in the European Commission, the moral and the legal fail to overlap in Europe today. Despite protracted efforts at integration, there is little common political awareness across member-states since the people’s ‘shared understandings’ do not cohere with the representative, legislative authorities. This mismatch has created what Cécile Laborde describes as ‘resentment towards aloof and acculturated elites’,14 fuelling a democratic and motivational deficit. Voter turnout at elections is often taken as a symptom of this deficit. The economic upheavals of the Eurozone and especially the Greek experience have been painfully obvious signs of a deeper malaise. But there are more subtle and intractable forms of resentment which counting votes may not register. Consider the case of the ‘metric martyrs’, British market traders in fruit and vegetables, who were indignant when their imperial traditions of weighing and measuring were assaulted by distant metric powers, committed to pan-European standardization. The academic, popular, and political tendency to dismiss such everyday experiences of resentment from public consideration as unsophisticated anti-cosmopolitanism seems politically unwise. Popular alienation from far-away authority which disrupts the warp and woof of local economic and social practices is

12

Walzer, Politics and Passion, 94. Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, 944; cf. M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic Books, 1984). 14 C. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, British Journal of Political Science, 32/4 (Oct. 2002), 601. 13

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energized by centuries of organic and evolving tradition. These signs of a democratic deficit demand exploration not trivialization. Political thought typically takes the resurgent nationalist movements across Europe as a graver sign of disillusionment with the European experiment. For in a time of economic crisis, such nationalism has implications for, among other things, individual member-states’ social security and employment practices. A preference for jobs for home nationals rather than European neighbours may be directly opposed to European law but local allegiances represent a powerful political force. Laborde is typical of many in claiming that to be ‘fully legitimate, political institutions must be perceived by citizens as democratic forums of self-rule, where debate is inclusive and comprehensible, representatives fully accountable, and decisions publicly justified’.15 Such a move is a serious attempt to stabilize polities and diminish resentment by connecting moral and legal communities. But the role of affections themselves requires exploration. Such an emphasis does not diminish the importance of inclusive deliberation, justified decision-making, and accountable representation. Participation in public discourse, debate, and voting are not in any necessary conflict with a constructive role for affectivity. In fact they may coinhere in profoundly important ways. But the legitimacy question requires enrichment through investigation of the nature of ‘shared understandings’.16 Understanding these understandings may be more fundamental to the nature of political life than is commonly recognized and may bear upon the notion of ‘intersubjectivity’ which Habermas has used to explore the discourse processes of political societies.17 For the form Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 601. Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, 944. 17 For a summary of intersubjectivity, cf. N. Adams, Habermas and Theology (CUP, 2006), 28: ‘To treat people as objects or “things” is to engage in “strategic” or “goal-oriented” action. It is to treat social relations on a model of cause and effect: to seek control over others by one’s action as a cause in order to bring about their action as an effect. To treat people as “subjects” is to engage in “communicative” action. This model is often called “inter-subjectivity”. It is to treat social relations on a model which describes the interaction of free and autonomous agents: to persuade others to act by using arguments which the other can freely and autonomously accept or refuse. The crucial difference between strategic and communicative action lies in the role of force and the symmetry or asymmetry that holds between the parties. For strategic action it is “rational” to use violence to achieve one’s ends: one seeks an outcome, not an agreement . . . For communicative action the only force admissible is the force of the better argument; one seeks reasoned agreement, not merely an outcome.’ 15 16

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of any putative affective dimension in political intersubjectivity could refine perceptions of the political process so as to render affectivity an essential ‘motivational’ feature of the internal life and external relations of polities. Understanding the way that affectivity operates in political societies is thus a reasonable goal of political thought. Moreover, recalling the common pejorative association of affectivity with religious faith and the rejection of both as inherently violent and dangerously anti-political, such a development could address questions pressed by Habermas concerning European political culture’s relationship to its religious, specifically Christian, past as well as to its increasingly multi-religious and even, he suggests, ‘post-secular’ present and future.18 Whilst the quasi-eschatological term ‘post-secular’ suggests a changing of eras in ways which are not to be taken as gospel, Christian faith should yet take the opportunity such language affords to share its own distinctive resources for understanding and overcoming the democratic deficit within contemporary polities, while at the same time continuing to pursue its global concern for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. We will return in more detail to these matters in Chapters 4 and 5. However, in order to prepare for that part of the enquiry, we must avoid the imprecision concerning affectivity which has bedevilled various political theories by enquiring closely into its nature and political significance. This enterprise will occupy us for the rest of this chapter, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. Only through pursuing these matters rigorously can clarity be brought to the ‘motivational’ and ‘democratic deficit’ of contemporary political experience.

II. THE COGNITIVIST TURN IN THEORIES OF EMOTION The preceding section attests the inchoate yet insistent popular and academic claim that ‘emotions’ or ‘passions’ are somehow important to political relations, whether as invaders which facilitate malign 18 J. Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations of the Cosmopolitan State?’, in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Polity Press, 2008), 101–13; J. Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of What is Missing (Polity Press, 2010).

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manipulation or as constructive contributors which build popular solidarity around common purposes or both. There seems to be some definite reality which appeals to ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ attempt to pick out, an ‘affective dimension’19 inextricable from the many levels of civic participation. But this dimension has been inadequately conceptualized in mainstream political theory. To understand why and to explore the nature of the democratic deficit and shared understandings to which Lacroix and Walzer refer, two lines of enquiry need to encounter each other.

Intentionality and rational assessment Many recent philosophers of emotion have taken a position that might surprise their contemporaries in political theory. As noted above, Thomas Dixon has argued that ‘emotions’ were largely a nineteenth-century invention which collapsed and occluded the older distinctions between ‘passions’, ‘affections’, and ‘sentiments’ and led to the classification of emotions as essentially non-rational. Commenting on the contemporary scene, Dixon notes that the predominant scholarly attitude towards the emotions in recent decades has been one of loving restoration. Long maligned by moralists and theologians as irrational and harmful, so the story goes, it has fallen to modern philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists in recent years to retrieve the emotions from centuries of neglect and abuse and to restore their intellectual lustre. The standard view now is that emotions are cognitive states which constitute intelligent appraisals of the world. They are neither mere feelings, nor obstacles to reason. The cognitive nature of emotions is used to argue not only against a strong dichotomy between reason and emotion, but also in favour of the relevance of our emotions to ethical decisions.20

As Dixon goes on to argue, there are deep historical and interpretative problems with the charge that moralists and theologians were responsible for emotions’ non-rational classification. To these we shall return. For now, we shall consider the conceptual core of the new

19

O. O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), 163. T. Dixon, ‘Revolting Passions’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011), 298; for a succinct survey of alternative contemporary views, cf. N. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 12–15. 20

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consensus, the notion of ‘intentionality’. Cognitive theorists of emotion reckon that the ‘intentional’ nature of emotions indicate that emotions have a cognitive quality. By ‘intentionality’, cognitive theorists mean something very specific, namely the way that emotions are typically about or directed at something or someone. ‘We are rarely, if ever, simply angry, proud, or afraid. Rather we are angry at someone, proud of something, afraid of something or someone.’21 We say that we are angry at those who use military force without just cause, that we are indignant about political fraud, that we are compassionate towards hospital patients, that we have an ongoing fear concerning the economic situation, or that we rejoice in the political leader whom we have elected because of the goods she has protected for us. What impresses cognitivists is that the structure of objectdirectedness is closely akin to many other cognitive processes such as beliefs, judgements, or thoughts—if emotions are also object-directed, it seems plausible that they might be members of this cognitive family and even constitutive of other family members. As noted above, this suggestion is hardly original. The object-relatedness of ‘affectus’ and ‘passiones’ led Augustine to reject the Stoics’ wish to extirpate them and explore instead the reasons for affections’ attraction to certain objects. Nevertheless, whether or not its theological predecessors are recognized, this renewed interest in ‘intentionality’ has garnered widespread albeit not universal support across contemporary philosophy of emotion. A clarification is essential here to prevent misunderstanding. This use of the term ‘intentionality’ is importantly distinct from the notion of intention as ‘intending to act’ which refers to a resolved will to do ‘x’ or ‘y’. This other discourse about intention concerns a range of factors such as deliberate decisions, choices, and actions. In that discourse, for example, one’s beliefs and one’s intentions may conflict. One may at the same time intend to do ‘x’ but also believe that one will not be able to do ‘x’. But these questions, though important in their own terms, are not central in the discourse about intentional emotion. For the semantic range of the term intentionality as used by cognitive theorists of emotion is quite distinct from ‘intention to act’. Their interest, to repeat, is in the intentionality suggested by the object-directedness of emotion, which in turn suggests emotions’ 21 P. Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 312.

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cognitive aptitude. The notion of ‘intentional emotion’ does have a connection to action as we shall see but should neither be interpreted as ‘emotions we mean to have’ nor simply as an aspect of the discourse about choice, will, and desire as related to intentional action. In addition to the claim about emotions’ family resemblance to other cognitive activities, contemporary cognitive theorists of emotion hold that emotions’ object-directed intentionality suggests that they are not essentially non-rational but rather ‘proper objects of rational assessment’.22 If emotions are directed or attached to objects, then it follows that emotions may reasonably be admired, critiqued, or condemned depending on the nature of the emotion and the nature of its object. It is common not only to ask ‘why are you sad?’ or ‘do you think your anger is reasonable?’ and to expect answers but also to assess whether sadness or anger of this sort is appropriate. If someone is angry at her political representative over some apparent failure to uphold justice, it is possible to ask her questions about this anger and to assess it in relation to factors such as her perception of the state of affairs, whether there really is injustice, whether the representative is responsible, and so on. On another note, if a nation-state’s international development policy is also to its own advantage, it is reasonable to ask whether compassion and self-regard are reconcilable and so evaluate the policy’s claim to be compassionate. Or again, if there is widespread anger over a particular kind of criminal offence, it is reasonable to assess the rightness of that anger and its relevance, if any, for sentencing offenders. The dual insight of the intentional quality of emotion and its concomitant openness to rational assessment provides the basis for the widespread contemporary consensus that emotions are ‘intelligent appraisals’ of some sort.23 Since other cognitive phenomena such as beliefs, thoughts, and judgements are characterized by this kind of intentionality and openness to rational assessment, this insight has suggested that emotion itself has a cognitive aptitude and may be equivalent to or constitutive of such other cognitive phenomena. Objections have been raised against this development in emotions theory. Others will be considered during the argument but a common one is that emotions often seem to lack particular objects. The fear of 22 J. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics, 104/4 (July 1994), 824–5. 23 Dixon, ‘Revolting Passions’, 298.

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falling off a bridge into a gorge is not directed at any particular object. On a political level, an objectless fear of what might happen if a national way of life is not preserved against outsiders makes nationalistic political operations significantly easier. Personal emotions, such as generalized anxiety or depression, also seem objectless. Cognitive theorists have rebutted these objections by either recategorizing such apparently objectless emotions under ‘moods’ or, more convincingly to my mind, by claiming that there are implicit, unrecognized objects which have not yet appeared to the consciousness but are attracting subconscious emotional attention.24 Such a rebuttal typically observes that a common feature of apparently objectless states as depression and anxiety is a feeling of anxiety about the apparently objectless anxiety itself. This stands as further evidence that emotions are intentional, may be reasonably assessed, and so are characterized, in some way, by a cognitive aptitude.25

Sources of the cognitivist turn To clarify the cognitivist turn in theories of emotion and its political significance, it is important to understand the sources of its impetus. These can be categorized under two interrelated headings. The first group of sources is conceptual and widely shared among cognitivist thinkers; the second concerns the interpretation of the history of ideas, is much contested, and concerns the viability of the relationship between theology and politics. First, a common conceptual impetus to most cognitivist theories is scepticism of sensationalism’s sharp distinction between reason and emotion. William James, in his (in)famous 1884 article, argued that emotions are simply feelings of bodily change, individuated by particular bodily sensations and caused by environmental factors such as running away from a hungry bear.26 James rejected previously 24

For an early proponent of emotions’ cognitive aptitude, George Pitcher, an emotion may be intentional even without a precise referent. G. Pitcher, ‘Emotion’, Mind, 74 (1965), 326–7. 25 Cf. M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (CUP, 2001), 132–5; cf. A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 36ff., 42; for a good summary of the cognitivist position, cf. M. Elliott, Faithful Feelings: Emotion in the New Testament (IVP, 2005), 17–47. 26 W. James, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9 (1884), 188–205.

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accepted notions of the brain or soul acting on the body in favour of an account of causation wholly dependent on bodily changes. The argument was seriously flawed in ways which James himself soon realized but could not address.27 Most obviously, the notion that bodily feeling exhausts the definition of emotion does not follow from the claim that emotions may involve bodily changes. Moreover, bodily changes such as tears may accompany a range of emotions such as anger, joy, or sorrow and so the bodily feeling does not effectively individuate emotions. James’s own contemporaries mounted a detailed critique making these observations. Some instead proposed cognitivist positions not unlike the one already outlined.28 Despite these profound weaknesses, James’s theory attracted and retains widespread academic and cultural acceptance. Dixon observes that James’s ‘assumption that all emotions, harsh or tender, involved bodily disturbances of some kind—whether contingently or by definition—is a doctrine that gained consensus among psychologists of all kinds in the late nineteenth century, and which has persisted to the present day’.29 It is not hard to understand why this has been so. James’s contemporary, James Baldwin described James’s approach as characterized by ‘a certain frankness and naïve clearness which has concealed in a measure the real complexity of the problem’.30 Robert Roberts is similarly direct: Why are people inclined to identify emotions with physical sensations? Experimental psychologists no doubt find bodily states attractive because they are more readily measurable than other factors. But the mistake is not just a professional liability; ordinary people can be easily induced, with a few leading questions, to think they feel their emotions in their bodies. The reason, I think, is that these sensations are conceptually simpler and easier to identify than the emotions themselves. This homely theory is just an instance of our pre-reflective tendency to alight on the simple and obvious.31 W. James, ‘The Physical Basis of Emotion’, Psychological Review, 1 (1894), 516–29, summarized by Thomas Dixon as an ‘unexciting and ultimately capitulatory formulation’ in the face of the heavy criticism the original article had received (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions (CUP, 2003), 211). 28 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 212–23. 29 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 223. 30 J. M. Baldwin, ‘The Origin of Emotional Expression’, Psychological Review, 1/6 (1894), 610. 31 R. C. Roberts, ‘What an Emotion is’, Philosophical Review, 97/2 (Apr. 1988), 208; cf. R. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (CUP, 2003); R. Roberts, Spirituality and Human Emotion (Eerdmans, 1982). 27

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James’s influence is non-trivial for politics for it is just this simple belief in the non-rationality of emotions which has kept popular discourse and political theory largely uninterested in addressing the affective dimension of political life. For it is hardly likely to be politically important that a citizen feels a slight shiver in his liver when he sees the stock-market take a tumble, that a doctor weeps as she comforts the parents grieving a miscarriage, or that a group of soldiers feel a burning sensation in their cheeks as they are publicly praised for serving their country. However, it would be paying James too great a compliment to put our contemporary uncertainty about this dimension of politics down to him alone. Cognitive theories of emotions have also gained impetus from a more challenging and ambiguous conversation in the wider philosophical tradition. In this conversation, David Hume’s thought has been interpreted as a contrast to cognitive theories of emotion.32 Hume is said to have accepted the Lockean claim that passions were ‘internal sensations’ of pleasure and pain and ‘no more contain any thought than do the bodily sensations that are their simple counterparts’.33 John Locke himself was no mere sensationalist and did not hold that mental faculties were simply ‘the products of experience’ but rather ‘believed the powers of the mind to be derived from two sources—first, sensations, but also the internal reflection of the mind upon its own activity, which he called . . . “reflection”’.34 For Hume, inheriting Locke’s legacy, passions were mental sensations, akin to physical sensations but constituting internal mental activities.35 Hume denied the rationalist consensus that such sensations should be subjected to reason if they were not to endanger moral agency. The intellectual backdrop often invoked here is that of René Descartes who is said to have been highly suspicious of the passions in light of their tendency to obscure rational thought, stemming as they did from the bodily senses and working ‘inwards’, as it were, via the animal spirits (fine parts of the blood) to bring about confused perceptions in the soul. John Cottingham sponsors this traditional account to some extent but, as a corrective, has emphasized a further 32 For an alternative examination of this characterization, cf. J. Milbank, ‘Hume versus Kant: Faith, Reason and Feeling’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011), 276–97. 33 J. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism’, 825. 34 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 99. 35 D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (OUP, 1978), esp. book II, part i, sect. 1.

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strand to Descartes’s thought, namely that passions, although they do not render ‘clear and distinct truths’ yet provide ‘powerfully motivating signals that alert us to what is beneficial or harmful to the mindbody composite’. The passions are part of the human apparatus given by God and, though liable to betray us, can assist us to some extent. The limit case seems to be Descartes’s wondering adoration of the beauty of knowledge of God which ‘involves a remarkable fusing of cognitive intuition with an outpouring of passion’.36 This revision of Hume’s most influential immediate intellectual predecessor suggests more common ground than generally supposed. Nevertheless, Hume does represent a real departure epitomized in his observations both that reason was and should be the slave of the passions and that passion itself was rightly basic to the sympathetic mechanism which sustains the obligations we hold in society. Our affections are enlarged in such a way as to take the good of every person as our own good also, thereby buttressing the work of justice.37 Passions, unlike mere bodily pains and pleasures, are secondary impressions of reflection, which, as material particles in the mind, interact by association with each other. Though Hume may appear to allow for cases when these passions are unreasonable, as when ‘accompany’d with some false judgment’, he then goes on to explain that it is ‘not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment’.38 On this reckoning the ‘passions’ are not judgements and have no cognitive aptitude, still less the newly minted term ‘emotion’, which either occupied a similar though vaguer semantic place in Hume’s writings or, as Annette Baier has suggested, was perhaps directly equivalent to mere bodily disturbance.39 What is of political importance is that Hume believed that these passions are somehow able naturally to approve what conduces 36 J. Cottingham, ‘Sceptical Detachment or Loving Submission to the Good? Reason, Faith, and the Passions in Descartes’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 50–2. 37 T. Penelhum, ‘Hume’s Moral Psychology’, in D. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume (CUP, 1993), 117–47; D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (OUP, 1975); cf. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism’, 825. 38 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, part iii, sect. 3, 416. 39 A. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Harvard University Press, 1991), 160–70, 180–1; cf. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 105; also cf. ibid. 108, where Dixon suggests that Hume’s use of the term ‘emotions’ is derived from Descartes’s ‘émotions’.

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towards public utility and all that is beneficial to people living in society. This given quality to human passions is ‘founded on the original constitution of the mind’.40 Accordingly, he criticizes those who dismiss the political significance of passions and sentiments, specifically calling for people to ‘renounce the theory, which accounts for every moral sentiment by the principle of self-love’ and to ‘adopt a more public affection’.41 Hume’s overall line of thought suggests a given, transcultural, public significance for sentiments, passions, and affections. It also hints, tantalizingly, at the possibility that passions may, after all, have some kind of intentional quality as forms of approbation and blame and that, inasmuch as they concern public affairs, they are akin to beliefs. However, such a claim would be a minority report and in some tension with Hume’s sensationalist account which firmly distinguishes passions and reason.42 And so it is the settled view of cognitivists that sensationalism, whether Jamesian or Humean, is unable to compete with the explanatory power provided by the renewed focus on the intentionality of emotion.43 So Paul Lauritzen argues that ‘if anger . . . is always anger about something, then anger will include reference to belief and judgment in a way that feeling or sensation does not. We do not ask about the object of a stomach ache or about that of fatigue. But we ask about the object of anger.’44 But just as physical sensations of pleasure and pain do not have an intentional referent and so cannot be an exhaustive account of emotion, it is similarly hard to imagine what a mental sensation which is purely pleasurable or painful might possibly be. The mind’s passions or

40

Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 214 (173). Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 219 (178); as suggested above, self-regard and compassion may not be essentially contradictory as Hume’s opponents suggested. 42 Cf. M. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the 18th Century and Today (OUP, 2010), esp. ch. 3. 43 For an alternative to the line I suggest here, cf. S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Clarendon Press, 2000). 44 Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’, 312. Similarly, Charles Taylor suggests that an ‘emotion is a response to its “intentional object”, and as such essentially involves a “take” on this object. I fear some impending disaster, or I am despondent at some disappointing outcome which has already befallen. The emotion is an apprehension of the object, threatening or actually present’ but quite distinct from a ‘raw feel’ such as ‘the pleasurable feeling of entering a warm bath after trekking through deep snow’. Taylor, ‘Reason, Faith and Meaning’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 13. 41

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emotions may of course cognize something concerning which it may experience pleasure and pain. But to say this is already to admit that emotions are self-reflectively intentional and so to rule out Hume’s claim that the passions are non-cognitive sensations. It is quite reasonable to allow that some emotions may be accompanied by particular sensations on some occasions but this is not equivalent to the claim that emotions are identical with any particular physical sensations let alone any putative mental sensations. Accordingly, such is the confidence that modern cognitivists have that Penelhum can pronounce Hume’s account as fatally flawed by ‘a wildly implausible denial of the intentionality of passions’.45 This judgement seems correct and so, if a more persuasive and insightful account of the affective ‘shared understandings’ of political relations is to be developed, the account of emotion as a sensation without cognitive intentionality must be set aside.46 The political significance of rejecting the Jamesian, Humean, or Cartesian routes and accepting emotions’ intentionality is the evaluative form which intentional emotions take. Deigh comments that if the object of fear must be something that is seen to threaten harm, then fear entails an evaluation of its object as the potential source or agent of some bad effect. If the object of pity must be someone who is seen to have suffered misfortune, then pity entails an evaluation of its object’s condition as bad and undeservedly so.47

Anger about the pay and conditions of a certain sector of the population includes some evaluation of that work, its proper environment, and its proper reward, as well as an evaluation of the worth of the workers. Hatred of a tyrannical leader who has prevented widespread economic prosperity evaluates both that leader and the benefits of which the people have been deprived. Emotion recognizes value in its object and some goodness or badness about the object’s conditions and qualities. When unions come together in anger and when people rise up in hatred against rulers, we see these evaluations shaping collective discourse and action. A sensationalist account which excludes intentionality excludes emotions from that process of reasoning about value which lies at the heart of politics. 45 46 47

Penelhum, ‘Hume’s Moral Psychology’, 128. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism’, 826. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism’, 836.

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A second common conceptual impetus among cognitivists has come from neuroscience. Developments in this field contradict sharp philosophical and psychological distinctions between reason and emotion and the Brownian idea of a singular unitary phenomenon called ‘emotion’. In contrast to the late nineteenth century’s supposed empirical certainties, Joseph LeDoux is critical of modern psychology’s tendency to ascribe reality to vague departments of the mind and to ‘carve the mind up into functional pieces, such as perception, memory and emotion’.48 LeDoux explores the way that neural networks interact in the brain and aims to show that ‘cognition and emotion are best thought of as separate but interacting mental functions mediated by separate but interacting brain systems’.49 But once the importance of neuroscientific data is granted, there remains the task of interpretation. Dixon takes neuroscience’s findings as further evidence of ‘subdivisions within Thomas Brown’s overinclusive category of the “emotions”’,50 while LeDoux wonders whether human brains may develop through evolution so that with ‘increased connectivity between the cortex and amydala, cognition and emotion might begin to work together rather than separately’.51 He emphasizes the difference between conscious and unconscious emotions and criticizes the trend in cognitive science since the 1960s which has equated emotions with ‘cold’ reasoning and logic.52 According to LeDoux, ‘more and more cognitive scientists are getting interested in emotions. The problem is, instead of heating up cognition, this effort has turned emotion cold—in cognitive models, emotions, filled with and explained by thoughts, have been stripped of passion’,53 reducing human minds to ‘souls on ice’.54 Gerald Clore’s suggestion that ‘the automatic, negative affective reaction we have to

48

LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Phoenix, 2004), 16. 49 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 69. 50 Dixon, ‘Revolting Passions’, 309. 51 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 303. 52 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 38; cf. ibid. 27, where the functionalist development in cognitive science is traced in which minds and machines were closely associated. Cf. H. Putnam, ‘Minds and Machines’, in S. Hook (ed.), Dimensions of Mind (Collier, 1960). 53 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 38. 54 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 25.

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incoherence and illogic’ prompts a process of ‘dissonance reduction’ is perhaps the kind of cooler account which LeDoux has in mind.55 Michael Spezio takes the evidence of neuroscience further than LeDoux, arguing that emotion is ‘constitutive of, and not separate from, the reasoning and decision making that people do about their own values and the preferences and values of others’.56 He is rightly sceptical of a reductive psychologism, ‘the doctrine that normative logic and ethics/morality are subsets of descriptive, causal theories of mental processes, such as are found in psychology and neuroscience’.57 He reasons first that ‘the current methods of neuroscientific investigation into reason and moral action depend utterly on the very normative distinctions that psychologistic proponents seek to replace’ and second that the empirical ‘limitations of neuroimaging data’ may be misleading about actual brain activity, especially when those data are extrapolated from a sample to humanity as a whole and then applied back to any one individual.58 Instead, Spezio believes that moral theology and neuroscience can help each other and appeals to the analysis of brain-damaged patients to show ‘the potential importance of neural areas associated with emotional processing to realworld reasoning, especially in the evaluative and social domains’.59 The key data here came from ground-breaking analysis by Antonio Damasio of the skull of Phineas Gage, the late nineteenth-century railway worker whose accident sent a metal bar through his brain, severely damaging ‘his ventromedial prefrontal cortices and the front of his anterior cingulate’, sparing his ‘dorsolateral areas’ and leaving Phineas with severely reduced social sensitivity but functional logical capacities. The outcome has been a focus on the ‘importance of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex as critical for effective social judgment and action, and thus for emotion’s role in both’.60 Spezio is cautious about relying too heavily on the Gage case since the data, being fragmentary and distant, entail that findings are 55 G. Clore, ‘Psychology and the Rationality of Emotion’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011), 328. 56 M. Spezio, ‘The Neuroscience of Emotion and Reasoning in Social Contexts: Implications for Moral Theology’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (April 2011), 342. 57 Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 340. 58 Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 341–2. 59 Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 345. 60 Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 343; cf. A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (HarperCollins, 1994).

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necessarily speculative. Instead, he focuses on ‘linking impaired social reasoning to focal damage in the ventromedial cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and frontal pole’.61 This social reasoning is bound up with brain-damaged individuals’ ‘own valuations [and] those of the people around them’.62 This all-too-brief examination of contemporary neuroscience has important theological, philosophical, and political implications. The research Spezio draws upon has reshaped the neuroscientific field away from excluding emotion from cognition and towards an affective neuroscience which recognizes affectivity as an aspect of cognition, taking its place alongside memory and decision-making among others. The shift has been so profound that Richard Davison goes so far as to arraign the notion that ‘[a]ffect and cognition are subserved by separate and independent neural circuits’ as one of the seven sins in the study of emotion.63 For our purposes here, what is important is that theologies, philosophies, and political theories which have neglected the role of affectivity in political relations on the grounds of its non-cognitive status need to take heed of the science. Christian theology is not in itself competent to judge the workings of the ventromedialcortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and frontal pole. Nor should theology make itself a hostage to each new claimed discovery. However, major strands of Christian theology have their own reasons to learn the truth about neural networks in light of a highly positive albeit complex view of human embodiment. For example, contemporary Augustinianism, represented by a figure such as Oliver O’Donovan, affirms contemporary bodily life in the doctrines of creation and incarnation and points towards its fulfilment in the resurrection and new creation. Such a theology will be committed to exploring the working of the brain and remain respectfully attentive to this ongoing debate in neuroscientific research wherein dual process accounts which dichotomously oppose reason and emotion are still prevalent, partly under the influence of cognitive psychology and, in some cases, prior utilitarian moral commitments which are driving the interpretation of neuroimaging data.64 On the other hand,

Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 344. Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 345. 63 J. Davison, ‘Seven Sins in the Study of Emotion: Correctives from Affective Neuroscience’, Brain and Cognition, 52 (2003), 129. 64 Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 351. 61 62

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the contrasting integrationist approach, sponsored by Spezio, points to emerging evidence of ‘simulation processes’ whereby interpersonal ‘shared circuits’ of neural ‘networks are . . . supportive of empathy . . . the ability spontaneously to reconstruct in oneself what another is feeling, thinking, and [planning to do]’.65 The second source of the cognitivist impetus is more disputed. Although there is a majority consensus today about the cognitive aptitude of emotions over against sensualist and dual processing theories, there is less agreement about the history from which such consensus emerged. It is in this historical contest over who was responsible for the opposition of cognition and ‘emotion’ that the terminological preference for ‘affection’ argued for in the Introduction shows its conceptual and political teeth. On one historical reconstruction, the philosophers of antiquity and the theologians of Christianity are the bogeymen while late twentieth-century philosophers and neuroscientists are held aloft as the great saviours of emotion. The neuroscientist LeDoux, who is, as noted above, optimistic about the evolutionary development of integration, ventures to trace the history of traditional thought about emotion. He begins by dismissing Plato as having starkly opposed reason to passion, citing Plato’s parable of the charioteer. This is hardly an adequate reading of the Phaedrus where the role of the attentive steed is contrasted to the wild and recalcitrant one. But LeDoux reserves his most stinging criticism for Christian theology [which] has long equated emotions with sins, temptations to resist by reason and willpower in order for the immortal soul to enter the kingdom of God. [Moreover] our legal system treats ‘crimes of passion’ differently from premeditated transgressions. Given this long tradition of the separation of passion and reason, it should not be too surprising that a field currently exists to study rationality, socalled cognition, on its own, independent of emotion.66

On this view, Christian theology—LeDoux does not pause to tell us which theologians he has in mind—is the guilty obscurantist which has kept cognition and emotion apart only now to have been reunited by neuroscientific discovery. This ambitious judgement on two thousand years of Christian thought and practice stands as an invitation to 65 66

Spezio, ‘Neuroscience of Emotion’, 350–1. LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 24.

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give a theological account of the phenomena which LeDoux calls ‘emotions’. Moral theology may have greater subtlety than LeDoux imagines is the case. If LeDoux’s charge did not have such serious ramifications, it would be amusing to note that the crime for which he arraigns Christianity is precisely that of which Augustine finds Virgil and Plato guilty, namely the equation of the body along with ‘cupiditatem’, ‘timorem’, ‘laetitiam’, and ‘tristitiam’ (desire, fear, joy, and sadness) as the ‘origines omnium peccatorum atque vitiorum’ (‘the beginnings of all sins and vices’).67 In contrast, Augustine explains how Christian faith longs for the affective richness of the life of the city of God in the new heaven and the new earth, a fully bodily life of righteous affection, living according to the Spirit and not the flesh.68 Unfortunately, LeDoux fares no better in his bold but unguarded summary of jurisprudential wisdom on emotion. For he actually describes the legal tradition moving in an opposite direction to what he perceives to be the theological error. Emotions would be both nonrational and culpable sins according to LeDoux’s account of Christian theology but would be reasonable mitigations of culpability according to the most generous interpretation of his legal theory—the cuckold’s emotions in common law are, as Nussbaum and Kahan have suggested, assessed according to whether they are reasonable.69 But these two directions are hardly reconcilable. Indeed, LeDoux’s foray into theology and politics is all confusion and invites more considered attention of actual legal practice, such as the ancient Israelite and common law traditions to which we shall return in depth. A theologically sophisticated account of affection may not only clarify problems in politics and philosophy but also support the very integrationist neuroscientific programme which Spezio and LeDoux are interested in promoting. LeDoux’s opinions reflect a wider antipathy towards Christianity which seems more due to unreflective cultural presuppositions than actual historical evidence. Thomas Dixon cites especially Robert Solomon’s claim that ‘from antiquity up until the late twentieth 67 Augustine, City of God, 14.3; cf. 14.5: ‘hinc eis sint morbi cupiditatum et timorum et laetitiae siue tristitiae; quibus quattuor uel perturbationibus, ut Cicero appellat, uel passionibus, ut plerique uerbum e uerbo Graeco exprimunt, omnis humanorum morum uitiositas continetur.’ 68 City of God, 14.9. 69 LeDoux, Emotional Brain, 24; cf. D. Kahan and M. Nussbaum, ‘Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law’, Columbia Law Review, 96 (Mar. 1996), 269–374.

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century philosophers and psychologists have generally, and misguidedly, thought of reason and the emotions as antagonists’.70 By contrast, according to Dixon, the association of ‘emotion’ with nonrationality was a temporary nineteenth-century historical accident caused mostly by the occlusion of older especially Christian subtleties. Moreover, this awareness of the process of occlusion comes not from Dixon but from Thomas Brown, the inventor of ‘emotion’ who claimed, in relation to the paradigm-shifting effect of the term ‘emotion’ that a ‘difference of words is, in this case, more than a mere verbal difference. Though it be not the expression of a difference in doctrine, it very speedily becomes so.’71 Dixon suggests that Augustine and Aquinas’s subtle categorizations and distinctions of passions and affections show just what a disaster Brown’s terminological takeover was for the fate of ‘emotion’. For Augustine, ‘to conflate “emotion” or “affect” with “passion” is a kind of ideology of [the] original lie . . . that one commits oneself to in pride’ since it is pride that fails to see that the Good which summons our affections, which may be good or bad, is beyond the idols to which perverted passions are enslaved.72 These divergent histories play out on the political level, only touched upon by Dixon. If any particular political theory has neglected the cognitive nature of these phenomena, it may have done so for at least two reasons. Either it may have accepted the received wisdom that ‘emotion’ is non-cognitive and therefore non-political or it may have associated religion with passion and followed the secularizing imperative to exclude all such destabilizing and divisive influences from public reasoning. In both cases it will have lost the subtlety of the pre-‘emotion’ era. Here neuroscience is helpful for, as Sarah Coakley observes, if ‘reasoning in its neurological 70 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 2; R. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Hackett, 1993); cf. R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (OUP, 2000), which argues for a mistaken turn deep within the Christian tradition over the reception of Stoic thought on the ‘emotions’ such that Seneca’s innocent ‘first movements’—which were distinct from emotions—were transformed progressively into sins by Origen and Evagrius and then focused, by Augustine, in lust. For one form of a response to Sorabji, see J. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, Augustinian Studies, 36/1 (2005), 195–217. 71 T. Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Tait, 1828), 100; cited at Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 122. 72 Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, 201; cf. E. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 278.

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manifestations is in some sense essentially also affective . . . it cannot be that belief in God is irrational simply because it too has affective dimensions’.73 In other words, if affectivity is back in the political mix, then theology cannot be excluded on the grounds that it is affective. The mistake has been to assume that any one philosophy, theology, or political creed was solely responsible for the loss of subtlety concerning the significance of joy, fear, hatred, and the rest, and may therefore play no part in their rehabilitation to political significance. The more promising route forwards is for all who share the consensus position today to agree that if cognitive, evaluative intentionality does characterize sorrow, joy, fear, shame, and many other phenomena, this will affect descriptive conceptualization of and normative recommendations for political society. If these ‘emotions’ are cognitive they may be articulated and shared in common by a number of subjects; and if evaluative then they may become constitutive of a political interest for that group of subjects. Contrast this with sensationalist accounts in which it is hard to imagine the shared sensation of a particular physical pleasure or pain being politically unifying and constituting a political interest. One could of course conceive of a widespread experience of painful suffering such as cancer being the object towards which emotions are directed or drawn and thereby becoming a unifying focus. But it is not, properly speaking, simply the pain which establishes unity but rather the pain along with the emotional cognition of it when shared among sufferers and carers alike. This cognitivist consensus can be applied to such diverse political phenomena as demonstrations, mitigation in criminal trials, the strength of bonds in professional guilds such as medicine, the durability of military regiments, local allegiance, the role of rhetoric, religious bodies such as churches, the form of laws, and the nature of political representation. Phenomena like fear, anger, and joy seem to play a significant role in these elements of nations’ common life, some of which will be considered in detail in the course of our discussion. Representation and law will be examined in Chapter 3, locality in Chapter 4, and churches in Chapter 5. If what we have hitherto called ‘emotions’ do have cognitive aptitude, then neglecting

73

S. Coakley, ‘Introduction’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (April 2011), 219.

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them on account of their supposed non-rationality will not be wise political practice in any of these areas and many more.

III. COMPASSION AS PARADIGM: MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S APPROACH In light of the multiple, heterogeneous theological and philosophical commitments which characterize the cognitivist consensus, it seems sensible to proceed in our investigation in close conversation with a rival and non-Christian account that we might judge whether or not distinctively Christian theological resources bring particular benefits. If our account of ‘affection’ is to have any persuasive power within political theory and practice, it would be as well to be in dialogue, from the beginning, with those who currently have command of the field, thereby acknowledging in practice the reality of general revelation. There is much to be gained through such close conversation, not only for strengthening agreements but also for establishing better quality disagreements between various philosophies and theologies. Martha Nussbaum seems an ideal conversation partner. Her work seeks to fill the void left by discredited Cartesian, Humean, and sensualist theories of emotion.74 Using the language of ‘emotion’, her moving and insightful approach shows how deep philosophical commitments can influence an analysis of the nature of emotions and their role in politics. Moreover, she puts those philosophical commitments into conversation with theology in fruitful ways and applies her thesis about emotions to specific political structures and laws. This makes her work particularly important for any writing which attempts to understand the place of emotion in modern nation-states. Furthermore, Nussbaum is particularly interesting because of her professed Judaism and her willingness to take seriously Christian theologians such as Augustine. She is open to conversation not merely with some thin theism, skin stretched tight over non-revelatory bones, but rather with a robustly theological declaration of the nature of reality. Accordingly, an extended analysis of Nussbaum’s theory will be of peculiar 74 Esp. Upheavals of Thought and Hiding from Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2004), cf. M. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, with respondents, ed. J. Cohen (Beacon Press, 2002).

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importance in highlighting the nature of the field in which a Christian moral theology must do its work. Nussbaum’s account sits within the cognitive-evaluative school of thought outlined above. Basic human ‘emotions’ are ‘intelligent responses to the perception of value’ which ‘involve judgments about the salience for our well-being of uncontrolled external objects’.75 She argues for the intentionality of emotion—their ‘aboutness’—and their openness to rational assessment, as contrasted with the way that the wind is not about the object it crashes into and pounding blood is not about the reason for its pounding.76 She criticizes conceptions which cannot effectively individuate emotions. For example, feeling-centred conceptions cannot sufficiently account for why anger is different from grief since the same physical feeling or change may occur with both emotions. Moreover, emotions cannot be individuated by characteristic modes of behaviour such as running since the same behaviour with similar physiological change may indicate fear or compassion, depending on whether one is running from a bear or towards a loved one in distress. Instead she argues that what must individuate emotions is the cognitive content they have with respect to the objects towards which they are directed. Emotion is organized around belief rather than physical sensation since the belief is a necessary condition of the emotion. Beliefs are not intellectual acts separate from the emotion but rather constituent parts of the emotion. Thus emotions are themselves at least partially constituted by beliefs about objects rather than simply parasitic on belief.77 Having established this, Nussbaum then adopts the Stoic claim that a judgement about the world is an ‘assent to an appearance’ of reality.78 When a Stoic has observed that something appears to be the case, her judgement is an assent to that appearance, an acceptance that it is the case. Nussbaum adapts this account towards a ‘neo-stoic’ position: namely that a judgement about a valuable object which is not under the agent’s total control will be an emotional evaluation of that object not a mere assent to its appearance. For example, when Nussbaum considers the death of her mother from cancer—an event 75 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 1–2. Nussbaum also expends great energy on animal emotions; however, this aspect of her theory lies beyond the reach of the present discussion. 76 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 27. 77 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 33ff. 78 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 37.

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which was obviously not under her total control—her perception of reality involves an evaluative content, namely the emotion of grief by which she intelligently responds to this uncontrolled death. Her emotion is intentionally directed towards an object (her mother’s death) in the sense that, by her grief, Nussbaum sees the object internally, interprets it from her own perspective and believes certain things about its value. All human emotions involve these evaluating judgements and are characteristically directed to ‘intentional objects’, such as other human beings, which are ‘external’ to the subject, that is, beyond her total control. Note that ‘external’, for Nussbaum, does not necessarily mean beyond one’s physical body since there are many aspects of one’s own body (including the brain) that are not under one’s total control. Nussbaum goes further by saying that, for her emotion to be an emotion, the object of her emotion—in this case, the death of her mother—must be of significance for Martha Nussbaum. Emotions are focused on objects beyond the agent’s control which are significant to the subject’s ‘eudaimonistic’ plans to achieve a flourishing life.79 Thus she ‘claims that grief [over a mother’s death] is identical with the acceptance of a proposition that is both evaluative and eudaimonistic’.80 This eudaimonistic dimension is vital for her whole project since it organizes the way in which valuation occurs and thus the objects towards which emotions can be directed. For the sake of conceptual clarity we should distinguish (a) the claim that emotions are focused on objects beyond the agent’s total control, (b) the claim that emotions focus on objects valued through eudaimonistic interpretation, and (c) the claim that valuation is necessarily eudaimonistic valuation. None of these claims can be inferred from one or both of the others and all will be called into question as we proceed. However, Nussbaum links all three so that emotions focus on objects which matter to the agent’s conception of her own happiness but which are not totally controlled by the agent. In so doing, she places vulnerability at the heart of her account of emotions.81 Objects which one fully controls cannot be objects of

79 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 31–3, passim; Nussbaum explicitly announces her commitment to Aristotelian eudaimonism here. 80 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 41. 81 This is, of course, hardly a new theme for Nussbaum, cf. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (CUP, 1986).

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one’s emotions. However, once an agent eudaimonistically values objects which are beyond her total control, she has ‘hostages to fortune [and] she lets herself in for the entire gamut of the emotions’.82 For whatever befalls the uncontrolled, valued object—be it Nussbaum’s mother or the cause of homosexuals in the USA, for which Nussbaum is an ardent advocate83—will be perceived emotionally by the subject. Emotions will change as the fortunes of these valued objects change. Thus, as ‘far as the passage from one emotion to the other goes, one is in the hands of the world’.84 The upheavals of the world come upon us and upon the objects of our emotions and bring about corresponding upheavals of thought. Thus ‘the geography of the world as seen by the emotions has two salient features: uncontrolled movement, and differences of height and depth’.85 This is the ultimate reason for the urgent quality of emotion which is often confused with irrationality by non-cognitivist theorists. As Nussbaum says, ‘bringing thought about well-being right into the structure of emotion, shows why it is the emotion itself, and not some further reaction to it, that has urgency and heat’.86 The account follows a highly nuanced path which cannot be traced in full here.87 Suffice to say that emotions, for Nussbaum, are cognitive, evaluative, intentional (object-directed) beliefs about external objects which are vulnerable to upheaval and valuable because of the subject’s eudaimonistic outlook. What is of particular interest is how this theory has political purchase. To grasp this, one final component of Nussbaum’s thought must be briefly reviewed. Nussbaum considers the education of emotion an important political goal. She analyses education by beginning with infants’ attachment to uncontrolled objects in the world such as food and care-givers which appear and disappear in ways which both support and run counter to an infant’s awareness that all things are apparently coordinated to the infant’s needs. An infant’s experience of total dependence on uncontrolled objects of great importance to its well-being forms early object relations and emotional attachments. Nussbaum 82

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 87. M. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (OUP, 2010). 84 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 87. 85 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 88. 86 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 78. 87 Cf. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 24–88, for Nussbaum’s full cognitive account. 83

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shows how these emotions arise again in seemingly uncontrolled ways at inexplicable moments in adult life and are thus mistakenly thought of as non-cognitive, uncontrollable forces like the wind. What is happening in adult emotions is that our complex infantile and childhood experiences are continuing to shape our thoughts about reality. As infants, we struggle with our lack of control and utter dependence. We only come to understand it later when our selfconsciousness emerges and we learn to distinguish ourselves from our carers and appreciate them as others. But because of these infant experiences, Nussbaum argues that the ‘roots of anger, hatred and disgust lie very deep in the structure of human life, in our ambivalent relation to our lack of control over objects and the helplessness of our own bodies’.88 Nussbaum is by no means suggesting a return to a rationalism that demands that these infantile emotions be controlled by reason or that we should grow out of emotions into unemotional, adult choosers. Nor is she inviting us to become ashamed of our human neediness, fragility, and lack of control from which emotions stem. Rather her goal is to explain how our emotions, as beliefs about the world derived from our contingent, uncontrolled, initially infantile personal narratives, should evaluate our fragile reality and thereby contribute to an emotionally healthy common life. Such a life will not be one of infantile dependence nor of atomic independence. Rather, since we all live needy lives, we should learn ‘mature interdependence’. In this state, ‘the child is able to accept the fact that those whom she loves and continues to need are separate from her and not mere instruments of her will . . . [She is then willing to] establish the relationship on a footing of equality and mutuality.’89 Adult love is not possessive but rather respects the separateness of the other while identifying with the other as a fellow vulnerable person. From here one can see why Nussbaum believes that compassion is the paradigm emotion which ought to characterize this mature interdependence in political relations. Compassion is the essence of mature political relations since others with whom we share interdependence are vulnerable to suffering just as we are. For we are all equally ‘in the hands of the world’ and should learn to see each other in that light.90 88 89 90

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 234. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 225. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 87.

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An aspect of Nussbaum’s attention to education is her awareness of the particularity of tradition and culture. One tradition may favour some emotions over others. The Norwegians like the gloominess of the forest. Others may have cultural practices which must be considered when implementing a political programme. Western mothers gaze into the eyes of their children while Indian mothers carry children out of eye contact on the hip.91 From this she observes that ‘beliefs can be powerfully shaped by social norms’92 and that the ‘nature of this framework [of beliefs] will shape the emotions’.93 Aware of this, Nussbaum suggests a literary educational programme centring on tragedy. Such studies, she believes, enable the ‘extension of concern’ among citizens. Tragedy deepens ‘the ability to imagine the experiences of others and to participate in their sufferings’.94 Through witnessing such performances, people can learn an emotional repertoire which then fuels appropriate judgements amidst comparable real-life circumstances. Such education is one example of Nussbaum’s political programme which also touches visual art, music, the media, welfare provision, and criminal procedures.95 The overall goal is ‘to overcome mental obstacles to full political rationality’ including ‘rationality in emotion’.96 Having established that mature interdependence makes a healthy political society and that compassion is the paradigm political emotion, Nussbaum proposes that three cognitive judgements are intrinsic to the emotional reasoning by which compassion is directed to another human being. Each of these judgements is a constituent part of and necessary condition for compassion, all three judgements are jointly sufficient for compassion and the simultaneous presence of the three judgements will constitute compassion.97 The first judgement 91

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 161. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 142. 93 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 147. 94 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 426; cf. 304ff., 408–9, where Nussbaum highlights this common human experience of weakness through the appeal to Sophoclean tragedy, esp. the story of Philoctetes. The chorus in the play realize that Philoctetes’ suffering, caused by an accidental act of sacrilege, could have been their own and their evaluation of him is deeply coloured by their awareness of their own fragility, that his tragedy could have been theirs. Cf. her earlier work The Fragility of Goodness, for studies of a range of Greek tragedies. 95 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 433–54. 96 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 433. 97 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 304ff. 92

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examines the seriousness of the situation which another human being is experiencing—whether it has ‘size’ or is merely trivial. A traffic jam would normally not be sufficiently serious to warrant compassion (unless the jam was making one late for a funeral, for example) but an abusive husband would qualify. The second judgement considers whether it was the person’s fault that she was in trouble or whether a dreadful calamity had befallen her or, as often happens, there was a mixture of the two. In a mixed case, further discernment is required though this discernment is left somewhat vague by Nussbaum. But, broadly speaking, compassion will be more appropriate in the case of calamity than in the case of fault. The third judgement ascertains whether the predicament affecting the other person (the external object)—perhaps starvation, poor schooling, or an unjust tax burden—falls within the subject’s own plans for the good life yet is not fully under her control while also being a predicament which the subject herself can imagine suffering. This third is the eudaimonistic judgement which restricts compassion to cases where the one feeling compassion (the subject) understands the external object to have significance for her.98 The imaginative-epistemological qualification to this third act of judgement stems from Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s criterion concerning the similarity of persons. This criterion works by reckoning that each person is acutely aware that the predicament another person finds themselves in could potentially become their own predicament. Thus an awareness of one’s own weakness and vulnerability is an epistemologically valuable aid to becoming aware that the cognitive-evaluative requirements for compassion have been met in any given situation. When these three judgements are present, one is feeling compassion. Such compassion is open to rational assessment. Since we are at least partially responsible for our development from possessive childishness into mature interdependence, it would be a failure in maturity if we were not to be compassionate when appropriate. This is not to say that Nussbaum simply blames people for not displaying compassion. A failure to grow out of infantile emotional fantasies is a moral failure but one for which others, such as early childhood carers, may share responsibility. But the very possibility of someone bearing responsibility for a failure in emotional maturity suggests that

98

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 315–16.

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emotions such as compassion must be essentially ethical and political. We hold people responsible for emotions because emotions shape our view of the world and so our understanding of appropriate action. For although emotions are not actions, they are intrinsic to practical reasoning as evaluations of objects concerning which action might be taken. Emotions must therefore be open to ethical scrutiny along with other aspects of practical reasoning.99 Nussbaum applies this basic thesis about the ethical nature of human emotions to a variety of human social and political experiences. Emotions are not simply psychological adjuncts to practical reasoning but rather, as cognitive-evaluative forms of judgement, are of the essence of a particular subject’s view of the good life or flourishing. Since similar emotions are often commonly experienced by many people in the same society, emotions are also essential to a society’s view of the world. For emotions, as acknowledgements of value, will influence what we do in some way with respect to that value.100 And so it matters enormously whether and concerning what and on what grounds a society feels compassion. Emotions, including compassion, which do not accord with mature interdependence will not value accurately that which serves the good of a particular subject or of society. Without mature emotions, the actions of individuals and their political representatives will not be informed by that deep awareness of shared vulnerability which lies at the heart of Nussbaum’s thought. Further elements of Nussbaum’s theory of emotion will be examined at a later stage. The argument which follows will share with Nussbaum in the consensus cognitivist claim that emotion (affection) is at least partially defined by intentionality. The critical arguments against feeling-centred conceptions of emotion which were presented above seem conclusive. Emotions do have objects and are some kind of cognitions, thoughts, or beliefs about those objects. Our concept of affection will be likewise intentional and cognitive. More precision concerning what kind of intentional cognition affections are and how they relate to valuation and agency will be taken up in detail in

99

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 304ff. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 135–7; esp. Nussbaum’s distinction between her account and the Humean belief-desire account of action in which desires are ‘hardwired in psychology’ and ‘lacking in intentionality’ and beliefs serve desire simply by providing ‘information about how to obtain its object’ (136). 100

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Chapter 2. But with this qualified consensus in hand, we can make the following two sets of observations which bring to the surface issues with which the following chapters shall be repeatedly concerned.

Joy, tears, and the knife The first set of observations concern Nussbaum’s account of emotion. She focuses on emotions such as fear, anger, envy, jealousy, grief, and compassion. Nussbaum’s attention to the weakness and neediness of human experience is sensitively illustrated and funded by careful introspection on her own experience of her mother’s death while she hurried to the hospital. However, this focus on human vulnerability in a world of upheavals means that the emphasis falls on those emotions which relate to frailty and weakness and that other emotions which pertain to more settled objects assume a somewhat ambiguous position. This is particularly apparent in her treatment of joy. Its first important appearance is at the funeral of Nussbaum’s mother where ‘joy masters grief ’ because of the ‘judgment that [her] mother was in certain crucial respects not gone from the world’.101 Nussbaum reports that this judgement was based on ‘the speeches of many whose lives she had helped . . . since they proved the continuity of her influence in the world’ and the presence of her ex-husband ‘because I could recognize in him twenty years of life with my mother’.102 Later there is something more like a systematic account of joy which considers only ‘[s]ome varieties of joy’ as characterized by ‘vulnerability to reversal’ while other varieties are not like this but are still emotions.103 Such an account, while honest about problems of definition, raises the suspicion that her handling of vulnerability has brought with it a certain implausibility. This suspicion only grows in Nussbaum’s account of ‘background’ joy.104 Background emotions are emotions which continue to be present even when they are not felt. They are judgements that are enduringly present as acknowledgments of what is valuable in life. Specifically, background joy may be present ‘when one’s work is going well, when one’s children are

101 103

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 87. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 43.

102 104

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 21. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 67ff.

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flourishing, when an important relationship is going smoothly’.105 This joy is directed towards apparently stable objects which are going well with no obvious threats to contend with. Nussbaum’s delicately expressed joy at her mother’s funeral was a joy in some sort of stability, arising after the death of her mother in the form of memory. But such joy is at odds with standard emotions which are characteristically directed towards unstable, vulnerable objects in a world of upheaval. A steady joy might be an emotion but neither a typical one nor even a particularly intelligent one since it rests upon a false assumption of the stability of its object. The world’s ‘upheavals’ and our helplessness amidst them renders that kind of joy an illusion, just as the joy of an infant in being held is coloured by the infantile, deluded narcissistic belief that the world revolves around him.106 Dispelling the illusion of such joy and replacing it with emotions oriented to interdependent fragility is what maturity is about. Moreover, it seems that her particular interpretation of intentional emotion depends on a concept of the moral subject as standing in sharp distinction from and over against the ‘upheaving’ world. Although little rests on etymology per se, ‘emotion’ has a linguistic bias which is peculiarly appropriate to Nussbaum, stemming from the Latin root indicating a ‘moving-out-from’. The association of movement of some sort with the phenomena in question is commonplace. In the Christian tradition, the movement (‘motus’) of the intellectually formed will may be in accord with or opposed to the good. What is important for Nussbaum is the conceptual emphasis on emotions as unstable outwards movements. This ‘moving outwards’ does not necessarily refer to any sense of physical distance. Nussbaum has argued that ‘external objects’ are not necessarily physically outside the agent in question. Rather, Nussbaum’s concept of emotion renders the individual subject the determining feature of any emotion and thereby alienates the rest of the world from the subject as that out towards which the subject eudaimonistically thinks and acts. The radical subjectivization of emotion within a eudaimonistic framework distances the subject from peaceful belonging in the world, which at any moment may lunge into the subject’s background emotional

105

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 70. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 139–73, for ‘Emotions and Human Societies’; 174–237 for ‘Emotions and Infancy’. 106

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wounds with a situation emotional ‘knife’.107 Thus, although for Nussbaum emotions are judgements about the world and although these judgements are carefully located within social and psychological narratives and although the goal remains mature interdependence,108 they are still judgements about the world from within a significantly individualistic account of human existence in which the emotional individual is not of the same order as the world but encounters it as something other than herself and normally threatening. The world is a sharp weapon which may rise up and plunge itself into one’s deepest being at any moment. This is hardly the only way to see reality. By way of a counterpoint which will preview some of the discussions to come, consider Augustine’s response to the death of his own mother, a classic literary topos which, surprisingly, Nussbaum’s broad-ranging review does not include. As is well-known, tears drench the Confessions. Neither Augustine’s nor Monica’s tears in the narrative are simply a dampening of the cheek or even ‘an outer manifestation of an inner feeling but rather [represent] an understanding of a state of affairs intentionally communicated’. Over against William James, these tears are a ‘knowledge-bearing [judgement] about the state of things’, whether that communication is to God, self, or another.109 At the death of his mother, however, Augustine restrains his tears lest they imply that ‘death is miserable or that it issues in extinction . . . judgments Christians should not make’.110 He then sorrows at his sorrow as he recalls the joy of his mother’s company and then turns to grief again. The understanding of his mother’s continuing existence, not solely in ‘influence’, as Nussbaum movingly described, but awaiting resurrection provides the strange depth and complexity of Augustine’s affectivity.111 The fragility and interdependence of earthly life is obviously at the heart of the tears which soak the Confessions—the world is lamentable in an important and enduring sense. But an Augustinian theology which affirms the resurrection of the dead offers a different account of joy amidst that vulnerability. Although an Augustinian doctrine of the Fall will share something with 107

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 75. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 17. 109 P. J. Griffiths, ‘Tears and Weeping: An Augustinian View’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 20–1. 110 Griffiths, ‘Tears and Weeping’, 23. 111 Augustine, Confessions, 9.ii; cf. City of God, 14.9. 108

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Nussbaum’s account of a dangerous world, the doctrines of a good created order within which creatures are at home and a new creation towards which creatures journey as pilgrims run counter to the view of the world as a knife. It is in the interrelation of joy, compassion, sorrow, and other ‘affections’, construed in light of these teachings and considered on a societal basis, that a genuine political response to Nussbaum may emerge. This task will be taken up at various points in the chapters to come and especially in Chapters 3 and 5.

Social contract and judicial compassion The second set of observations concerns the implications of Nussbaum’s philosophy for the political role of emotions. For Nussbaum, all human life is conceptualized eudaimonistically and emotions are only conceptualized in relation to those partially or totally uncontrolled factors which surround an agent’s and a society’s eudaimonistic plans with uncertainty. These philosophical commitments do important political work for Nussbaum. They enable her to coordinate her theory within a liberal democratic framework which aims to secure an individual’s freedom to choose concerning his or her vision of the good over against a world which might seek to threaten that freedom. In a psychological twist to the Millian harm principle, emotions operate at the frontiers of an individual’s area of control.112 Emotions are the way in which individuals psychologically negotiate the difficult terrain of a fragile world where other-dependence is essential but where threats to vulnerable objects are pervasive. Emotion towards objects within the agent’s area of total control is typically not possible on Nussbaum’s account; it is almost always when valuable objects are out of the agent’s control that emotion comes into play. However, she wisely does not hold that emotions are thus essentially to do with objects that are vulnerable to surprise and reversal. Moderating her initial series of claims about emotions, she notes that emotions are only about uncontrolled objects ‘most of the time’. She admits that some ‘varieties of love and joy’ may not involve ‘instability’ in the sense of vulnerability to surprise and reversal and 112 Nussbaum, Hiding, 16–17, 335–40. This interpretation has also been confirmed through personal interaction during a public conversation with Professor Nussbaum at a roundtable in the Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh, 22 June 2007.

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she distances herself from the Stoic position that these are not really emotions. However, it remains the case that the typical emotion will record a ‘sense of vulnerability and imperfect control’.113 The implications of this position are intriguing when set in a political context. For emotion, on Nussbaum’s reckoning, is perfectly suited to a person who is navigating between other citizens in a liberal democracy where relationships are organized around control. A citizen has some control of himself as a bodily being and certain other objects such as his vote, property, labour, children, and activities to achieve social justice. For Nussbaum, typical emotions are directed towards those objects inasmuch as they are partially uncontrolled by the citizen. Other citizens, government authorities, or simply changing circumstances are all potential threats (or supports) to the citizens’ eudaimonistic plans. But the constant factor, determining whether and what emotion is appropriate, remains whether or not valued objects are totally controlled by the individual. Two observations are pertinent here. First, Nussbaum’s account of mature interdependence explicitly rejects any notion of autonomous, autarkic control, a self-sufficient imperviousness to the world and to our need for others. In contrast to those who might see such interdependence as a diminishment of human agency, Nussbaum is particularly critical of political environments which encourage the subhuman illusion of autarky, grouping the Nazi cult of impenetrable, steely German soldiers114 alongside the modern American ‘cultivation of a body image of perfect muscular power and hardness’.115 On a political level, Nussbaum sees this illusion of independence deep within the social contract tradition. On this point, her analysis of childhood and family contrasts with earlier feminist writings, most obviously Susan Moller Okin’s sympathetic but critical reception of John Rawls’s reflections on the integration of the family within his theory of justice. For Okin, the ‘judgement that the family is “nonpolitical” is implicit in the fact that it is simply not discussed in most works of political theory . . . In the most influential of all twentieth century theories of justice, that of John Rawls, family life is not only assumed, but is assumed to be just.’ This blind-spot was, for Okin, mirrored in Walzer’s notion of ‘shared understandings of a culture as the foundation of justice’, 113 115

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 42–3. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 425.

114

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 222–4, 345–7.

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understandings which were inattentive to gender concerns. The wider oversight is that many (male) philosophers ‘take mature, independent human beings as the subjects of their theories without any mention of how they got to be that way’.116 But Okin’s response, unlike Nussbaum, was to repair Rawls’s original position. She applauds the way ‘Rawls . . . treats the family seriously as the earliest school of moral development’.117 He comments, for example, that family nurture forms the ‘art of perceiving the person’ with proper respect, in the context of mature psychological development.118 Yet she finds him trapped in ‘the conventional mode of thinking that life within the family and relations between the sexes are not properly regarded as part of the subject matter of a theory of social justice’ and that he therefore fails to observe that, alongside all the many other factors of life (wealth, natural ability, etc.), not even sex should be known behind the veil of ignorance.119 Were that possible, the individual imagination could conceive of both the male and female standpoint and prescribe principles of justice accordingly. Moreover, Okin goes further to observe that Rawls is far from being what he sometimes confessed to be—a rational choice theorist. For since ‘he reduces the knowledge of those in the original position to the point where they cannot employ probabilistic reasoning and cannot be assumed to take risks, Rawls does have to rely on empathy, benevolence, and equal concern for others as for the self, in order to have the parties come up with the principles they choose, especially the difference principle’.120 The combination of a recognition of an implicit reliance on imaginative empathy and greater gender consciousness is the way to offer reconstructive surgery to Rawls’s original position. Such, in brief, is Okin’s effort to elaborate Rawls in accord with feminist insight.121

116 S. M. Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 9; cf. ‘The fact that human beings are born as helpless infants—not as the purportedly autonomous actors who populate political theories—is obscured by the implicit assumption of gendered families, operating outside the range of the theories. To a large extent, contemporary theories of justice, like those of the past, are about men with wives at home’ (13). On Walzer, cf. ibid. 68. 117 Okin, Justice, 21. 118 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1999), 411. 119 Okin, Justice, 91–2. 120 S. M. Okin, ‘Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice’, Ethics, 99/2 (Jan. 1989), 229–49, 243; cf. 248. 121 For another, more critical feminist reception of the ‘male fixation on contract’, cf. A. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1994), 114–20.

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But for Nussbaum, the whole contractarian schema is emotionally unworkable for it conceives the inconceivable as its core political idea—the absence of temporally experienced interdependence, weakness, and frailty. This, for example, makes genuine compassion implausible since the individual must think of herself as both beggar and queen while being all the time an academic philosopher. The theory is underpowered in its normative content, left swinging amidst diverse cultural winds.122 But while they disagree on the plausibility of contractarianism, Nussbaum and Okin agree in other ways. Okin observes in both Rawls and Kant the ‘tendencies to separate reason from feelings’ and links this closely to their sidelining of women and acceptance of unjust gender patterns.123 For Kant, desires and inclinations might be harnessed by reason as a supportive ‘supplement’ to duty. This impurity is benign rather than negative but nonetheless an impurity. John Hare comments that, as concerns ‘affects, Kant accepts the Stoic principle of apathy, that the wise person must never be in a state of affect, because affect makes us (more or less) blind’, while, with respect to desires and inclinations which are steadily opposed to reason, Kant ‘calls them passions and . . . is against them’.124 Reason wears the epistemological trousers and, when desire and inclination go wrong and become affect and passion, thereby blocking right reasoning, they get the belt. So, although Rawls retains a significantly more positive account of maturation and feelings than Kant, the Kantian inheritance remains highly influential. In my view, this emerges most obviously in the fact that, despite Okin’s nuanced distinction of Rawls from Kant, both Okin and Rawls suffer from the same psychological indeterminacy that Markell noted in the context of constitutional patriotism. Having reviewed the empiricist and rationalist approaches to the significance of ‘emotion’ or ‘sentiment’, Rawls, for all his recognition of their importance as Okin indicates, says he will ‘not try to assess the relative merits of these two conceptions of moral learning’ and settles for a undefined ‘natural’ combination. He recognizes the vulnerability of his account by admitting the possibility that his ‘psychological account [might be] defective is a way that would call into question 122

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 340–2. Okin, ‘Reason and Feeling’, 230. 124 J. Hare, ‘Kant, the Passions and the Structure of Moral Motivation’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 59–61. 123

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the acknowledgement of principles of justice’. But this admission in itself hardly makes up for the lack of theory.125 Okin’s own description of feelings also remains at a general and somewhat unconvincing level—compassion and empathy are celebrated but not defined. But Nussbaum, by contrast, utilizing the cognitivist turn, has developed this line of thought in a far more sophisticated manner than the late Okin was able to and in a way which displays a philosophical seriousness which surpasses Rawls’s psychological ambivalence. Whether or not Nussbaum’s own approach is convincing remains to be seen. The important lesson for the moment is that the conceptual sophistication of Nussbaum’s account of emotion leads her towards robust criticism of contractarianism and thereby distinguishes her from Okin with whom she might otherwise be in sympathy. The second observation is that Nussbaum’s conceptualization of human subjectivity in terms of control of an uncontrolled and substantially ‘ungovernable’ world places heavy and perhaps intolerable burdens on the judiciary.126 In such a world, government is an essential form of control, providing a relatively peaceful environment for people to grow into mature interdependence. Although Nussbaum is conscious of the way multiple cultures shape emotion, she thinks politically solely in terms of constitutional liberal democracy. This is especially clear in her defence of ‘compassion’ as the paradigm political emotion. Compassion, we recall, is constituted by the three judgements (seriousness, fault, eudaimonistic-epistemological considerations) and is focused upon circumstances which are not totally controlled by the one feeling compassion. Difficulties inevitably arise on a political level when one seeks to define what counts as an appropriate object of compassion. Nussbaum comments that ‘we want not just any and every type of compassion, but, so to speak, compassion within the limits of reason, compassion allied to a reasonable ethical theory in the three areas of judgment’.127 That standard depends on ‘basic rights and liberties’ which are guaranteed by the constitution and concern ‘certain basic goods’, rights, and liberties which are in turn ascertained ‘through a process of judicial interpretation’. Nussbaum names these rights and liberties as a set of ‘capabilities, or opportunities for functioning’ which ‘corresponds closely to the Sophoclean and Aristotelian lists of tragic predicaments’ and 125 127

Rawls, Theory of Justice, 403–5. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 414.

126

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 75.

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defines the way that compassion should function. Two examples will suffice: according to Nussbaum, compassion will be appropriate towards those who are not ‘able to live to the end of a human life of normal length’ or until ‘one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living’. Compassion will also be appropriate towards those who do not have opportunity to fulfil their capability of bodily integrity which includes ‘choice in matters of reproduction’.128 Consideration of capabilities like these is intended to bring a rational conclusion to any disagreement about what constitutes public compassion and, as such, will bring an end to emotional disagreements. This treatment of compassion makes explicit Nussbaum’s rationale for the political significance of emotions. She believes that societies need people who have matured in such a way that they conform to rational compassion and so acknowledge that they themselves should be concerned for others’ needs. Such an acknowledgement will influence people’s view of society and so assist political action in addressing the needs which have been acknowledged in emotion. Without the acknowledgement, people’s needs will be neglected. Nussbaum’s belief that judicial process is decisive in determining the rationality of any particular example of compassion is not without its difficulties. She recognizes that her account requires the existence of ‘judges who exemplify rationality . . . judges who are properly emotional’, properly compassionate.129 On Nussbaum’s view, adjudication between possible examples of rational compassion is not straightforward and so should be entrusted to the discretion of judges. The claim that law is an important way in which a culture’s emotional cognitions are coordinated and remembered is, to my mind, uncontroversial, although exactly which forms of which emotions should be affirmed is of course controversial. Nonetheless, the turn to the judiciary does not end the discussion for it simply opens up a new question as to what constitutes the right sort of judge. Nussbaum’s answer for this is her ideal educational programme, focused on Greek tragedy, through which citizens and therefore prospective lawyers and judges would be inducted. She is committed to the claim that 128 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 416–18; other capabilities are life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses/imagination/thought, emotions, practical reason, relations with other species, play and control over one’s environment both political and material. In relation to reproductive choice, we note here that Nussbaum does not reflect on the interdependence between an unborn child and its mother. 129 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 446.

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properly run institutions, such as the law, can themselves create ‘facilitating environments’ for flourishing human development into mature independence.130 However, there are two problems with this approach. First, Nussbaum had earlier acknowledged that, since ‘compassion is unreliable and partial’, it was necessary to give an account in which ‘appropriate compassion may be embodied in the structure of just institutions, so that we will not need to rely on perfectly compassionate citizens’.131 This recognition of the frailty of compassion, however it is described, is surely right. But her argument has proceeded to lay a heavy burden of expectation, perhaps not for perfection but for a very high degree of emotional performance, precisely upon individual citizens in the form of the judiciary. This worry is accentuated by a second problem, namely that the capabilities approach is designed to be, as Nussbaum notes, highly flexible and plural in its application. This raises the familiar concern as to whether the form of liberal democracy she wishes to defend has sufficient positive convictions about what is good in order to conceptualize the compassion which she wants the judiciary to promote. If not, this would leave compassion itself too indeterminate and overly exposed to the imaginative capacities and inclinations of judges. The concern which is left hanging is whether a judiciary and a citizenry educated through Greek tragedy will have gained sufficient common appreciation of what is good in order to be compassionate concerning the good capabilities which they are called to defend. More fundamentally, what lies behind this second observation is a concern about the tragic, comprehensive vision of reality which Nussbaum is committed to promoting. This concern cannot be explored in full at this juncture in the argument but will be explored in various ways later, especially in Chapter 3 where it will be argued that an Augustinian comprehensive vision of reality interprets compassion in a way which will better foster wise democratic culture. However, at this stage we may observe that Nussbaum’s juxtaposition of judicial action and compassion is closely related to control, that essential element in her concept of emotion. Her appeal to the judicial process is a bid for some sort of control in an otherwise uncontrolled world. Just as, on the standard liberal contractarian story, autonomous individuals are limited by the government they

130

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 224–9.

131

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 403.

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have jointly established, so emotion needs some ordered limits lest consensus about what counts as appropriate compassion be constantly overturned by the upheavals of the world. Government and the courts provide those limits and so regulate the central political emotion. However, this bid for control is only necessary because of the prior claim about the nature of the world we inhabit, namely that it is essentially uncontrolled and needs to be tamed by the forces of humanity, especially their political force. Indeed, human control exerted amidst uncontrolled disorder is hardly an uncontroversial way of understanding the place of politics in the world nor is it bound to build consensus. Various forms of both non-theological and theological political thought have offered alternative ways of interpreting reality which allow both for the sovereign presence of God and for an ongoing good order within creation which political authority is called to attest and which sets the context in which compassion is intelligibly construed. On this reckoning, politics does not create order but rather is itself created and given to humanity for its benefit by God.132 But without some assumption of the sovereignty of God in human affairs whereby political authority is raised up, political theory must establish its own account of sovereignty. Nussbaum’s is one example of this approach, characterized by the marked tendency to prioritize emotions such as compassion over joy and to conceptualize order ultimately through the courts, leading to a dependence on a properly educated judiciary to give the deciding judgement on the true nature of compassion.

CONCLUSION Nussbaum’s account of emotions systematically lays out issues and questions which this enquiry must address. The cognitivist claims 132 There is theological disagreement within Christianity about whether such authority was given before or after the entrance of sin into the world. On an Augustinian reading e.g. human political authority is a necessary provision against sin and is treated as a temporary expedient for the sake of the maintenance of peaceful creaturely life in a providentially governed moral order rather than as the ultimate form of control in an otherwise ungoverned and ungovernable world of upheavals. On a Thomist view, political authority was already given in creation that humanity might hold it for the common good but was then adapted in function in light of the Fall. Whichever approach is taken, the sovereignty of God is recognized.

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about intentionality, evaluation, and cognition are given sensitive, sustained, and at times compelling treatment. She also indicates the reason why emotion is relevant to political considerations in her analysis of the cultural and social formation of emotion and then in detailed proposals for education and law.133 Whether the expensive metaphysical and eudaimonistic postulates adopted by Nussbaum pay their way as explanations of human emotional experience and build wise democratic culture remains to be seen. This discussion will return to whether Nussbaum’s account is sufficiently supple to explain the interrelation of human affective phenomena such as joy, sorrow, wonder, indignation, and compassion. It will be particularly important to see whether an account of the settled nature of the created moral order and, indeed, the presence of extraordinary forms of control or ordering, such as God’s eschatological, providential activity and the work of the Holy Spirit, have greater explanatory power with respect to the interrelation of affections such as compassion and joy. We now turn to explore a positive, theological account of the nature of ‘affection’, its role in human morality, and an outline of its place in political relations. This will be the task of Chapter 2 which will lay the groundwork for our detailed discussion of the place of affection in politics which will be carried out in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.

133

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 425ff.

2 Affections This enquiry’s goal is to explore the nature of human affections, their role in morality, and their significance for political relations. Building on Chapter 1’s account of the consensus and contentions in the theory of emotions, this chapter will argue that the kind of cognitive form which affections take decisively shapes their role in human morality. The affective dimension of political relations will be described in outline before a more detailed examination in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Distinguishing the questions in this way will lend conceptual depth to these later political observations. Political theory’s lack of subtlety about political ‘affect’, ‘passion’, or ‘emotion’ has hindered analysis of the ‘democratic deficit’ and ‘shared understandings’ discussed in Chapter 1. This conceptual vagueness risks slippage into either the chilling of affectivity which LeDoux warned against or an unexamined Jamesian sensualism. Where there is subtle analysis of ‘emotions’, as with Martha Nussbaum’s work, many highly contested questions arise concerning the significance of compassion, joy, and judicial control. Such theoretical deficiencies and subtle positive contributions invite further examination and an alternative constructive proposal. Such are the considerations of this present chapter. First, it will be suggested that affections are the beginnings of understanding. Second, that affections endure over time in ways which are vital for politics. Third, that affections’ way of construing objects in terms of excellence and eschatology defines their political significance. In what follows, resources from various Christian theologians will facilitate the conversation which both Nussbaum and Habermas have signalled that they welcome. Such conversation should hold considerable interest both for the theologian and for the political scientist or ethicist who, while not bringing theological convictions to the table, is yet curious to engage in a genuinely open

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conversation about the significance of our contemporary political experience.

I. AFFECTIONS AS THE PARTICIPATIVE BEGINNINGS OF UNDERSTANDING This section proposes that affections are the participative beginnings of understanding. An exploration of the notion of participation will come in due course. First, to begin with ‘beginnings’ requires some explanation. Three observations will orient the use of this term. The first two refer back to ground considered in Chapter 1 while the third carries us forward into the substance of this chapter. First, talk of ‘beginnings’ recognizes the insight, in accord with Nussbaum, that people and their complex affective attachments do not spring from nowhere but rather arise within families and cultures. People’s birth, family life, place, culture, and upbringing all express the interdependence which Nussbaum rightly highlights. Logically, one might add to her list the interdependence of mother and child during pregnancy although she does not. An attentiveness to those first carers amongst whom people appear in the world within and beyond the womb is directly opposed to an autarchic or self-sufficient view of life which might construe affections apart from a person’s experience of parenting and family. A ‘beginning’ in this sense recognizes the reality that members of political societies make a beginning in the world, that they are, without exception, in some way conceived, born, and brought up. In Hannah Arendt’s pregnant terminology, this is ‘natality’, one of the most general conditions of human life.1 Such a condition means that ‘emotions’ or ‘affections’ are not simply ‘up to us’ but rather that they are already with us in complex ways, formed by our familial and political environment, whenever we set about moral reasoning. We cannot help but begin from where we have come from. Second, there is the corroborative insight from neuroscience that affective neural networks are always shaping people’s participation in the world. For example, neural patterning laid down during infants’ initial experience of the world forms their 1

H. Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8–9.

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future life deeply. These affective neural pathways cannot be shut off, except by strange injuries and illnesses such as that of Phineas Gage, but rather constantly form people’s participation in the environment into which they are born, live, and have their being. In this sense too, we are always beginning emotionally. But third it follows that affections are the beginnings of understanding inasmuch as they are the way that moral reasoning is initiated by a people as members of a political entity of some sort. Affections are in this case the beginning of political understanding. The interdependence of human experience is given multiple forms of expression in political life. Such political beginnings are the start of processes in which people in communities engage in moral reasoning towards action. People have some affective understanding of the world in which they plan to act before they set about their moral reasoning and practical enterprises. Such an affective understanding may or may not be conscious—political affectivity as much as personal affectivity may be unrecognized and yet still formative. It is enough that affectivity is inescapably present prior to and at the start of moral reasoning. Whether or not this initial, affective understanding is an accurate understanding of the world and indeed how a claim to accuracy might be meaningful are further questions. The claim at this point is that affections always do have a subjective and potentially interpersonal and formative role in beginning to understand the world, a beginning which may then be followed by further moral reasoning. For the sake of clarity, if affections are beginnings of this sort, then conversely a beginning is not an autarchic abstraction from the narrative of a particular moral agent, community, or political society. A beginning is not a fresh start, an unattached, individualist, dehistoricized foray into the world. Such a notion would be an overly simplistic account of beginning, as if a time T1 when affection happens could be meaningfully isolated from the rest of a human narrative. Such a notion disregards the fact that beginnings are always beginnings within a particular extended life and that this life is, in turn, set within a certain culture, history, and tradition. As Walzer observes, ‘there is no such thing as choosing from scratch; there are no absolute beginnings’ in human reasoning.2 There are

2

M. Walzer, Politics and Passion (Yale University Press, 2004), 13.

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moments within human experience in which one might observe that some process of moral or political reasoning began—a sorrowful realization of political failure or a joyful recognition of political success. These common experiences are beginnings too and important aspects of reasoning. But these beginnings have been and will be preceded and followed by other beginnings. We are always engaging in processes of moral reasoning which begin, proceed, and reach a conclusion, a conclusion which will give way to further beginnings of moral reasoning. Moreover, we normally have multiple such experiences occurring simultaneously both as individuals and as communities. Beginnings are always with us. We may awake to their reality but we cannot escape their influence. We are born to begin and reason until we ourselves come to an end. Such an analysis has important political ramifications. For what we self-consciously count as an acceptable kind of beginning to political enterprises will shape the form of political life. For example, as suggested in Chapter 1, we may regard moral reasoning and practical enterprises begun emotionally as of dubious moral worth compared to those begun without the presence of strong feelings or, indeed, feelings of any sort. Recall the example of whether the judiciary should take account of popular emotional responses to offences such as child molestation and murder. Whatever view we take of the worth of ‘emotional’ beginnings will affect how we attempt to begin, which in turn will affect how and whither we proceed in political deliberations and activities. Were we to try to exclude affections from the initiation of all political decision-making, this would be highly significant for the conduct of our lives. Political movements or judgements begun in anger or sorrow would be automatically under suspicion. The self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit-seller in 2011 would be impressive but essentially irrational. This would seem a strange conclusion to reach. Thus when we investigate the beginnings of our practical enterprises we are, in an important sense, investigating the whole of morality. This is not to say that the beginning one makes determines the end one reaches but rather that the nature of the journey taken by our moral reasoning and practical engagements will be substantially affected both by the beginning we make and by what beginning we understand ourselves to have made. The two of which may of course be quite different from one another, the latter reflecting the vagaries of self-knowledge which commonly characterize human experience.

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Beginnings in Aristotle In order to specify more precisely how affections are beginnings, I will now consider several conceptions of beginning. Setting on one side the neuroscientific considerations which were naturally unavailable to Aristotle, consider three observations about beginnings which arise from his thought. First, Aristotle famously recognized the significance of upbringing for political understanding. If education is to benefit young men, it is necessary that they be brought up well. However, as Okin notes in her scathing critique of Alasdair MacIntyre’s adoption of the ‘Aristotelian ethic’, family life is neglected in Aristotle’s account. The beginnings of life in which people are born and cared for, especially by women, are largely absent.3 For Okin, the lack of attention to the connection between familial experience and political life renders Aristotle’s thought unjust, sexist, and inadmissible in contemporary society. Nicholas Lombardo notes that this absence is carried over in Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of Aristotle which also suffers from neglect of the ‘formative influence of parents on the affectivity of their children’.4 Second, turning to the grown men of the city to whom Aristotle’s writings are addressed, consider the beginnings of their deliberation towards political action. It is contested whether Aristotle’s practically wise citizen has a highly defined knowledge of the nature of the supreme good for man, eudaimonia (PÆØÆ), before he begins to deliberate about action. The practically wise man engages in speculative thought concerning the supreme good, perceiving the structure and nature of the goods in which the supreme good consists—goods such as friendship, health, and wisdom. Deliberation about what to do journeys from that speculative knowledge of perceived reality towards decision about action. Controversy surrounds how comprehensive a knowledge of the good is possible before deliberation begins. An illustrative exchange appears in David Bostock’s discussion of Sarah Broadie.5 Broadie holds that Aristotle did not believe that a highly detailed pre-deliberative knowledge of

3 4

S. M. Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 52ff. N. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire (Catholic University of America Press, 2011),

248. 5

D. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics (OUP, 2000), 82–96.

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the good was possible. She observes that Aristotle neither describes the supreme good in detail, nor any people who have such an end in mind nor an indication of how we might come to specify such an end.6 But Bostock believes that Aristotle’s argument indicates that the practically wise man must have an exhaustive account of the supreme good. Although Aristotle may not claim to be able to define it himself, he seems to believe that the practically wise man, having all the virtues—what Bostock calls ‘full virtue’,7 must have what Socrates called ‘knowledge of the good’ which, in Aristotle’s terms, is a ‘true apprehension’ of eudaimonia. To make sense of Aristotle’s claim that ‘as soon as this one thing, practical wisdom, is present, all the virtues will be present too’,8 one ‘must take it that [Aristotle’s account of “true apprehension”] includes a clear view of all the different things that go together to make up PÆØÆ, and of how they fit together’.9 Thus, though Aristotle does not hold simply to the Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge, he does believe that a clear knowledge of the end goes hand in hand with virtue. On this reading of Aristotle, full knowledge of the good prior to deliberation is arranged around a thoroughgoing teleological conception of moral reality, permeating the natural order of relations and the form of the active human life, the two being construed as an organic whole. Every kind of question about what the good is and what to do about it can be considered and decided on in advance by being coordinated teleologically within the supreme good. The practically wise man’s reasoning is not a matter of constant, engaged exploration and consideration of the world. Rather, according to Bostock, Aristotle believes it is possible to reach a complete knowledge of the good which then shapes any particular process of deliberation about how to achieve the good. As to whether this knowledge of eudaimonia, as a first principle of action, is provided by socially habituated virtue of character or by nous (F), an intellectual capacity which is capable of apprehending both particulars and universals perceived through those particulars, Bostock interprets Aristotle as believing that nous attains this knowledge while habituated virtue prevents vice from obscuring the intellectual grasp of the supreme good specified in the 6 7 8 9

S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (OUP, 1991), 198. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 86–7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. J. Bywater (OUP, 1894), 1144b32–1145a2. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 87; emphasis original.

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detailed account of eudaimonia. When Aristotle describes virtue of character as a mean disposition to have right feelings in harmony with reason which lead to right actions, those virtues, feelings, and actions are all organized towards a highly detailed, intellectually defined vision of the good life, a vision already known and depended upon at the beginning, before deliberation begins. Naturally, those who are less advanced in their understanding of the good than the practically wise man are yet able to begin practical deliberation about what is right until they grow into full contemplative knowledge of the nature of the good. Third, whether or not Bostock’s interpretation is correct, I suggest that a chief reason that there is this contest about beginnings and moral education lies in Aristotle’s treatment of ‘feelings’ ( ŁÅ). He proposes that just as actions need to be done at the right time and in the right way according to the mean so too feelings, belonging to the semi-rational part of the soul which can listen to reason (as a child listens to his father) but does not have reason in itself,10 should be similarly coordinated to the mean. Feelings are important for Aristotle because the virtuous action is only virtuous if the agent has pleasurable feelings for the virtuous action for its own sake. Virtues and vices are characterized in terms of what the agent feels pleasure and pain about. Such feelings which are in accord with right reason can only be acquired by habituation and training from one’s youth.11 However, the relation between feelings and virtuous actions is far from simple. Aristotle does not connect particular feelings to all virtues. Some virtues are dispositions to act but other virtues are dispositions to feel and act: neither the generous man nor the magnificent man, for example, is described in terms of their feelings, although Aristotle does not offer a clear rationale for this variation.12 Feelings are thus only partially integrated into Aristotle’s account of virtue and action in his doctrine of the mean, which, as the notorious example of honesty shows, is itself hardly without its problems.13 10

Aristotle, NE 1103a1–3. Aristotle, NE 1104b3–11. 12 Aristotle, NE 1107b8–21; Bostock comments that, ‘Neither of them are characterized in terms of any emotion, but simply with respect to their actions.’ Bostock further notes that honesty, ready wit and friendliness are similarly unconnected to particular feelings and that the attempt to connect justice to a particular feeling is ‘notoriously unsuccessful’ (Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 48). 13 Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 45–50. 11

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There are further difficulties as to how feelings hit the mean since feeling in a middling way in some situations would be inappropriate (e.g. only feeling anger in a middling way about something which one should be extremely angry about). Although there are charitable readings of Aristotle which interpret the doctrine of the mean in terms of the frequency of emotion, even such readings do not attempt to excuse him from all ambiguity.14 Beyond these interpretative ambiguities, the intentional quality of emotion does not seem to have impressed Aristotle so as to allow the claim of contemporary theorists that emotions have an essentially cognitive quality. There is admittedly some uncertainty as to what Aristotle thought on this matter. He claims that feelings do not have reason in themselves, yet his language suggests that there is an intentional quality to the phenomena of pleasure and pain. For example, to feel joy and grief, forms of pleasure and pain, at the right things is what constitutes true education.15 For Nussbaum, this suggests that Aristotle ‘views pain itself as an intentional state with cognitive content’16 and that ‘Aristotle in a general way accepts an account of emotion not unlike my own’.17 This attraction of Aristotle into contemporary cognitivism seems at least contestable in light of Aristotle’s firm distinction between reason and pathos. Aquinas, taking himself to be mirroring and developing Aristotle’s account of feelings, is not amenable to such interpretation.18 Although committed to the intentionality of passions, Aquinas ‘cannot be cited as an early advocate of either 14 Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 43; also 35 n. 10: ‘The truth is that Aristotle’s division of the soul (in the EN) is not given in sufficient detail to allow us to answer many of the questions that one might wish to raise about it.’ Moreover, it seems that there are occasionally direct contradictions between Aristotle’s views in the NE and in the Politics. This is especially striking with respect to  ºÅ Ø (boulesis): in the Ethics it is distinguished from  ØŁıÆ (epithumia) and Łı (thumos) as that which has reason in itself compared to the other two which only partake in or listen to reason (Aristotle, NE 11667b7–8; 1095a10–11; cf. 1111b11–30 for the basic division into the three varieties of appetition; cf. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 34 n. 6); but in the Politics,  ºÅ Ø is explicitly assigned to the unreasoning part of the soul. 15 Aristotle, NE 1104b12–13. 16 M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (CUP, 2001), 64; cf. 34 and esp. 326 where Nussbaum argues that a physical throbbing or spasm of pain is less certainly a necessary constituent part of the pain than the cognitive content which is always present. 17 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 475. 18 Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 66–7.

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cognitive or perceptual theories [of emotion] without extensive eisegesis’.19 Cognition and emotion are not the same thing for Aquinas. Rather, it is ‘more natural to speak about emotion as a response to some kind of cognitive appraisal’.20 Passions are ‘colored by cognitive evaluation’ without themselves being cognitive evaluations.21 Although the distinction of passion from reason is maintained, Aquinas does not hold that reason commands the passions absolutely. Citing Aristotle, he maintains that its rule is political, not despotic [although he] does not fully explain what it means for reason to rule the passions politically. Nonetheless, what he wants to claim is clear: that the passions naturally tend to follow reason, and actually seek out reason’s guidance, as long as reason does not command the passions to do something contrary to their nature. Reason guides the passions, but it does not supplant them, and the passions do not just accept reason’s guidance, they incline toward it, albeit imperfectly.22

On this view of Aquinas’s reception of Aristotle, passion cannot itself constitute a reasonable beginning to political enterprises. Although the natural quality of the inclination of passions entails that they could be similarly shared across a multitude of people, passion requires the prior governance of reason to be in place ordering and directing passion as to where it should be inclined. It is not that reason has the whip-hand over passion, which would be a wild caricature of Aquinas’s position. Moreover, as Eleonore Stump has argued, Aquinas differs from Aristotle in contrasting virtues infused by God with virtues acquired by repetition, the latter having less reality than the former. The gifts and fruit of the Spirit, understood in terms of a second-personal relation to God, lend the ‘passions’ a quality of intuitive understanding.23 Nonetheless, Aquinas does retain the Aristotelian notion that passions do not have reason in 19

Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 225. Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 226. 21 Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 24; similarly, Lombardo interprets Aquinas to be saying that ‘Hope hangs on a judgment of possibility, but consists in the desire for an arduous good’ (65) and that ‘Anger depends on a judgment’ (67), thereby distinguishing but interrelating passion and judgement. Cf. also Lombardo’s comment that the ‘tendency of contemporary philosophers to refer to emotions as mental states contributes to the tendency to see Aquinas’ account of emotion as including his account of cognition as well as his account of affection’ (226–7). 22 Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 238. 23 E. Stump, ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’ Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 29–43. 20

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themselves. By contrast, the cognitivist allows the possibility that an initiatory role in politics might be entirely appropriate since the phenomena constitute ways of judging or understanding the world. The Bostock-Broadie and Aquinas-Lombardo-Nussbaum disagreements indicate the challenges of decisive interpretation about Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning. To virtue itself, this discussion will repeatedly return. The following four comments concern how Aristotle’s account is salient to our argument. First, that what Aristotle thought about the humanly possible level of specification of eudaimonia is contestable but it is reasonable to argue that Aristotle believed that a highly specified knowledge of the end is accessible to the virtuous, practically wise man, is the necessary precursor to deliberation, and is grasped by nous, supported by habituated virtue; second, that successful deliberative moral reasoning about the means to the end (ta pros to telos, Æ æ  º) depends on the prior excellence of the work of nous; third, that feelings, although they may, when obedient to reason, have some role in the pursuit of eudaimonia with respect to select virtues of character, are not fully integrated into Aristotle’s account of the virtuous life; fourth, that feelings, since they ‘partake in reason’ by ‘listening to’ the deliverances of nous, ought not to provide initial guidance or knowledge concerning the nature of eudaimonia and thus do not qualify as suitable ‘beginnings’ to political enterprises. Feelings thus come after that beginning and then only in a supporting and non-integrated role. The full knowledge of the end from the beginning is the first principle of the pursuit of the end.24 The fact that only very few people have the requisite intellectual virtue to know the end at the beginning is not a problem for Aristotle. For this knowledge is not for the people at large but for the elite virtuous men who are to deliberate and govern on behalf of the many.25

24 Aristotle’s occasional equivocation between ‘practical wisdom’, which relates to finding a way to good ends, and ‘cleverness’ (deinotes, ØÅ), a form of practical understanding which is simply a matter of finding a way to achieve any already established end, supports this claim. For if cleverness can be a synonym for practical wisdom, the process of deliberation would not involve openness to new discovery but would consist in putting into practice what has been already known from the beginning. (Cf. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 88–90, for a general discussion of ‘cleverness’.) 25 Cf. Okin, Justice, 52.

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Beginnings in Lacoste An alternative concept of beginnings appears in Jean-Yves Lacoste’s discussion of Max Scheler’s phenomenology.26 Lacoste holds that values’ mode of appearance suggests that affections should be understood as ‘affective recognitions of value’. Such recognitions initiate processes of ‘reflection’ and ‘deliberation’ which lead to the disclosure of moral norms. Lacoste critiques Scheler’s view that sentiment (Fühlen) is epistemologically monarchical in recognizing value, a moral ‘intuition (affective intentionality in its moral application) . . . armed with a cognitive power that is as strong on its own ground as the cognitive power of perception’.27 Scheler’s sentiments are intuitions which, coming neither before nor after but with perception, bear perception’s characteristic certitude. As one perceives a painting, one simultaneously experiences a sentiment demanded by it. These sentiments are experienced as first and last words on the value of any particular features of reality as they appear, such as the goodness of an object or the rightness of an action. This position elides a distinction Lacoste insists upon between ‘reflection’ and ‘deliberation’, a distinction which I will adopt throughout the rest of this book. The two terms give shape to what I have hitherto referred to somewhat neutrally as ‘moral reasoning’ and which I now distinguish into moral reflection and moral deliberation. ‘Moral reflection’ will here mean a process of discerning the nature of the world in which we act—the interrelation, goodness, and badness of its various parts. Reflection is an extensive activity, not reduced to some narrow sphere of ethical issues. Rather it explores the way that the human species discovers its interrelation with the rest of the cosmos. Moral reflection involves piecing together our understanding of reality to fit us for action as members of the world. Reflection cannot be done from six feet in the air—it cannot be abstract but rather always readies us to live and act according to the shape of reality which we have discovered. ‘Moral deliberation’, on the other hand, will mean the process of deciding what to do in the

26 J.-Y. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, tr. O. O’Donovan (unpubl.) from ‘Du phénomène de la valeur au discourse de la norme’, in Lacoste, Le Monde et l’absence d’uvre et autres études (Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 107–27. Page numbers cited below refer to the relevant pages of the original French version. 27 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 114.

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world. To deliberate without reflection would be unwise since we would simply be stumbling forward and thrashing about without any sense of how the world in which we intend to act hangs together. And yet at the same time, the processes of deliberation may provide cause and content for reflection. As one deliberates and acts, one moves around within the world, understanding more of its contours. Deliberation is about what it is right to do next. In deciding that, a course is set through the world in which its nature and our membership in it are illuminated.28 Nothing is prejudged by this distinction about human capacity to reflect and deliberate accurately. What is assumed is more basic, namely that there is a goodness and badness to the world which people commonly reflect about, that the processes of investigating the nature of the world and deciding what to do in the world should be distinguished, and that they are epistemologically interrelated and coordinated. Lacoste observes that Scheler’s conceptuality elides this distinction between moral reflection about value (goodness and badness) and moral deliberation towards deciding what it is right to do with respect to value. For if the right is simply felt as right just as the good is felt as good, then the distinction falls away—both are known directly by one sentimental, epistemological movement without the necessity or even possibility of discussion. As Lacoste says, what is supremely important . . . is that on Scheler’s account, the approval with which we greet the appearance of values enjoys the privileges of a unique foundation, and so can always dispense with the demonstrations of moral argument . . . there is no other moral evidence than that which sentiment supplies; there is no other way that values are present to us than by their appearance in the realm of the affects.29

In common both with Scheler and with cognitivist emotion theorists such as Nussbaum, Lacoste holds that affections have both an intentional quality (‘aboutness’) and a cognitive aptitude.30 But Lacoste criticizes Scheler’s interpretation of cognitive intentionality since his monarchical sentiment disallows the possibility of moral enquiry. In contrast to Aristotle, Scheler’s approach elevates the affections to a

28 As will become clear in due course, my use of these terms is indebted to Oliver O’Donovan. 29 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 117. 30 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 115–16.

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place of total epistemological authority. This, however, leaves no meaningful role for moral reflection and deliberation after the sentimental experience. Lacoste claims that Scheler ‘sinned in wanting to know too much’ and ‘to know it too quickly’.31 In this phenomenological version of emotivism, sentiment discloses a first and final word on value. Where two people perceiving value disagree, there may only be sentiment and counter-sentiment, the phenomenological equivalent of two people both saying ‘I approve of this; do this as well’,32 a ‘rationality beyond rationality’.33 This leaves an unbridgeable chasm between ‘I feel’ and ‘we feel’, between an individual’s affective, intentional recognition of value and an intersubjective, shared, affective, intentional agreement on value. For Scheler, there can be no ‘interaffectivity’ or ‘communities of affective recognition’.34 An individual’s affective recognition is an incommunicable sentiment which cannot contribute anything to a shared, social, or political enterprise of reflecting about value and deliberating towards right action. The reason for this is obvious: he has placed too heavy an epistemological burden on affection by equating it unreasonably with the power of perception. Contra Scheler, value is not immediately perceptible in the same way as one sees a pipe. Such affective epistemology misses the essentially social and political enterprise of exploring value and so will not help us to interpret the ‘democratic deficit’ or ‘shared understandings’ towards which Lacroix, Muller, and Walzer inchoately pointed. Lacoste undertakes the charitable task of elaborating Scheler. Explaining this elaboration requires elucidation of the meaning of ‘value’. For Lacoste, value may inhere in states of affairs, human activities, character traits, or characteristics of objects. By way of examples (not Lacoste’s but mine), consider the following: the sorry condition of an orphan, a fruitful educational activity, the health of a previously sick parent, the failure of a foreign policy, the playfulness of children, a harvest safely gathered in, an ecologically damaging weather-pattern, the beauty of an English cathedral, the justice of a court decision, the death of soldiers for the sake of their homeland, the 31 32 33 34

Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 122–3. C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (OUP, 1944). Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 118. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 116.

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social kudos of possessing a particular object such as a car or house, or the trustworthiness of a rhetorically brilliant political representative. All these features of the world may be evaluated by someone or some group as objects of anger, sorrow, or joy (or some other affection) and in respect of their apparent goodness or badness. The form of the interplay between the activity, state of affairs or object, and the one who values them will naturally have an effect on the nature of the valuation. For instance, with the last two examples, the interplay between a marketer, lender, and borrower or between a public relations professional, politician, and voter invites us to consider what constitutes legitimate economic and political shaping of valuations. Value may appear in a remembered activity, state of affairs, or object, whether centuries old or more recent. Consider a past act when a man saved a drowning child, who was previously unknown to him, by diving into a dangerous river. It seems likely to have been the right action and is valued by the subject as a good of the past. Taking up our earlier distinction between reflection and deliberation, we note here that a distinction between the good and the right turns on the passage of time. The right about which we deliberate is singular for it refers chiefly to the open moment which we inhabit in the present— one must do one thing or another. As that moment moves into the past, the action done may be reflectively valued with respect to its goodness as well as its rightness since it takes its place among the range of remembered actions which we may consider and evaluate. Moreover, the group of conceivably right actions which were not done also form part of that range of imagined but not achieved goods. All these form memories towards which affective valuations may be oriented. Lacoste’s elaboration of Scheler together with my elaboration of Lacoste allows that intentional, affective recognitions of value, whether past or present, may potentially be shared by a (possibly large) number of individuals. To explain this, Lacoste draws on the idea of a shared, ranked order of value (or ordo amoris). Eric Gregory explains this notion by commenting that ‘Affectus and intentio lie at the crossroad of “psychology” and “ontology”. The intersection of this crossroad is the Augustinian concept of an ordo amoris.’35 In other 35 E. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 41; cf. Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 21 n. 5, on Aquinas’s concept of ‘intentio’ which Lombardo takes as equivalent to contemporary phenomenology’s notion of intention.

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words, a subject’s encounter with the world is experienced partially in the ‘aboutness’ or intentionality of affections which are correlated to some more or less coherent vision of the world’s worth. One might speak here of an ‘order of love’, as Gregory himself has done so thoroughly. However, the language of love will not take centre stage in what follows but give way to my particular focus on the evaluative quality of affections in contemporary politics. This language choice has a twofold theological and communicative rationale. First, Gregory and O’Donovan observe that ‘the most mature aspect of Augustine’s notion of love’36 is a ‘rational love’ by which worth or value is perceived. Such love has an ordo which is either imposed by the lover or ‘given by its comprehending conformity to the order of reality’.37 Whatever its quality, this rational love is concerned with recognizing value in some kind of order. Second, speaking in terms of orders of value has great resonance with contemporary democratic politics which has rediscovered, however ambiguously, the language of values. Its undisciplined talk of shared values or shared understandings cries out for more disciplined conceptualization and bears directly on our interest in understanding the democratic deficit. And so, for both theological and apologetic-communicative purposes, we will speak here of the individual and communal orders of value and of how affections evaluate the world from within those orders. For Lacoste, such affections’ valuations are therefore not unrelated one to another but rather affection ‘discerns value in a ranked order. Any given discernment of value may indeed afford a valid entrée into that order.’ That is, any recognition may be a way into a shared value system in which common, ongoing, moral reflection and deliberation may then occur.38 Entry into an order does not presuppose an exhaustive knowledge of the order as a whole nor that value has been rightly recognized. Still less, for an Augustinian, should it imply exhaustive knowledge of God who ‘does not compete with the neighbour for the self ’s attention, as if God were simply the biggest of those rival objects considered worthy of love [but rather] transcends any metaphysical frame of reference that might measure the reality of God in relation to other realities in some hierarchy of 36

Gregory, Politics, 253. O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine (Wipf & Stock, 2006), 31. 38 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 118. 37

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ascending goods’.39 Rather, elaborating on Lacoste, an order of value should be viewed as a shared way for a number of subjects, as joint members of a culture, subculture, nation-state, tribe, family, or continental political union, to sort and reflect on values grasped in affective recognition. Through such an order, some objects will be commonly valued more highly in relation to others and some objects less so. The birth of children will normally be rejoiced over more and in different ways than the birth of newts. And yet there will be internal conflicts of valuation as different participants of the same order value the same objects diversely. Moreover, within contemporary Western nation-states there will be plural orders of value at work throughout their peoples. Accordingly, an order of value itself should not, on Lacoste’s view, be viewed as a total or comprehensive account of what is valuable. Indeed, the self-aware members of a community who reflect on the presence of a diversity of valuation within a largely shared order of value will naturally become conscious of the insufficiency of their own cultural valuations to encompass all of reality. Lacoste’s description of human experience relies on Heidegger’s account of worldly affectivity whereby the ‘world’ is reality as it appears to us, known affectively but dimly by moral recognition, a beginning of moral understanding which is not yet moral knowledge.40 Lacoste distinguishes this ‘world’ from the ‘cosmos’, the world as it actually is, the world to which any ordo amoris will correspond to a greater or lesser degree. He argues that the ‘life of the affections gives access to a moral logic, yes; but it is the logic of a “world”, not a “cosmos”’.41 Accordingly, Scheler’s fault was that he ‘overlooked the worldly conditions of affectivity that prevent the perpetual parousia of values’.42 Scheler was unwisely proposing an over-realized eschatology of affectivity, that the time of complete knowledge had come already, that emotion could know it all and know it now. At this point, Lacoste’s own account of beginnings emerges as a clear alternative to both Scheler and Aristotle. Whereas one reasonable reading of Aristotle suggests that the first and last principle of action was a comprehensive vision of the good attained by nous,

39

Gregory, Politics, 41–2. Cf. J.-Y. Lacoste, ‘Existence and Love of God: Concerning a Note from Being and Time’, tr. J. Mumford (unpubl.). 41 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 124. 42 Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 123. 40

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supported by habituated virtue of character and whereas Scheler argued that the first word is the last word and is spoken by sentimental intuitions, Lacoste denies the possibility of a comprehensive knowledge of the good under the conditions of worldliness, agrees with Scheler on the importance of a phenomenology of value, but argues that values appear to the affections as the first ethical facts, the half-light of ethics. The valuable facts recognized are thus not like the bright ‘facts’ of natural science but rather are the dimly lit first facts of ethics. This Heideggerian worldly affectivity is quite different than the perceptual immediacy which Scheler championed. There are shared ranked orders of value (ordines amoris) in the world by which affections may be shared and discussed. But the light affections shed on an order of value is a half-light not a bright light. This half-light is what is necessary if the disclosure of norms is to follow the recognition of values. Although affective recognition remains cognitive, intentional, and evaluative, its fundamental mode of evidentiality is ‘penury’, the poverty of worldly rather than cosmic epistemology.43 This turn, I suggest, has great significance for the political questions with which this book is concerned. For the affective grasping of facts as typically penurious first words rather than typically wealthy last words about value makes affection the beginning of a process by which moral norms are disclosed, a process which is conducted through patient moral reflection and deliberation at every level of human life including in its political dimensions. Overhasty intuitionism and cold rationalism are equally excluded. For on the penurious approach, reflection and deliberation follow affection since affection knows something but not everything. Moreover, just what affections do disclose may be assessed. As Lacoste says, ‘is not the most selfevident thing about our feelings precisely the fact that we need to discuss them’,44 a need which is addressed in the day-to-day of political discourse and experience as rival valuations conflict with one another and reshape more or less shared orders of value. Affective interdependence will not always bring about consensus but may involve negotiation and conflict.

Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 121, reflecting the work of Edmund Husserl. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 117. This is not to say that affections may not also be recognitions which follow reflection and deliberation but only that, if they are, then they are themselves provisional and so discussible and suitable beginnings for further moral thought. We return to this point in section III below. 43 44

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The possibility and necessity of discussing affections, arising respectively from affections’ cognitive intentionality and the common experience of disagreement, opens up the project of ‘intersubjective verification’ of values recognized in affection, a task which is essentially communal and so familial, institutional, and political. Intersubjective verification of affection is the sharing of affective understandings among people in order that any particular recognitions might be verified as true recognitions or set aside as false recognitions. That such intersubjective sharing involves verification implies that intersubjective affectivity does not entail a simple, uncritical sharing of valuations but rather that conflicting valuations are both routine and negotiable. This negotiation and verification of conflicting valuations is the very stuff of political experience as objects are evaluated and re-evaluated in affectively toned ways. Intersubjectivity is not an optional extra in political life. Rather, it is a political necessity in light of what Nussbaum called ‘interdependence’ but which an Augustinian anthropology has articulated by both affirming the ‘separateness of persons’ and resisting ‘a self-identity that is not other-directed’.45 The process of intersubjective verification happens over time and among families, communities, institutions, and polities who have common objects which they agree are worthy of evaluation, however diverse those evaluations may then be. The outcome of intersubjective verification—perhaps a new, widespread affective agreement or at least a recognition of the reasonableness of alternative evaluations—shapes the common experience of the shared order of value. The experience of childhood, explored by Nussbaum, can be understood as an experience of intersubjective interdependence for the sake of making progress in affective understanding. The 15-year-old who is still angry when his mother is absent for a few minutes has not grown up into a mature experience of this verification of affective valuations. Gregory, observing the interconnections between feminists and Augustine, notes that intersubjectivity is the core of Augustinian human experience. ‘To go deeply into oneself, for . . . Augustine, is already to be scattered into a plurality that recognizes . . . God and neighbor . . . This intersubjective ontology, and subsequent anthropology, is basic to Augustine’s

45 Gregory, Politics, 260. As noted in Ch.1, intersubjective also has a significant place in contemporary European political theory. I reserve explicit discussion of this dimension for Ch.4.

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account of value and valuing. It is one that few liberal theorists today share.’46 On the political level, the highly diverse polities of the twenty-first century West are in this sense no different from Augustine’s Rome which he described, building on Cicero’s definition, as a multitude of rational beings united by common agreement on the objects of their valuations. Both ancient Rome and, for example, contemporary Europe and the United States may have a common name for the object of affections—perhaps ‘peace’ or ‘freedom’—but display profound internal and external diversity in their valuations of what constitutes and makes for peace and freedom alongside various modes of accommodation of these affective disagreements. One obvious reason for this diversity, analogous to Nussbaum’s insights into child psychology, is found in the diverse narratives and perceptions of history which characterize different polities and groups within those polities including families. Such narratives and perceptions will shape political affections, political processes of intersubjective verification of affection and, therefore, orders of value as they are constantly reformulated. These two—the affections’ penurious half-light and the necessity of interdependent, intersubjective political affectivity—are closely linked for two reasons. First, affections’ worldly penury encourages human discovery of new features in the cosmos (the world as it is) or, more precisely, things which only appear new to the agent but ‘which are yet not new but were there . . . from the first’.47 Since they are constitutionally incomplete reports about the nature of the world as it appears and the cosmos, they are fit beginnings to the moral reflection and deliberation characteristic of political life. They are fit precisely because they have not already decided on the nature of reality but are dependent, for their epistemological power, on consideration of the reality they seek to discover. This form of politics is consonant with ‘Christian thought [which] has tended to insist that every moral decision should be approached de novo, with complete openness to the moral field’.48 Affections are thus indispensable to moral thought but insufficient to do all moral thinking; indeed, their insufficiency is of the essence of their indispensability precisely 46 47 48

Gregory, Politics, 243–4. O. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (Apollos, 1994), 92. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 216.

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because through them we are drawn into a close attentiveness to what the world is like and what we should do about it.49 Affections then are a deeply human way of being committed to making moral discoveries and thereby being attentive to reality but also, through their insufficiency to carry out all the work of moral reflection and deliberation, to the fact that it is truly a moral discovery that we are making. Their nature shows that we can never engage with the world knowing all the answers about the good and the right beforehand. Instead, there is an expectation and a tolerance of diversity in valuations, a staple of contemporary democratic society. But alongside this, there is a robust confidence that not every affective recognition of value should necessarily be judged equally perceptive about what makes for the welfare of a political society, particular sector thereof, or other social entity. Understanding affections in this way fosters not only an anti-paternalism since everyone’s affections need to be considered and none should simply be allowed to prevail without examination but also, as a corollary, a realism that not everyone’s affections will be equally insightful. What will be expected, therefore, is a boisterous but reasonable conflict of affective understanding. This description of political experience is made conceivable by the notion of affections as the half-light of political understanding. Second, the combination of affections’ penurious insufficiency with their cognitive aptitude is the conceptual basis for the intersubjective discussion of the recognitions which affections constitute which is itself a vital form of our human interdependence. By way of a political illustration, imagine affections are like watchmen on the walls of a city whose job is partially constituted by their alertness to newness. As the dawn rises in the east one watchman will cry to another, ‘The dawn, the dawn! Do you see it?’ and the other will reply, ‘Yes, I see it! The dawn, the dawn!’ The initial perception of the one is Charles Taylor observes that ‘just having the feeling that X is important doesn’t resolve the issue. Questions, puzzlement may remain . . . [and the] process of reasoning goes on.’ C. Taylor, ‘Reason, Faith and Meaning’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 12. Taylor’s remarks are schematic rather than precise in this context although by no means opposed to the present argument. He writes of the ‘dawning sense of a new paradigm’ (8); of ‘words of insight, whose full nature can nevertheless not be fully communicated in words. Reason cannot be simply reduced to explicit reasoning, the methodical rational operations which we carry out on our already articulated insights’ (9). On his view ‘Descartes . . . neglected this interplay of groping and ratification’ (9), although John Cottingham’s account of Descartes’ alertness to awe, noted in Ch.1, should be borne in mind. 49

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intersubjectively verified by the perception of the other, their common perception is objectively verified by the first of the sun’s rays, and so the trumpet sounds and the city awakes to a new day of reflection, deliberation, and activity. But on the next day one watchman looks out and cries, ‘The dawn! The dawn! Do you see it?’ and the other looks hard to the east and responds, ‘No—not the dawn but the morning star rising.’ So intersubjective verification corrects the initial perception, the watchmen continue to wait and the city’s awakening to reflective, deliberative activity is postponed. Affective recognition has some resemblance, as Scheler argued, to visual perception but, contra Scheler, may be seriously mistaken and must be submitted to intersubjective verification followed by the process of moral reflection and deliberation which the affective recognition of value has initiated. Thus, just as the first watchman’s incorrect perception was intersubjectively corrected by the second’s response and objectively corrected by the rising of the morning star, so affective recognitions of value may be corrected. People, in the course of further reflection and deliberation, may come to some deeper understanding which in turn casts doubt on the quality of the original affective recognition. Thus affections, when intersubjectively agreed upon, are ways that we engage with and awaken together to the world as it appears to a community. As evaluative beginnings, affections themselves require discussion and this discussion gives intelligible structure to intersubjective verification for, in discussion, we may reflect more fully about both the nature and object of particular affections. Whereas Scheler’s privatized, incommunicable sentiments voided political discussion, my account envisions a public role for affections as the beginnings of corporate, discursive moral reflection and deliberation. And whereas Nussbaum does explore the intersubjective interdependence of people, the communicability of emotion, and its corrigibility, she appealed to the courts to arbitrate with respect to her particular list of capabilities, not to a distinction between world and cosmos, allied with intersubjective verification.

Beginnings as attracted participation If affective understanding is characterized by a worldly, half-lit penury, contested questions follow, namely whether that penury can be enriched, whether the half-light can be brightened, and

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whether there can be an intelligible relationship at all between a changing worldly, shared order of value (ordo amoris) and the world as it is (cosmos). This is partly a political question. For if there is such an intelligible relationship then the valuations of a particular, political ordo amoris are not to be conceived as final words but rather particular refractions of the general human experience. Amidst the contemporary reality of highly plural cultural expressions of humanity within and between contemporary nationstates, the further implication of such a relationship is that those sharing in any order of value may discover themselves to be more or less ordered to the cosmos. Any difference between an order of value and the order of the cosmos represents a source of energy for political change. The programmatic detail of this hypothesis may be expressed in the following way. If there is such an intelligible relationship between world and cosmos, people should approach the world as it appears to them in epistemological humility, affectively recognizing value in first ethical facts, not claiming exhaustive knowledge of the cosmos as it is but rather hoping to reflect intersubjectively on the values affectively recognized by oneself and others through one’s own and one’s community’s shared order of value. People should adopt this posture because they have an awareness that their order stands in relation to the cosmos and, therefore, in the intersubjective cultural experience, they should also seek penetrating, affective understanding of the cosmos itself. The order of value functions in this way, whether or not part or whole of the community understands that this is the case. An order of value, embodied in the tradition of a society, family, church, or philosophical movement does not therefore function in the same way as the comprehensive account of eudaimonia in Bostock’s Aristotle or as in Lacoste’s Heideggerian elaboration of Scheler. Instead, it functions as a structured, social way of bringing together the world as it is with the world as a person or community perceives it to be. The order of valuation would, therefore, always be open to reordering as affective recognition of value calls into question previous valuations. In considering the possibility of becoming reordered to ‘the world as it is’, the objective reality of a unified, cosmic order of value, we walk in contested epistemological territory. In the contemporary Western political world, the reality of political plurality concerning ways of ordering, even within a single polity let alone multiple polities, has meant that epistemological claims of this sort are

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routinely interpreted as power-plays. Talk of a cosmos appears as a bid for dominance by one perspective among others and could not legitimately open a conversation about an actual unified field of value. But on our hypothesis, there is such a field which we shall call a ‘moral order’. This ‘moral order’ is a theological conceptuality, discussion of which is present throughout multiple contemporary societies in conversation with accounts such as Nussbaum’s. Inasmuch as it has publicly beneficial explanatory power, the idea of a moral order should be no more barred than Nussbaum’s notion of a world of upheaval from a truly democratic, public discourse which is open to moral argument and persuasion. This is so even for liberal polities because a claim to an intelligible interrelationship between perceived worlds and a definite moral order by no means implies that this objective order can be exhaustively mirrored by a particular order of value so that subjectivity and objectivity are collapsed one into the other, a totalitarian notion, barring all but a select circle of cognoscenti from truth-bearing public reasoning, which rightly falls prey to sceptical critique. Rather, the claim is that there is a given, objective moral order of ‘ends’ and ‘kinds’, a reality in relation to which all other ranked orders of value, whether theological or philosophical, should attend. This moral order is the objective, given shape of the world, structured by patterns of value which are not projected on the world by humanity but present before they are affectively recognized. It consists in the variety of species in their interrelated orders which structure the cosmos and the enduring authorities which lie within the cosmos such as ‘beauty, age, community and strength (a word which includes the whole range of natural virtue, from might to wisdom)’ which ‘have the capacity, as we encounter them in individuals, in human institutions and in the natural world, to inspire and order our actions in distinctive ways’.50 For Christian theology, this

50 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 124; cf. 31–52. This claim will not be defended at any length though its implications will be seen. Objections to conceiving the creation as teleologically and generically ordered have been dealt with sufficiently by O’Donovan. The critique of a Humean or Kantian voluntarism which opposes generic and teleological ordering is particularly important here. O’Donovan comments that the voluntarist programme covertly retains an idea of generic categories since ‘there would be no way of distinguishing the moral affections from other affective impulses, feelings and desires, unless the former were bound to respond to all like things in like ways, that is, consistently, and so justly’ (46). The account of affective understanding which has been developed through Lacoste does not suggest

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reality has been created by God and vindicated by the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, as God’s saving actions say ‘yes’ to the goodness of that which was created from the beginning and destined for fulfilment in the new heavens and the new earth. On this reckoning, the created moral order provides ‘the only [epistemologically certain] point of reference’51 by which human creatures may reflect on the good and deliberate concerning the right as it is specified by human culture’s particular refraction of the natural moral order. Politics amidst such a vindicated created order is concerned not only with the human species but with every living species and every aspect of the creation through which species may flourish. Affective recognitions of value within any particular order of value may initiate discussion both about that order and the order of value, the moral order created by God, which is accessible to all. On this account, affections are not only culturally communicable forms of understanding which may lead a person from their particular perspective on reality into an activity of intersubjective communication. Affections are, by revelatory grace, forms of understanding whereby people come via a particular order of value to grasp the cosmos of value as it is, and even as it now holds together in Christ. This interplay between orders of value and the moral order is what we should call a natural account of affective recognition whereby the order of value in a human community is to the generically and teleologically arranged order of value within the created cosmos as the human law is to the natural law. Affections are naturally drawn out by the created order which yet retains an intelligibility that humanity may perceive.52 In awakening through natural affection to such an interconnection between the self, the communities of a totally uniform consistency. Instead, affections have the subtlety of evaluating particularities in terms of the generic and teleological structure of the moral order. We may not demand the same affection for every similar ‘X’ since ‘X’ may have complex characteristics which make the term ‘consistency’ inapplicable, not because ‘X’ is totally unlike anything else but because its particular instantiation of a genus is precisely in some relation to the telos of that genus. 51 O. O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), 311. 52 This form of ‘realistic’ moral realism goes to the roots of a stream of historical Christian thought which looks back to Augustine. Eric Gregory comments that ‘any Augustinian—liberal or not—will be a moral realist . . . As created and historical beings, however, social practices and biological conditions will play a decisive role in mediating our access to this source . . . Social practices are neither infallible nor exhaustive. Given the noetic effects of sin, an Augustinian will believe that epistemic

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which the self is part, the world as it appears, and the cosmos, a person comes to a measure of self-understanding. That self-understanding does not reckon the self as over and above the created order but as a member of it, a creature among the creatures. In this way, the Christian view retains an appropriately anthropocentric view of reality while avoiding the elision between self-understanding and eudaimonism which characterizes Nussbaum’s thought. Her ‘emotions’ refer to the self only as they refer to the self ’s eudaimonistic projects. Emotional self-awareness is at the service of self-consciousness not consciousness of self within an objective created order. She neglects systematic reflection on the possibility of this deep interconnectedness of self with cosmos. By contrast, the interrelation of natural affections and natural law is a precursor to the affective possibilities which follow from the accomplishment of Jesus Christ by whom the true nature of moral order was disclosed, in whom the cosmos now holds together, and before whom all orders of value are now judged. The political significance of this difference may be illustrated with respect to ecological concerns. The idea of established value within the structure and form of the cosmos is supportive of those ecological movements which emphasize our common differentiated oneness with other species, the land, sea, and the earth’s ecosystem as a whole in its diverse beauty, age, and strength. Moreover, there remains a further authority peculiarly relevant to ecological concerns—‘the authority of injured right . . . which shapes our structures of justice and government’.53 The cosmos is not simply the site of our projects but rather where we, as members of the cosmos, discover our value in relation to the cosmos’ own value-laden goodness and our wrongdoing in relation to its limits. By contrast, while gesturing towards our ecological integration through observing the interrelation between, for example, canine and human emotions,54 Nussbaum claims that we are ‘in the hands of the world’, and may be assaulted by it as with a knife. This form of language, which instrumentalizes the world in relation to our own perspectives, is liable to direct people’s emotions into ecologically less constructive directions. Fear, for example, is unlikely to have the attractive effect of drawing us back access to this moral reality faces severe challenges—not the least of which includes our capacity adequately to theorize about moral reality.’ Gregory, Politics, 103–4. 53 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 124. 54 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 89ff.

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into more harmonious patterns of interrelation with our fellow creatures. Nussbaum’s paradigmatic political emotion, compassion, is more promising for it encourages intersubjective understanding and I shall return to it in due course. But the concept of a good moral order explicitly affirms that we are creatures among other creatures, drawn affectively and intersubjectively into understanding our place within the differentiated created order. We are summoned affectively to discover our already-given ecological responsibility, to celebrate in joy the goodness of the world and to protect it and ourselves as one of its member species. In matters of this sort, moral theology may fulfil an apologetic task by offering publicly beneficial conceptual resources, thereby keeping open a way for moral discovery even amidst highly plural political societies. Creation’s moral order is not immediately accessible in bright, sharply defined detail—such a claim would simply fall back into Schelerian intuitionism and the endless disagreements which follow radically different claims to intuitive knowledge. And yet there may still be moral learning, the ‘intellectual penetration and exploration of a reality which we can grasp from the beginning in a schematic and abstract way, but which contains depths of meaning and experience into which we can reach’.55 This ‘penetration’ and ‘exploration’ are further expressions of the concept of ‘reflection’ and, in the Christian community, may be forms of sanctification. Such reflective penetration of the teleological and generic goodness of the cosmos and its God is never final but always open to further depths and correction. But the beginning by which we grasp the gestalt of the cosmos is substantially affective since the moral order created by God is ‘very good’56 and the resurrection of Christ from the dead reaffirms that ‘very good’ and promises its eschatological fulfilment. Affections evaluate this goodness in its many and varied forms and initiate that deeper understanding of the moral order which reflection achieves. Moral reflection is then the creaturely task of knowing-and-valuing the objectively value-laden, vindicated, created moral order even amidst its fallen condition. Such a position is an alternative to the familiar modern separation between fact and value which dominates much contemporary political discourse. ‘Knowing’ information as ‘bare fact’ is different from that knowing-and-valuing which is the 55 56

O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 92; my emphasis. Genesis 1: 31.

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substance of reflective knowledge. Indeed, the Augustinian claim is that knowing which does not value is not true knowing. Instead, reflective knowing is an ongoing, repeated form of committed moral valuation involving deeper penetration of the created moral order if its different aspects and their interrelation are to come into sharper focus. This good vindicated creation is the object in relation to which affective recognitions of value, though mediated by diverse orders of value, stand as subjects. Political debate is one basic forum for moral reflection, initiated affectively, and carried out amidst the diverse orders of value which characterize contemporary polities. On this hypothesis, we can say three more things about the form which affective evaluation takes. First, the goodness of the created moral order and its vindication by the resurrection of Christ indicate the unity of affective attraction and affective intention. Affections’ cognitive intentionality towards objects is not simply at the disposal of the subject who may choose to ‘deploy’ his affections or not. Instead, affective understanding, refracted through a particular order of value, is attracted by objects which are features of the generically and teleologically structured, good created order. The world as it is, the cosmos, draws out, evokes, and even demands affective understanding.57 Thus the intentionality of affection is not simply ‘up to us’ but is correlated both to the attractiveness of the good creation and to the particular cultural representation of that goodness which we inhabit. Second, this notion of attracted intention resonates with the traditional account of passions as movements of the soul in the form of the inclined will. People are acted upon by God or the creation through their will being drawn in some direction or other.58 In the Thomist tradition, this experience is mediated through the appetites which are teleologically ordered and acted upon by their objects.

57 Charles Taylor comments suggestively that ‘the perception of significance, of human meanings, can’t be detached from the experiencing of these meanings, an experience which can only be rarely and fleetingly indifferent. We grasp these meanings through our partiality to them. To such a point that we can often say, with Plato, that one hasn’t really understood the good unless one is drawn to it.’ Taylor, ‘Reason, Faith and Meaning’, 11. 58 ‘Appetites, passions and affections, on the classical Christian view, were all movements of different parts of the will, and the affections, at least, were potentially informed by reason’ or ‘a living God acting or moving through the passions and affections of the will’. T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions (CUP, 2003), 22, 88.

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‘A passion is nothing other than the movement of the sense appetite . . . in response to an object to which the sense appetite is inclined.’59 This very passivity of passion is what is being picked out by the notion of affective, intentional attraction. The focus on the concept of the voluntary ‘will’ as the locus of affections is, however, not uncontested. In bombastic style, the Reformer Philip Melanchthon distinguished the Aristotelian will as that which concerns downstream external acts in contrast to the heart, the innermost part of man, arguing that, ‘since God judges hearts, the heart and its affections must be the highest and most powerful part of man’. He then proceeded, citing Jeremiah and the Psalmist, to emphasize a far more radical account of the experience of attraction. On the one hand, for Melanchthon, the doctrine of predestination demonstrated that the will was not free. But more fundamentally, the heart’s ‘internal affections are not in our power’ because of the deeply pervasive reach of sin which means that the heart itself, from which the will proceeds, is deeply corrupt.60 On Melanchthon’s view, affections cannot simply be overcome by better thinking or sheer acts of will but are rather attracted to what is wrong and evil because they are themselves disordered and corrupted.61 As Jesus taught, it is from the depths of humanity that all kinds of evil arise, an insight that Augustine took very much to heart but which is naturally unpopular.62 Reverting to our earlier account, this corruption of human epistemology, scattering and confusing affections, offers to account for the Heideggerian insight that worldly affectivity is the half-light of understanding. But if attraction is not simply neutral but rather shares in the corruption which characterizes all life so that corrupted affections are ways of understanding the corrupted world, then this both affirms and 59

Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 34. P. Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes’, in Melanchthon and Bucer, Library of Christian Classics, 19,ed. W. Pauck (SCM Press, 1969), 27–30. 61 For Melanchthon, it is only in the Christian that ‘good affections struggle with bad’ for supremacy in the heart. Aquinas has a somewhat similar notion to Melanchthon in the form of the law of concupiscence, the participation of humanity in an inclination away from the natural law. (T. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. T. Gilby (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963), 1a2ae, 91.6.) On a more general level, Paul Ramsey wrote of the ‘element of sin in all human love’, Basic Christian Ethics (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 330, reflecting the Augustinian tradition of understanding disorderly loves by recognizing the exceptionless co-presence of sin and love in this present age. 62 Mark 7: 21. 60

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complicates the intelligibility of the relationship between orders of value and the moral order itself. The goods and authorities of the moral order continue to make demands upon our affective attention despite our own, our world’s, and the cosmos’ corruption. Affective understanding is corrupted along with that cosmos and is, therefore, not always and not simply a reliable source for political agreement on value. These first two theological observations make attracted intentionality a different concept than Nussbaum’s upheavals which explained the ‘heat’ of emotion as the experience of instability impinging on our eudaimonistic plans.63 By contrast, the claim here is that the cosmos has a goodness and order quite apart from our perception of that ordered goodness. It is this enduring goodness, however corrupted, which yet draws forth our affective recognitions, attracting us within the matrix of generic and teleological ordering. Our epistemological dimness does not eliminate the ongoing, created moral order. This order is firmly established, cannot be moved, and calls forth from us an ordered affective understanding which is then reflected in diverse orders of value. Its stability reminds us that, amidst the half-light of our fallen understanding, there remains the possibility of epistemological sanctification. Third, this refined account of affective intentional attraction within the moral order can be further clarified through the language of ‘participation’. Daniel Hardy and David Ford write of divine and human knowing as ‘being knit into all that there is’, a form of participative knowledge. God is ‘knit into all that there is’ in that God ‘is open to all of [creation’s] reality, including its distortions and agonies’, ‘refuses to avoid the truth and so is involved in enjoying or suffering it. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the main Christian criteria of what knowing the world means for God. They are the wisdom of God in its greatest concentration.’64 These themes, glimpsed now, will be developed at greater length in succeeding chapters. Ford and Hardy observe that if God’s wisdom is of this participative sort in the person of the incarnate Christ then human wisdom can be of the same species, sharing in Christ’s human experience. 63

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 78. D. Hardy and D. Ford, Jubilate: Theology in Praise (Darton Longman & Todd, 1984), 108. 64

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Our description of affections resonates with this creaturely, participatory form of knowing. Human affective recognitions of value are the first moments of moral understanding, the beginnings of being knit into all that there is, when ‘all that there is’ is interpreted as the moral order vindicated in Christ. They are the beginnings of participation and the form of initial, committed, attracted engagement open to us as creatures in the moral order. This is an aspect of the human condition more generally ‘Morality is man’s participation in the created order’65 and there is no other way of being human than being committed or engaged in the world in some way—we cannot avoid taking a moral stance within the cosmos just as we cannot avoid being bodily present as a member of it. Similarly, Eric Gregory rightly warns against a notion of emotions that allows that they ‘are complex evaluative cognitions and energies that focus ethical attention and develop understanding and judgment . . . [and] play an important role in motivating political action’ but ‘concedes too much to the traditional liberal picture that emotions get morality going just in time for rationality to step in and take charge’.66 This is not what is being proposed here. One may attempt to escape reality and seal oneself off from the cosmos’ goodness and corruption. But affections are inescapable: we cannot stop ourselves from valuing objects within the cosmos and reflectively exploring those values.67 Affections are the always present first stitches in the knitting of human moral thought and enterprises within the teleological warp and generic woof of the cosmos. The ultimate reason for this is the created, attracted relation in which we stand as members of the cosmos which draws us as creatures within its order of value. Our affective nature saves us from lingering tentatively on the edge of the cosmos or skating Stoically over its surface, as if such absurdities were possible. Our very humanity, including its epistemological-neurological, bodily 65

O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 76. Gregory, Politics, 249. 67 Cf. Gregory, Politics, 247: ‘Augustine . . . considers love . . . constitutive of being human. Love is ineliminable. It is a deep fact about the world. One cannot not love.’ Similarly, one cannot not be affective. Cf. R. M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (OUP, 1999), 23, where Adams comments that ‘our reasonable aspiration is not to get value judgments out of the foundations of objectivity, which is probably impossible, but it allow there only value judgments that are very plausibly objective’. The aspiration is reasonable precisely because ‘the role of evaluation in our thought is so pervasive’. (Adams, ‘Precis of Finite and Infinite Goods’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64/2 (Mar. 2002), 440.) 66

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capabilities, is already and permanently affectively, evaluatively participative in the world, interrelated with all other features of the created order. Through affections, we discover that the good but broken reality of the world we encounter has value and, through affections, we are drawn to respond. It is in this attracted, participative way that affections are the beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation about action. With this participatory, affective, attracted beginning of understanding in mind, we return to where we began with the controversial notion of epistemologically penurious people becoming more ordered to the world as it is. Lacoste comments that ‘an affective grasp may be weak, and it may be mistaken: the important thing is that it may be dead right’,68 but modestly holds back from an account of how affections might become permanently ‘dead right’ about the world as it is, about whether ‘feeling will ultimately have the answer to everything’.69 Thus it remains unclear whether Lacoste believes that the penury of affection is due to humanity’s created nature or to the corruption of that nature as Melanchthon suggested. He does not disclose whether penury is a permanent characteristic of human affectivity or a temporary indigence suffered by a corrupted humanity. Hints of eschatology emerge in the course of the essay but, as Lacoste says, he has been focusing on the first word rather than the last. Augustine of Hippo’s eschatological reflections on affections go further in accounting for penury than philosophy qua philosophy can venture. According to Augustine, humanity experienced a richly affective, Edenic life before they fell into corruption. Their overriding affection was ‘grande gaudium’ (‘great joy’) which proceeded from a love of the God who was present to them.70 Augustine has earlier enquired as to whether affective experience itself is an aspect of corrupted, infirm earthly life,71 whether humans experienced affections in Eden and will experience them in the resurrection, and whether the angels and God lack affections. He reckons that the scriptures seem to affirm the reality of angelic and divine affectivity and that people too ‘will exhibit a love and gladness’ in the newness Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 113. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 127. 70 Augustine, City of God, tr. H. Bettenson (Penguin Books, 1972), 14.10. This tr. will be used throughout except where noted. 71 ‘ad vitae praesentia pertineat infirmitatem . . . huiusce modi perpeti affectus’; City of God, 9.5. 68 69

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of life.72 In the Confessions’ account of joy and memory, Augustine speaks of a ‘gaudium pristinum’,73 a joy of long ago akin to the ‘grande gaudium’, reflection on which makes him question afresh where and when he experienced the happy life. Humanity now pursues and rejoices in happiness though many mistake the proper object of joy by seeking happiness solely in the creation and not in the Creator. Nonetheless, the common human desire for happiness and for joy in the object which represents that happiness indicates that there is a ‘modicum lumen’, perhaps equivalent to Lacoste’s ‘half-light’, which survives amidst human corruption whereby people desire happiness but with limited understanding. Augustine is clear that God is the proper ultimate object of joy. There are many idolatrous attractions but genuine ‘gaudium de veritate’ is the joy which is grounded in and attracted by God, the ‘beata vita’ which Christians will experience.74 Two important conclusions follow: first, that Augustine did expect affections—specifically joy—to mark the human experience of heaven;75 second, that Augustine believed the current corrupted state of the world to have reduced affection to its initial, preliminary form of understanding—the ‘modicum lumen’ consists, at least partly, in a penurious affectivity. Affectivity in the present era will have more or less light depending upon the condition of the subject or community of subjects, the extent to which their affectivity is rightly ordered. Though penurious, humanity’s ‘task as moral agents is to participate in [the moral] order, understanding it and conforming to it in what we think and do’.76 In light of Christ’s resurrection, ‘the redeemed creation does not merely confront us moral agents, but includes us and enables us to participate in it’.77 Such epistemological modesty makes good sense of our weak condition and the dependence of our subjective, affective recognitions on a shared order of value which approximates more or less well to the moral order itself. Moreover, if the first affective moment claimed to have revealed an exhaustive account of value, then intersubjective verification of value within a shared order of value would have no purpose. But, as Lacoste says, we really do want to talk and are able to talk about our 72

73 City of God, 14.9. Augustine, Confessions, 10.xxi.30. Confessions, 10.xxiii.33. Cf. ‘That is the authentic happy life, to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you.’ Ibid. 10.xxii.32, tr. H. Chadwick. 75 Augustine, City of God, 14.9. 76 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 127. 77 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 101. 74

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affections. On the other hand, if the first affective moment had no possible connection at all with the world as it is, the moral order vindicated in Christ, then affections would collapse once again into radical perspectivalism or monarchical intuitionism. Discussion would be terminated at its inception, reduced to an anti-social mathematical point. But the present account of the beginning of shared moral reflection and deliberation avoids these dangers and combines both the epistemological penury and the epistemological possibilities of affections as attracted, intentional recognitions of value which are open to intersubjective sharing and verification. In summary, by insisting that the affective recognition of first ethical facts is the initial half-light of participative moral understanding, this account proposes a more modest epistemological role for the affections than Scheler and stands in sharp contrast to Bostock’s reading of Aristotle. However, at the same time, I am proposing a greater confidence about the possible accessibility of the created moral order to human affections than Lacoste ultimately allows in his insightful essay.78 The necessity of intersubjective verification and the reality of participative affectivity function to draw people into self-awareness and cosmos-attentiveness. As O’Donovan suggests, the fruit of this process is a genuinely participative moral learning, a reordering of affections to be more in tune with the world as it is, the created, cosmic moral order.

II. ENDURING AFFECTIONS If we grant that affections are the participative beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation, we should now discuss their enduring 78 For the avoidance of doubt and in light of the complexity of Schelerian and Aristotelian scholarship, I should say here that my use of these authors has been heuristic rather than exhaustive or structural to the argument. Specifically, Bostock’s interpretation of Aristotle provides a helpful contrast to the theologically enriched version of Lacoste’s discussion of Scheler. The discussion of Scheler and Aristotle has drawn out broader issues concerning affections and laid the groundwork for future analysis but should not be read as decisive findings concerning the whole of their respective corpora of writings. At this point we leave Scheler behind to face Lacoste’s well-judged charge of anti-intersubjective emotivism. (Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 117; cf. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (Duckworth, 1985), chs. 1–3.)

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quality. Political relations clearly endure and develop over time. I was born British and remain British today. If affections are aspects of political relations, it seems plausible that affections too somehow endure. I argue in what follows that enduring affections enable people repeatedly to begin to understand an order of value and the moral order and so reflect, deliberate, and act together in a relatively consistent, cohesive, albeit fragile way. I suggest that this sheds light on the notion of shared understandings and the democratic deficit. The differences between Scheler, Bostock, Lacoste, O’Donovan, and Ford may be explained through consideration of ‘stability’. ‘Stability’ describes the enduring solidity of the epistemological foundation on which a people put their weight as they begin their moral reflection and deliberation and push out towards action. It seems intuitively apparent that fear, joy, hate, and other affections often have a stable, enduring quality. One thinks of the steadiness of some Scots’ hatred of England, evoked especially by Margaret’s Thatcher’s government but also by the more distant past. It is a cognitive evaluation, intentionally attracted by historical experience and maintained through political rhetoric. Then there is the enduring indignation and sorrow of Northern Irish Unionists over the unresolved crimes during the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, affections which become more complicated as former enemies become official political leaders. To cite these examples is not to affirm or valorize any particular affective response but rather to highlight that stable, enduring affections are constantly interrelated with more ephemeral or ‘episodic’ affections such as joy in a sporting victory, which dims even as the next match approaches. If affections have epistemological aptitude, a stable popular epistemology will be partly constituted by the stability of a people’s affections, the joy, hatred, and fear (for example) by which they repeatedly evaluate and understand some features of reality, such as the representative leaders and activities of a rival political bloc. Enduring affections are enduring beginnings, ways of participating in reality which more or less stably characterize an epistemological outlook. Typically, people are only occasionally aware of their stable affective outlook. But intersubjective reflection on stability will bring a number of results. First, perception of a stable foundation assures a community that reflection, deliberation, and action are repeatable and adaptable—having launched out stably on one occasion, one can either do the same again or adapt one’s conduct after reflection.

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This repeatability and adaptability reassure the community of stability amidst change which in turn enables the development over time of a common culture, a theme to be developed in Chapter 3 with respect to social and institutional memory. However, from a theological or philosophical perspective, a political society’s consciousness of stability is no sure sign of an actually stable epistemological foundation. Bostock’s Aristotle saw stability in an account of the good life protected and promoted by virtue of character. Such stability arises from the detailed specification of what counts as good and bad, right and wrong, and relies upon a certain teleological account of social order interrelated with the wider natural order: just as vegetation is directed to a higher end, namely animal nutrition, so certain human beings—a slave-class, women—are naturally directed to a higher end, namely the ruling class of men and beyond that to a god who is an aspect of the world’s economy of cause and effect, an unmoved Mover. Relations between those who share in such stability become grotesquely distorted to elevate hoi aristoi (ƒ IæØ Ø) over hoi polloi (ƒ ººØ), ‘a situation of pervasive domination’ in which the absence of dissent is taken to mean the agreement of all.79 We shall call such false, shadow stability ‘stubbornness’. It is a fixedness of affection, solidified by an immovable perception of reality. Such stubbornness is a failure of moral understanding, a refusal to participate penitently in the cosmos in affective penury. Moral philosophy and moral theology have commonly suggested that epistemological stability for a political society requires the transcendence of a community’s culture. Aquinas wrote of a natural law,80 Kant of the universal law, and Eastern philosophers of the tao. Contemporary moral theological thinkers have variously described a created moral order which summons rightly ordered loves (Oliver O’Donovan)81 or a system of natural or inherent rights and correlative obligations (Nicholas Wolterstorff).82 Common to all

79

Okin, Justice, 65. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, 94. 81 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 31–52. 82 N. Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008). The implications for affections of the disagreements about rights which subsist between Oliver and Joan O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolterstorff cannot be addressed here. Wolterstorff comments that ‘[r]ights de-center the agent. Instead of the agent’s happiness determining his action, the worth of the recipient and of those others who will be affected by the action is to determine what the agent does’ (Justice, 178). This 80

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these conceptions has been moral obligation concerning what is rightly owed to one’s neighbour, whoever he or she might be. Within the moral theological discourse, whether or not natural and inherent rights are taken to be basic dimensions of moral reality, the common assumption is that subjects have their being and perform their actions within a stable, objective moral reality. Moral obligation is inextricably linked to the created being of humans and the nature of the world they inhabit.83 Righteousness or justice, as the morally ordering logic within the good order of the cosmos, has a consistent goodness and stable power of attraction by which affections are energized and endure. Not so with Aristotle. As Wolterstorff succinctly observes, Aristotle ‘makes no attempt at grounding justice ontologically’.84 For Aristotle, justice as a particular virtue (as distinct from general justice which embraces all the virtues) is a matter of equality of recompense and proportionality of distribution.85 Justice is not rooted in the very structure of the world but is a matter of more-or-less in particular circumstances. Both Wolterstorff and O’Donovan show, in different ways, that this conception is not acceptable.86 The question then remains for Aristotle: ‘whence stability?’ His answer, arising from the inextricable linkage of social order with cosmological teleology, is that stability is rooted within his own social order and the virtues of those who embody it. The O’Donovan-Ford-Lacoste approach, which explores the structure of the cosmos as an objective moral order with objective obligations, indicates a different account of stability than Aristotle’s. People enter moral reflection and deliberation in the ‘half-light’ afforded by

decentring is a neat way of expressing the common ground which both sides of the rights debate share—namely humans are members of a wider social order and creation order which renders eudaimonistic individualism inadmissible. For a brief discussion of rights and emotions, see P. Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 318–21. For O’Donovan’s response to Wolterstorff ’s account of rights, cf. O’Donovan, ‘The Language of Rights and Conceptual History’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 37/2 (June 2009), 194–207. 83 For O’Donovan, justice is unintelligible without an explicit ordering of ends and kinds. For the judgements whereby particular genera are classified as morally relevant as opposed to other genera which are irrelevant is essentially a teleological judgement (cf. Resurrection and Moral Order, 48). 84 Wolterstorff, Justice, 14. 85 Aristotle, NE 1131a10ff. 86 Wolterstorff, Justice, 13–15; O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 31ff.

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an affective recognition of first ethical facts, inescapably participating in the moral order as it is. This recognition becomes intersubjective through reference to a communally shared ‘ranked order’87 of value. There follows an ‘intersubjective verification of what affective knowledge finds itself presented with’.88 This formulation recognizes that affections are necessary at the dawning of a process of moral reflection and deliberation but that a particular community finds its stability neither in the affections nor in the self ’s virtue nor in a prereflective, pre-deliberative, highly defined account of the supreme good but in a shared, ranked order of values (ordo amoris) which is shared and participated in by affection. The ranked order is the way that affective recognitions may be sorted and reflected upon and, by it, the community itself is internally ordered. An order might be shared by an entire political society, characterized by institutions, laws, and practices which embody that shared order in its totality and sustain the practice of judgement which conforms to that shared order, or by smaller communities and constituent institutions within any political society or, normally in a more attenuated fashion, by multiple political societies such as continental unions. The stability of any particular ranked order is correlated to the objective moral order of the world as it is, with its matrix of moral obligations and generic, teleological order. The moral order, precisely because it transcends other ranked orders, is always not exhaustively known or possessed by any one society or religion and so stands constantly available for deeper discovery and penetration by all. It has an objective stability which endures and lends stability to affections within societies. Enduring affections, stabilized in this way, are attracted by the moral order via the shared order of value which the society upholds and constitute the normal ways of beginning moral reflection within a community. The shared order of value participates in the natural order just as, in Aquinas, the human law may participate in the natural law. Moreover, from the subjective side, there is the possibility of an increased stability on account of becoming more ordered to the stable moral order, through committed, reflective, deliberative, attracted participation in it. This movement represents the escape from stubbornness to which the enquiry shall return by another route when I come to consider memory below. 87 88

Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 118. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’, 116.

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This association of stability and affection differs from Nussbaum’s ‘upheavals of thought’. In contrast to Nussbaum, for whom the outwards emotional movement was a response to instability, the material world inasmuch as it is uncontrolled or not wholly controlled by the individual, a Christian account of affective, intentional recognition will involve affections being ultimately ordered and attracted towards the stability of the objective though fractured moral order vindicated in Christ and towards the Christ himself in whom all things hold together. On this account, every person’s hate, sorrow, fear, and joy are signs of a deeper awareness of the moral order—initial, cognitive gestures towards the stability of the heavens and the earth from within the corruption of this present moment in salvation history and conflicting multiplicity of social valuations. In that sense, affections have a revelatory quality, disclosing the weighty attractiveness of the created world and understanding the beauty of God as it is reflected in creation, that beauty named by Augustine as ‘pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova’ (the ‘beauty so old and so new’), drawn up from the depths of memory and hoped for in the deepest reaches of human consciousness.89 In Nussbaum, this movement from creation to fallen multiplicity and on to unified new heaven and new earth is reduced into a monolithic, geological account of human experience amidst upheaval. There is no before and no after. There are no metaphysics. There are only events which plunge themselves like knives into our consciousness of the world. The theological description offered speaks instead of a created, fallen, vindicated universe of generically and teleologically related features,90 whose stability is guaranteed by a transcendent God who became incarnate. Nussbaum denies such stability and rather sees uncontrol of unstable objects as shaping all human emotions, emphasizing fear and grief but offering a limited account of joy. With no transcendent reference point or stable moral order, there is no place for enduring joy. Instead, emotions are conditioned solely by culture, child psychology, and the perception of instability. These emphases are vital but our approach explicates a fuller range of affections by attending to the settled, attractive quality of the created though fallen order. Rather than rooting the instability in the world—which, though blighted by sin, is yet firmly established—our account calls people to examine 89 90

Augustine, Confessions, 10.xxvii.38. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 31ff.

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themselves, their own unstable fragility, and their failure to be fitted to the cosmos as it is. Such a move relativizes the liberal democracy upon which Nussbaum seems conceptually dependent by directing our gaze to the created order of value itself and the Trinity by whom it is sustained. It is in this way that human creatures avoid stubbornness and instead come in humility to begin to learn the ways of the cosmos through affective participation in its generic and teleological ordering. Indeed, it is in this way that we come to participate more truthfully in the particular orders of value that we do inhabit. The transcendence embodied in the good news of God incarnate promises to renew the political life both of liberal democracies and other forms of political arrangement.

Stability and virtue If it is hypothesized that affections gain enduring stability as beginnings of understanding through participation in the firmly established objective moral order via particular, cultural orders of value, then the next step is to enquire as to the nature of that stability within the subject. This may be done by drawing a qualified contrast between virtue and memory as possible sources of subjective epistemological stability. John McDowell has proposed a highly epistemological account of virtue whereby the basis of a stable moral epistemology is the agent’s own virtue. When an agent encounters circumstances which pose a question of moral obligation, he should depend epistemologically on his virtue of character for the determination of right action. ‘A conception of right conduct is grasped, as it were, from the inside out.’ A virtuous person has a ‘reliable sensitivity’ about what should be done in any situation and the ‘deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge’. Moreover, the sensitivity is that which delivers right action in practice and so the ‘sensitivity turns out to be what the virtue is’.91 He goes on to explain that the virtuous person is internally habituated to see a particular fact in a situation as the salient one to be concerned about with respect to action. This ‘perception of saliences’ is the heart of virtue.92 McDowell is insistent that

91 J. McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, in R. Crisp and M. Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics (OUP, 1997), 141ff. 92 McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, 154–8.

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‘concern’, the necessary emotional element of this virtuous perception, has cognitive qualities, though he admits that he does not have the resources to tackle the anti-emotional, rationalist challenge fully since he cannot properly account for the nature of emotion.93 McDowell’s view illustrates, in a radical form, thought-patterns which have emerged in explicitly Christian ethics. There is a stream of Christian ethics which, drawing on Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, have described moral understanding chiefly as a function of virtues achieved and formed through the practices of Christian community. The societal analogue is that political moral epistemology is formed by the practices of a political community, producing virtuous citizens of moral insight. We might call this a neo-Aristotelian politics. But this approach is open to critique not only by theories which are sceptical of appeals to virtue habituation but also by more chastened or realistic accounts of virtue. Brian Brock suggests that neo-Aristotelianism has issued in an ‘unbiblical anthropocentrism’.94 A right concern for learning ethics from narrative has led thinkers such as Stanley Hauerwas wrongly to prioritize narrative over nonnarrative and to recommend church tradition and virtue as the epistemological powerhouse of ethics.95 Oliver O’Donovan warns that we ‘shall not learn to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters’.96 He argues that character does not disclose how we should act but rather that acts disclose the character we have—there is an epistemological priority of action over character. The claim has a double target: first, it aims to chasten an epistemological dependence on a consciousness of virtuous character for the discernment of right action; second, it aims to puncture an overconfidence

McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, 160–1. B. Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Eerdmans, 2007), 31. 95 Brock, Singing the Ethos of God, 33. 96 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 224. Note that admiration of character does have a role in the formation of affections. John Webster has similarly criticized Christian virtue ethicists who reduce sanctification into techniques for forming character and thus lead the church away from the essential response to scripture, namely repentance: J. Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (T. & T. Clark, 2001), 93ff. For the only (somewhat brief) attempts I have found to integrate a subtle, cognitive account of emotion with Hauerwas, see Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’; cf. M. Wynn, ‘Emotions and Christian Ethics: A Reassessment’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 17 (2004), 35–55, esp. 39ff. 93 94

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in the competence and reliability of virtuous character to discern right action—even if character is not consciously reflected on during deliberation. The following two points expand and clarify O’Donovan’s argument. First, one’s own virtue of character is normally little known to oneself and so granting it a part in deliberation and decision about action is unwise. The endemic human tendency to overestimate, underestimate, or misunderstand entirely one’s own moral state may be partially addressed by sober judgement concerning oneself. However, it is hardly a scriptural expectation that such an inward judgement, which is typically negative and clouded with uncertainty rather than approving, is meant then to resource detailed moral thinking about what it is right to do in any given situation. Man looks on the outside but God sees the heart which is deceitful above all things and out of which comes manifold forms of sin.97 Moreover, even if a third person evaluation of my virtue of character—the view of another from outside—were more accurate than one’s own, such an estimation cannot itself provide information which short-circuits the moral deliberation about what I owe to a neighbour in this moment since each opportunity for action, though set within a generically and teleologically ordered universe and therefore like other opportunities, is still in itself new. What is necessary is a deeper penetration of the moral field in which the person is to act, a penetration gained partially through affective participation. Second, making one’s moral understanding dependent on one’s virtue of character habituated by one’s society and a highly specified account of eudaimonia may foreclose the possibility of experiencing moral correction. For such a virtue epistemology tends to block a repentant attentiveness to the created, vindicated objective moral order and God himself. Not only does the very nature of moral deliberation imply an open narrative in which virtue of character is not yet disclosed by action and so remains unavailable as a factor in deliberation but also the notion of a life of ‘complete virtue’ suggests a limit which humans might reach, thereby doing away with the possibility of ‘expansions of the repertoire of human virtue’.98 Over against the epistemological anthropocentricity of McDowell and some neoAristotelians, O’Donovan observes that ‘a strong self-consciousness 97 98

1 Samuel 16: 7; Mark 7: 14–23. R. M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (OUP, 1999), 56.

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about my own characteristic excellences, far from illuminating the meaning of the act which I have to deliberate, will have obscured it. It will have stood between me and the moral field to which I must respond.’99 The weighting of attention is unstable since the epistemology relies on the self ’s resources rather than engagement with the moral order which can correct the self, a correction which may itself bring about a greater consistency of action. Inasmuch as the response to the moral field is partly constituted by participative affective attraction within it, an account of virtuous character which resists this emphasis on attraction is liable to obscure an understanding of what God achieves through affection, namely that people are awakened to the cosmos as it draws out our understanding and may then become more stably ordered to that reality. We will have more positive things to say about virtue shortly but there are important political ramifications of this analysis. For an epistemology which depends on the self ’s character and a highly specified account of the good life in fact offers a shadow stability to a moral agent and her community in their reflection, deliberation, and action, a stability which is, at least potentially, narcissistic and blinded by the self in such a way as to be unable to act in penitent response to the moral order with respect to what is owed to the neighbour. This stubbornness is deeply unhealthy politically since it diminishes, quells, or eradicates the proper beginnings of reflection and deliberation in penurious, participatory, attracted, affective recognitions of the moral order as it is. A politics of this sort will drink from the undisturbed, stagnant pool of its own wisdom and gaze with ever more self-obsession into increasingly weed-veiled waters. An epistemological dependence on the self ’s virtue and already established detailed account of eudaimonia is opposed to the epistemological priority of affection as an attracted participation in the world both as it appears and as it is. A virtue epistemology, relying on virtue to establish the right course of action, both walls people off from the world as it is and refuses the revelation which affection can bring. Adams notes that it is just such a outlook which might ‘tempt us to suppose that a morally wrong act, for example, could be defined as one that it would be characteristic of thoroughly virtuous persons not

99 O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 213, cf. 211ff.; cf. S. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (SCM Press, 2003), 116ff.

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to do, as virtue ethicists have commonly suggested’.100 That way lies just the stagnant self-coincidence I have described. Against such a danger, I have argued that epistemological stability is not primarily in the agent’s virtue but in the order in which the agent participates and by which the agent is ordered towards stability. An Aristotelian objector may still say that virtue is affection under the control of reason and that to exclude virtue from an active epistemological role is to exclude affection too. Habituated affections simply are enduring forms of participative epistemology. The force of this objection is that it is only in a well-habituated character that affections arise at the right time, in the right way, to the right extent, etc. and thus that moral reflection and deliberation, in which affective recognition plays such a crucial initiatory role, actually does depend on the agent’s or community’s own virtue of character. Some modified form of this objection might be acceptable and I return to it shortly. However, the objection as it stands fails not only because it presupposes an account of reason’s mastery of emotion which has already been set aside, especially in the form it appears in the Nicomachean Ethics, but also because, as already argued, it is the object of affection which attracts our penurious, affective recognitions which then form the beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation, thereby overcoming stubborn and fallen understandings. It is not the moral subject’s goodness that gives rise to true recognition but the enduring goodness of the moral order, however refracted through any particular order of value, however affected by human corruption and in whatever contingent circumstances, that draws out the affective recognition. Affections are thus not necessarily indications of or the same as virtue of character but rather are primarily coordinated to and drawn out by their objects mediated through the shared moral order within which objects find their value. Even the deeply selfish man may rejoice at first sight of his child in the womb or as a newborn baby and may wish to do all sorts of things to protect it.101 Even the intemperate, vengeful woman, bitter over her relative’s death, may be awestruck by the mountains near which their loved one is buried or the forgiveness which others show in similar situations. As

100 101

R. M. Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (OUP, 2006), 7. I am indebted to James Mumford for discussion on this point.

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Augustine comments, ‘from time to time even [such a person] is touched by the brilliance of truth everywhere present’.102 Having offered this critique of a neo-Aristotelian form of virtue theory, I turn to consider what positive role virtue might play in the present account of affective epistemology. More specifically, I consider whether virtue has anything to do with enduring affections and what significance this might have for Christian thought about sanctification. Robert Merrihew Adams writes that ‘there is little hope for any ethical outlook that cannot accommodate the fact that human behavior of apparent moral significance is often quite predictable’.103 A particular person may, with reasonable consistency, feel and act in similar ways in similar sorts of situations and any ethics should account for this. On a political level, Eric Gregory argues for an explicitly Augustinian renewal of civic virtue in liberal polities. Conscious of the challenges which have come upon virtue discourse, he rightly observes that ‘Augustinians are usually nervous with the language of habituation given their strong doctrine of grace (there is no ascent without descent) and the strong doctrine of sin (the perpetual ruptures of the will in obeying moral demands placed upon us in any given moment)’ and notes that ‘for Augustine, habit (consuetudo) tends to solidify vice rather than promote virtue’.104 Moreover, ‘Augustinians are also usually anxious about the language of success given their attention to proper intention rather than maximisation of utility’ but this Augustinianism’s ‘allergic neglect of virtue language in both its readings of Augustine and its own proposals’ has caused its own debilitating problems.105 By way of further diagnosis of this malaise, Gregory explores the inherent instability of Augustinianism which, by commonly overemphasizing either love or sin is in perpetual danger of collapse into one of two errors. First, there is an ‘arrogant perfectionism’, a temptation fostered by a confidence about the goodness of creation which can lead into a political posture which takes the name of love while opening the door for anti-liberal, paternalist coercion. But second, there is a ‘negative liberalism’, a temptation towards suspicion fed by a realism that the thoroughgoing nature of sin requires an essentially negative account of freedom, guaranteed in practice by the state. In its contemporary secular form, this second option ends up excluding love from political 102 104

103 Augustine, De Trinitate 14.15.21. Adams, Theory of Virtue, 18. 105 Gregory, Politics, 68. Gregory, Politics, 60.

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consideration and replacing it with a desire for freedom from fear.106 For Gregory, virtue steps forward as an Augustinian way to ensure that appeals to love and sin constrain one another in a realistic yet politically beneficial fashion. Political life is essentially about the ordering of loves and true ‘virtue is a matter of loving well and loving freely’.107 This ‘Augustinianism motivates and sustains love for the neighbor (even the neighbor as fellow citizen), but it also recognizes the need to discipline our incontinent loves in a world constrained by sin.’108 Gregory’s view presses questions about the nature of virtue and how it might bear on obligations to act rightly, including political obligations. Adams argues that right action belongs to a different department of ethics from virtue. The right is to do with voluntarily chosen action while virtue, because substantially affected by one’s social circumstances, articulated by the categories of gift and luck, is not straightforwardly voluntary.109 To make right action a function of virtue or to reduce duty into virtue is to confuse these departments of ethics and to impoverish both right action and virtue.110 Adams’s most telling rationale for this view is that assessments of ‘virtue have a logical pattern more typical of judgments of goodness than of judgments of rightness. The concepts of the good and the right differ in the shape of the characteristic frameworks of evaluation they offer us, that of the good being much more tolerant of ambivalence and diversity.’111 In other words, doing the right thing is focused on a particular action while being good may take a wide number of different forms. There is a pluriformity to the good while there is a decisive singularity to the right such that the latter cannot simply be reduced into the former. Thus, ‘virtue is best understood as a kind of goodness rather than rightness’.112 Adams’s detailed reasons for this position are worth quoting at length. He argues that

106

Gregory, Politics, 15. Gregory, Politics, 22. Gregory, Politics, 39; cf. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 222–3. 109 Adams, Theory of Virtue, 158ff. The use of the term ‘luck’ is meant to capture the notion of contingency: that, for each particular agent, reality has turned out in a particular way so that his or her conditions of existence are of one kind and not another. 110 Adams, Theory of Virtue, 9. 111 Adams, Theory of Virtue, 10. 112 Adams, Theory of Virtue, 9. 107 108

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the value of an act can certainly diverge from the value of the character that produced it. Virtuous character is not sufficient to ensure right action. For instance, lack of attention may cause one to fail to recognize a moral duty, but such a lack of attention will not always manifest a deficiency in virtue. For any human being's resources of attention are limited and one may have had good reason to focus one's attention elsewhere. But even in such a case, action contrary to the unrecognized duty is still a wrong action. Virtuous character is also not necessary for right action. Suppose certain merchants deal honestly with you only because they fear dishonesty would damage their business. You have no reason to complain that their actions violate an obligation to you, though you may have reason to complain of their attitude, if you know of it. . . . [Moreover the] concept of obligation, and the associated concepts of wrongness and guilt, involve the idea of an agent owing it to someone else to act or not act in a certain way. That idea does not flow in any obvious way from a general concept of excellent personal character, and one could have a concept of excellence of character without it.113

So, on this view, virtue does not explain why a particular action is right or wrong nor does it have the capacity in and of itself to deliver reliable insights into moral obligations nor is it impossible to do right when one is, on some reckoning or other, vicious. Instead, Adams argues that virtue is ‘persistent excellence in being for the good’ though it consists in cognitive operations which are characteristically fragile, fragmentary, liable to inconsistency, and subject to what Peter Goldie calls ‘vicissitudes’. Adams further undermines neo-Aristotelian conceptions of virtue as robust, habituated reliability in action by asking whether it is ‘really so implausible to suppose that almost everyone has a certain character defect? Is it a tautology that character must be worse than average to be defective? Has it not at least historically been a widely held belief that most or all of us have traits of character in some ways sinful?’114 Over against those who focus on ‘direct behavioural dispositions’ and robust, reliably habituated action, thereby exclusively emphasizing overt behaviour, Adams argues that ‘motivation’, partially

113

Adams, Theory of Virtue, 6–7. Adams, Theory of Virtue, 148; cf. P. Goldie, ‘Intellectual Emotions and Religious Emotions’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 99–100, where Goldie explores normal human ‘vicissitudes’, such as depression or the experience of being assaulted, which are liable to come upon people and disrupt, disable, or terminate forms of virtuous activity. 114

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constituted by emotional ‘intelligence’,115 is also a large part of virtue. He does not believe that Emperor Virtue has no clothes but presents a more humbly attired virtue which, through accommodating its largely cultural and, from a theological perspective, providential source, denies the ‘imperialistic’116 reduction of duty into virtue, the unity of the virtues, the robustness of habituated action, and the primacy of overt behaviour in the definition of virtue. Such a position harmonizes with O’Donovan’s outlook, despite first appearances, since O’Donovan’s view that actions disclose character does not deny the existence of something underlying action, however inscrutable to first- or thirdperson observation, which might have the name of virtue. Adams’s observations suggest a more positive account of virtue’s role in affective epistemology than has been allowed to this point. Adams’s commitment to the fragile nature of consistency in action and indeed the emotional intelligence that is behind action support my earlier scepticism about whether reflective and deliberative stability might be gained through epistemological dependence on or consideration of one’s own character. And yet, this is not to suggest that virtue, however fragmentary, may not contribute at all to stability and so to the endurance of affections. The distinction we need, I suggest, is between one’s own virtues as a source of moral revelation concerning the right and the good and the virtues of others disclosed only in their actions, as objects of affective recognition. Consider, for example, a courageous action or consistent and predictable series of courageous actions. An agent reflecting on the pluriform good and deliberating about the right might call to mind and affectively participate in the virtuous consistency of courageous action displayed by a man such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Such ‘consistency’ does not entail repetitive, robust uniformity since the narrative of Bonhoeffer’s life, like all lives, consists in a multifaceted, fragile unity. The nature of any man’s virtuous consistency is conditioned by his changing circumstances, moral awareness, and human weakness. Thus consistency may entail adaptation and, crucially, change, some of which may be appropriately called ‘repentance’. An admirable consistency of life—something we might call ‘virtue’—does not, 115 Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 14. ‘Emotions can be ways of being for or against something, but only insofar as the emotion has an intentionality that involves some understanding of its object.’ 116 Adams, Theory of Virtue, 6.

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then, entail a robust, uniform goodness but rather a humble amenability to continuous change, albeit in fits and starts with backwards and forwards steps and amidst the genuine uncertainty of changing circumstances. Such ‘saints’ have rough edges and sainthood should not be conceived ‘negatively, in terms of never or almost never doing anything wrong, but rather in terms of enlarging the possibilities of good in some positive direction’.117 This seems a realistic account of sainthood and sanctification as opposed to the implausible notion that Gregory decries, namely that ‘a life of virtue becomes easier with time’.118 The positive place of such virtue would then be that, as a person reflects on Bonhoeffer’s fragile consistency, he might be affectively drawn to participate in it through shame, wonder, joy, sorrow, or some other affection. His affections are drawn by the virtue of another person which then informs his understanding of the relation of himself to the proposed act within the pluriform, good moral order. Such an affective movement is not an attempt at imitation but rather a receptive welcome and admiration of goodness. By way of corroboration, consider how Michael Spezio, drawing on neuroscientific observations, explains that ‘emotionally relevant conceptual processing [which] is essential for adaptive and efficient social engagement’ is coordinated by simulation processes in the brain whereby similar neural processes ‘are involved in both the experience of an intention or emotion in oneself and the perception of an intention or emotion in another’, processes which are also ‘modulated by the consciously perceived morality of another person’.119 In the terms of this enquiry, the process of intersubjective verification of value, imaginatively participating in the other’s valuation, is focused in the perception of goodness of the other. On a more intuitive level, Charles Taylor reflects that normally ‘our sense that X is important ethically is inseparable from our feeling its importance, from admiring those who follow it, for instance; or being inspired by it; or feeling

R. M. Adams, ‘Responses’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64/2 (Mar. 2002), 477; cf. Finite and Infinite Goods, esp. 50–8. 118 Gregory, Politics, 69. 119 M. Spezio, ‘The Neuroscience of Emotion and Reasoning in Social Contexts’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (2011), 350–1; Spezio qualifies this by observing that ‘What is not known as yet is whether the conscious awareness of similarity or morality gets the simulations started to begin with, whether it is the other way around, or how much these processes integrate in a recursive network’ (351). 117

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relieved and grateful that this exists as a human possibility’.120 Just so, others’ fragile consistency of action—the evidence of humble virtues—opens a range of moral reasoning to us through our affective, participative recognition. For by affection we welcome some virtue of Bonhoeffer’s character, as disclosed by his actions, and find an initial entrée into reflection on our own order of value and the moral order as it is and so come to deliberate concerning what it is right to do in that order. In being a third-person observation of another’s virtue as disclosed by action, this movement does not pretend to an implausible self-knowledge but is content with an affective grasp of the gestalt of the virtuous appearance perceived in another. So this is not a way of forming one’s character to be like Bonhoeffer’s but rather of furnishing one’s moral awareness with a vision of virtue which, being indeterminate, fragile, and non-exhaustive in its account of the good, does not foreclose further moral reflection and deliberation but offers grounding to both by focusing our affections on a good in the actual moral field. A good of this sort, especially concerning one whose life has been intersubjectively recognized by a wide range of people as worthy of moral reflection, offers a route to a mediating point of stability for one’s own reasoning. Bonhoeffer’s life in the same moral order which I now inhabit summons me to be aware of myself as a moral actor. The stability is thus neither centred in self nor the virtues of another but in God and the created moral order whereby Bonhoeffer’s excellence and my agency may be affectively construed together. O’Donovan reflects that ‘the virtuous are not to be imitated, but simply to be loved for what they are, and to be taken as material for understanding what kinds of things God accomplishes in human action and lives’.121 Such a notion may even allow for the truth of Aquinas’s distinction between acquired virtue and the true virtue of Christians as gifts from God—something which God works in us without us.122 But such gifts are best recognized by directing attention towards others who are themselves fragile, fallen Taylor, ‘Reason, Faith and Meaning’, 11. O’Donovan, Morally Awake? Admiration and Resolution in the Light of Christian Faith, New College Sydney Lecture Series 2007, Lecture 2, ‘Admiring’ (unpubl.); used with the author’s permission. 122 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 55.4; Augustine, On Free Will 2.19. Cf. E. Stump, ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’ Ethics’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 29–43; A. Pinsent, The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (Routledge, 2012). 120 121

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gifts from God, given in service of a community’s moral awakening and renewal—‘in humility, reckon others as surpassing yourselves’.123 In this way, love and sin, recognition of God’s power and human fragility, the marks of Augustinianism, condition our recognition of value. Recognizing human moral virtue, disclosed in the fragile consistency of another agent’s acts, represents a special form of the normal case of affective recognition which is always an attracted recognition of value in particular objects and subject to intersubjective verification. Virtue is disclosed in virtuous action, recognized in affection, and thereby appears at the beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation. Such virtue, especially in the fragile giftedness of a Bonhoeffer, enables affections to endure as they are steadily drawn into its consistency vis-à-vis the moral order, and are able, on that basis, repeatedly to initiate moral reflection and deliberation. Sanctification remains a bumpy ride but no less real for that. The road to any kind of progress in stability is in profound humility and admiring, affective participation in the goodness of the cosmos rather than in epistemological self-dependence. Such virtue as exists ‘is a power which is fundamentally God’s, not our own’,124 mediated partially through the stability of the cosmos which he has vindicated and now sustains moment by moment in Christ.

Stability and memory If someone’s own virtue is so uncertain and if others’ virtuosity, though possibly conducive to godly moral reflection and deliberation, is fragile, then it seems wise to enquire afresh about affections’ endurance in our political relations. Augustine tells us that ‘there exists another power’ in human life.125 This power is memory and we will now explore its relevance to the deficits of shared understanding which characterize contemporary political societies. While affections are constitutionally fitted to enable epistemological participation in the present, stable moral order as the future becomes our current experience, affections also recognize value from the past, by the power of memory, and so have access to a level of enduring stability 123 124 125

Philippians 2: 3. Gregory, Politics, 269, paraphrasing Augustine. Augustine, Confessions, 10.vii.11.

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which virtue of character, whether acquired or gifted, in its fragility and epistemological inadequacy, does not provide. Memory and present stability are related first because the past has been decisively established and second because memory concerns acts and events in the generically and teleologically defined moral order which we inhabit in the present. First, consider that although only God’s present has any current existence,126 the remembered past also has a present stable quality which the present itself, experienced as fleeting novelty, lacks. For the past cannot be changed but can be made present to us again by the power of memory. This is the temporal aspect of the earth as firmly established and immovable—the established creation has an eternally stable past. The performance of human memory is naturally variable—its imperfection, partiality, and deceptiveness is a commonplace. Nonetheless, memory is sufficiently equipped to stabilize affections as the beginnings of that understanding which initiates reflection and deliberation. For memory gives humans an intersubjective way of coming to present reflection and deliberation via affective understanding of past events. The passage of time may even render one’s own past actions as vulnerable to critique as those of others. In light of memory, we see again why Nussbaum’s elision of eudaimonism and emotional self-understanding was unwise. For affection can understand the self in memory without being concerned with the self ’s current eudaimonistic plans. Time’s distancing effect on self-perception may remove my narrative from my current eudaimonistic vision while leaving that narrative as an object of affective understanding. Augustine describes how in the vast hall of my memory . . . I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where I was affected (affectus fuerim) when I did it. There is everything I remember, whether I experienced it directly or believed on the words of others . . . on this basis I reason about future actions and events and hopes . . .127

Memory contains a vast range of items which may be objects of conscious or unconscious current affective recognition: one’s life narrative, communities’ narratives, events, acts, series of acts, people, and mental occurrences such as affections. By memory, we participate 126

Confessions, 11.i.1, 11.xiii.16.

127

Confessions, 10.viii.14.

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in, are attracted by, and value these past objects, rejoicing in, sorrowing over, fearing, and hating them. Such affective recognitions should not short-circuit the task of moral reflection and deliberation. Rather, affective participation in remembered objects throws halflight onto an intersubjectively shared order of values and on the moral order as it is, drawing us to present self-consciousness and empowering reflection about the nature of the good and deliberation about right action. Such affections endure by participating in that which is relatively more stable than the present, namely the remembered past. In political societies, such memory-stabilized, enduring affections exist as background, shared understandings of the world which continually shape the beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation. Second, memory of the past is precisely memory of the past within the teleologically and generically organized moral order.128 Moral learning through memory is accomplished via affective participation in aspects of the past reckoned as features of the moral order. The birth of a child, the conclusion of a conflict, the establishment of a trade union, or a dinner under the stars: all these may be remembered affectively in relation to the created generic teleologies of children, peace, work, and food. This kind of memory of the past enables enduring affections which sustain reflection and deliberation towards action in the present. Such enduring affections are aspects of general revelation while Christian affective memory, by the Holy Spirit, understands the past within the moral order vindicated in Christ. Instead of skating over the surface of the world, affections and memory enable Christians not only to remember the past in the context of this Christ-centred stability but also to participate in it in a committed way, understanding the world as it is in Christ, remembering the past rooted in creation and salvation history and gaining stability for the present moment from Christ in whom all things hold together.129

128 Augustine seems to indicate this: Confessions, 10.viii.13, ‘ibi sunt omnia distincte generatiumque servata, quae suo quaeque aditu ingesta sunt’. ‘Memory preserves in distinct particulars and general categories all the perceptions which have penetrated’ (Chadwick). 129 Augustine’s Confessions—at least the first nine books—exemplify such an exercise in memory, carried out before God, with respect to the salvation history which he has enacted within creation, but to be overheard by others, namely

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This twofold analysis of memory shows how affections may be not only episodic but also steady. It also represents a further explanation for the apparent predictability of human behaviour of moral significance, the challenge Robert Merrihew Adams laid before us. For, though often dark and unexplored, the storehouse of memory is imbued with affective understanding which continues to shape our way of seeing, reasoning about, and acting in the world. Our analysis also significantly develops the concept of stability in that affective memory of past virtue—such as Bonhoeffer’s—draws people to a threefold attentiveness to self, world, and the present. Personal or intersubjective stability, from which we launch out in moral reflection and deliberation, thus lies partially in our memory of the past, as a more or less imperfect record of what good and evil took place within the created, vindicated but fallen moral order. Such stability is not primarily virtuous but is rooted in memory of value, remembered in relation to a community’s shared order of values and, by God’s grace, the moral order as it is in Christ. An objector might observe that an accurate memory, whereby what is remembered is remembered truthfully, is itself an intellectual virtue and that, in refusing the stability of virtue of character, this discussion has simply shifted to another form of human self-reliance which can equally well obscure the moral field, namely a special form of virtue of intellect, the memory. To this objection, one may respond in two ways, both of which are serviceable to my argument. On the one hand, one could deny that memory is a virtue and see it as an ability. We might observe that memory which effectively retains facts is not virtuous because it does not engage the will. Thus it would only be when affection, as an attracted, inclined understanding, evaluated items in the memory that memory took a place in moral considerations. On the other hand, one could admit memory is a virtue, albeit Augustine’s neighbours, those towards whom he must act rightly. As Augustine says in book 10: ‘when I am evil, making confession to you is simply to be displeased with myself. When I am good, making confession to you is simply to make no claim on my own behalf, for you, Lord, “confer blessing on the righteous” but only after you have first “justified the ungodly” ’ (Confessions, 10.ii.2). Also, ‘Good people are delighted to hear about the past sins of those who have now shed them. The pleasure is not in the evils as such, but that though they were so once, they are not like that now’ (Confessions, 10.iii.4). It was in personal conversation with the late and rightly revered Henry Chadwick at the Oxford Playhouse Café in the spring of 2003 that I was taught that the first nine books of the Confessions should be understood through book 10’s account of memory.

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a fragile one as with every virtue, but deny that it is a moral achievement—it is something received rather than achieved.130 I favour the former but in either case, memory—because of its characteristic activity—is not competent to decide beforehand what it is right to do but rather supplies a record of what has been done or thought or felt in the past. Such a record will to some extent be already affectively toned while current affections may evaluate and discover value afresh while some memories are not essentially affectively remembered but simply recalled. Plain facts such as the ten times table or the date of the Chalcedonian definition stand in contrast to the beauty of a friend’s courageous act, the goodness of faithful marital love, or the righteousness of a political judgement. The former cases do not necessitate affective understanding (except perhaps as an element in a certain aesthetic of mathematics); the latter ones require that such affectivity is engaged if there is to be understanding at all. As we approach the moral field de novo, as we daily must, we come with memory but without epistemological dependence on robust virtue and without our minds decided on what good there is in the world or what the right thing to do about it will be. The nature of politics involves permanent responsiveness to changing events, which leave political leaders uncertain about right policy in advance of discoveries made during the process of change. Moreover, the political experience involves multiple, plural memories of the same events fostering diverse attitudes to the future. Different sectors of British society might experience a more or less common memory of events. But they will respond with diverse affections such as joy, fear, shame, or hatred and so be drawn into multiple understandings of aspects of its own past such as the successful protection of its borders against an historic foe, institutional abuses, or the actions of some demonized minority. Through these affective, attracted recognitions of remembered past values which reawaken the community to shared orders of value, they may again turn to the reflective and deliberative task in the present. This then is the beginning of an account of communal selfunderstanding through affection and memory. Affections are intersubjectively shared on the basis of common memory. But affective understanding will often differ and so affective interpretation of

130

Gregory, Politics, 69.

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memory itself becomes contested and a cause for conflicting understandings which require resolution. The saving grace is that this selfunderstanding is not necessarily bound up solely with self-reference. Rather, if the community understands its order of value in relation to the moral order, such self-understanding enables the community to perceive itself as a collection of creatures with plural perceptions but within an intersubjectively shared created order which transcends the community’s inner logic.131 Shared memory-stabilized affections endure and form background ways of understanding the world. They become especially active when memories are summoned at particular moments. But affections, both enduring and episodic, do not depend on being habituated into robust, reliable virtues but rather on the power of memory which may recall values and draw penitent subjects and communities of subjects in affection into the stability of the cosmos. Via memory, enduring affections depend upon the moral order itself and are renewed, verified, corrected, and quenched on a daily basis in our creaturely, political, and worshipful interactions. And yet affections stabilized by memory do not necessarily yield a political affectivity which proceeds to right judgement. For, just as neo-Aristotelian virtue epistemology can foster stubbornness so too may memory block penitent change. In such circumstances, episodic affections—such as fear of the consequences of stagnation or joy in the possibilities of realizing the common good—constitute opportunities for fresh revelation or fresh appropriation of memory. When a political organization such as a party or local government institution is confronted with the necessity of change and a turn to the relative unknown, then the stabilizing work of memory may either resist or resource change. Precedent can stymie or enlighten. But episodic affections are very necessary lest the past overdetermines how a community acts in present circumstances. The affective memory of value does not determine the right in a moment open before us; the past must not be allowed to obscure the moral field at this present moment. However, affective participation in the past may enable an enhanced, committed re-engagement with the moral order in the present. The truthfulness of memory combined with a wise form of affective participation is therefore basic to reflection, deliberation, 131 Chs. 3, 4, and 5 will explore further how the political institutions of a community repeatedly may facilitate just this process of enabling the intersubjectivity of memory and affection through the interplay of the transcendent with the political.

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and action. Affective memory may, of course, entrench misperception of the moral order and intersubjective verification of affective memory may mislead by affirming false affective recognitions. Nonetheless, the very possibility of such wrongness suggests that the opposite is also possible and, moreover, is of great worth for a community. Intersubjective verification of affective memory is therefore the necessary accompaniment to the stabilization of affections by memory. One particular benefit of seeing the connection of memory and affection relates to conversion, both personal and political. R. M. Adams comments that, despite ‘a flurry of talk about “narrative ethics”, there has still been relatively little attention in ethical theory to the evaluation of life histories or processes of change; and there deserves to be more’.132 A convincing account of conversion—‘processes of change’—depends on remembering one’s own and others’ past. Adams rightly emphasizes that persisting cognitive traits are of the essence of a good life, that a good life is only ever embodied in a fragile and fragmentary way, and that emotions (or affections) are just such cognitive traits which understand the world. These affections, I suggest, as participatory ways of being drawn into and understanding the world as it appears and the world as it is, empower an account of conversion. Memory, by summoning us to worldattentiveness, avoids the perils of virtue epistemology by diverting epistemological dependence away from an agent’s enduring traits towards the past affectively remembered in relation to the moral order and forming the reasons for our affections and actions in the present. Persistence in excellence in being for the good is stably founded not finally in ourselves but in the moral order, remembered and brought to mind in the present, and in that order’s God. By remembering the past held in our memory, we are constantly enabled affectively to recognize our past selves in the context of the pluriform moral order of the world, to come to world-attentiveness and selfawareness in the open moment in which we are now called to reflect concerning the good and deliberate concerning what is owed to our neighbours, repeating, adapting, or repenting of past activities in order that we might more consistently do what is right. This seems to be an outline description of conversion.

132

Adams, Theory of Virtue, 164.

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Theology enables further exploration into the deepest sources of memory-stabilized, enduring affective understanding. Augustine argues for a much more radical form of remembering whereby affections are attracted to an ultimate stability that grounds reflection and deliberation in the present. For Augustine, the reason that all seek the happy life is that, since we were all in Adam, we all knew that happy life once.133 On the one hand, there are person-specific provisions in the storehouse of memory such as Carthage or the eloquence of some acquaintance or other. On the other, there is a generic memory of the blessed life of Adam and Eve which all people share. Such a memory lies deep within humanity, giving rise to a longing for relationship with God expressed in various affective understandings. These longings and affections, when rightly ordered to God, are the happy life which Augustine calls ‘joy based on the truth’.134 The ultimate enduring, affective understanding of the restless heart, attracted by the memory of such blessedness, hopes in joy for this happy life, recalling the primal joy which has been long in the memory. When recalled either in itself or in myriad ways refracted through the corrupted world, a powerful attraction of the understanding occurs, disclosing to the self its need for an enduring experience of truthful joy found in God alone. Augustine observes that memory of past joys does not make us feel as we once did. In the ultimate case of recognizing the separation of self from the uncorrupted happy life of Adam and Eve, Augustine comments that ‘I am sad as I remember joy of long ago.’135 His mind sorrowfully recalls the Adamic affective experience of enduring joy in the world as it was through affective recognition in the present moment in the world as it is. This present affective recognition of past joy—whether it be sorrowful, joyful, fearful, hateful, envious, or something else—draws an individual into participation in the reality of the present, fallen moral order via intersubjective verification of value in a shared order of values. The stability of Adamic life which was known in bright primal joy is yet accessible now by the affective recognition of first ethical facts, features of that perfect life, which, filtered through the fallen world, shed half-light on our present reflection, deliberation, and action. But what such primal joy offers 133 134 135

Augustine, City of God, 14.10; Confessions, 10.xx.29ff. Confessions, 10.xxiii.33. Confessions, 10.xxi.30; Lat. gaudium pristinum.

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is the enduring stability that comes from another country, the place once shared but now lost, and stands in tension with the often consuming claims of national or international identity. Indeed such claims can be construed as parasitic upon the deepest human affections for a community which has transcendent endurance. The failure of such claims throws our gaze forward to the horizon towards which human affections are designed to be attracted. The happy life remembered in Adam is inseparable from God, the enduring source of beatitude himself, the one coming to bring about the new heaven and the new earth. Augustine sees that God the Trinity is in his memory now but believes there was a time when God was absent. The learning, whereby God came to be in his memory, began both with the fact of God’s transcendence and with the reality of his inner presence.136 But God only came to be loved in memory and dwelt upon through God’s mercy and grace. It is this constant divine initiative which trumps and excludes a dependence on personal or communal virtue for the purpose of epistemological stability and underpins conversion and an affective reorientation away from stubbornness and into enduring, truthful, affective understanding, the subjective experience that coincides with the objective salvation of the ungodly. The stability of the moral order into which affective recognition draws us is itself ultimately dependent on the deeper stability of the Trinitarian Orderer and Redeemer by whom that moral order was created and vindicated, in whom it is sustained, and into whom we are drawn in affective recognition as he takes his place in our memories. Affective recognition of him as the One-inThree and the goods he works in our personal, communal, and global salvation histories is the ultimate in enduring affective epistemology and, as later chapters will show, vital for the renewal of political affections in the present age.137 For to recognize value in God and his works is to be drawn into reflection and deliberation within a

136

Confessions, 10.xxv.36–10.xxvii.38. Augustine’s path to affective stability was only via his attempts at Neoplatonic ascent which aimed at participation in the life of the One. Through these he sought to escape the apparent mutability of earthly things to find rest in the immaterial alone. However, though by his efforts he gained access to the half-light ‘in ictu trepidantis aspectus’, he did not possess the strength to give himself stability (Confessions, 7. xvii.23). Though able to remember stability in love through his ascent, he could only have the ongoing experience of stability in dependence on Christ the Mediator between darkness and light (Confessions, 7.xviii.24; cf. City of God, 9.10ff.). 137

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moral order which fulfils and transcends the past and present in the eschatological future of the new heaven and the new earth, the Christological vindication of the created order. To be drawn affectively by the indwelling, gracious Holy Spirit into participation in this new order is to begin the eternal life of worshipful reflection, deliberation, and action. In this peculiar sense, in being called to remember God, creatures are called to remember their future as disclosed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is towards that horizon that we now turn.

III. AFFECTIONS AND THE END The preceding discussion of how affections, as the beginnings of understanding, come to endure through remembered participation in pristine, fallen, and new creation has laid the groundwork for the task of this section, an outline description of the interconnection of politics, eschatology, and affections. By blending elements of Augustinian memory with an account of the moral order vindicated in Christ, I have now enriched Lacoste’s thesis by stabilizing affective recognition in a creational and eschatological conception but from within the half-lit, worldly orders of value in which all participate. To elucidate this conception, we now need to answer two sets of questions which relate to how affections concern the ends of our understandings as well as their beginnings. (1) If affections are the always participative beginnings of understanding, intentionally attracted by particular values in the world, then how do they relate both to the full range of subtly interwoven valuable goods to which orders of value point and in which the moral order consists and to the eschatological end foreshadowed by God’s vindication of Christ in the resurrection which vindicates the whole moral order and points towards its fulfilment in the new creation? Such an end has the quality of supremely integrating all that is good. How might affections recognize this end? And how might the answer to these questions enable a clearer description of the stable endurance of affections at the beginnings of reflection and deliberation? (2) On the basis of the answers to (1), how might one account more fully for the lurking intuition that affections not only characterize

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the beginnings of practical reasoning but also permeate and conclude such reasoning? Without retreating from either our insistence on the initiatory role of affection or the idea that beginnings are participative, it is necessary to enquire how affections seem also to have a conclusive quality, often supervening on the end of trains of reasoning and following from some previous knowledge. Such a movement certainly accords with the pattern which was hypothesized at the start of this chapter, namely that affection initiates reflection and deliberation, which in turn leads to further affection initiating further moral reasoning.

Excellency in Jonathan Edwards To address these matters, I now turn to Jonathan Edwards, a move which requires some justification and comment. Edwards’s writings on affections arose from his historical concern with the revivalist movement known as the Great Awakening, giving an evangelical twist to the widespread eighteenth-century interest in subjectivity. In so doing he addressed questions which have followed from that subjective turn and which still occupy us today, most notably the relationship between the interior life of individuals and the community of which they are members. However, an interest in Edwards will strike some as irrelevant for understanding and overcoming the deficit in shared understandings which characterize the highly plural polities of contemporary nation-states and continental unions. For in Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue, the account of affections focuses almost entirely on those professing Christian faith. Affections are described as distinguishing signs of the Holy Spirit’s work within the lives of particular believers. Edwards’s interest may seem purely pious and his account distant from the political questions towards which this enquiry tends. However, such a judgement ignores the way that Edwards’s vision of communal, ecclesial life offered a powerful critique of the individualism of some aspects of the Great Awakening, an individualism which had far-reaching consequences for the ecclesial and civic life of the context in which the United States emerged.138 Moreover such a judgement 138 G. R. McDermott, One Happy and Holy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 137–42.

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mistakenly suggests that Christians’ affections are irrelevant to morality in general and to political societies at large. This is obviously wrong since the affective understanding and self-understanding of Christians are naturally part of political life and discourse in places where Christians live, as we will see in Chapter 5. Finally, an internal Christian reason for resisting this judgement is that Spirit-inspired affective recognition of the moral order vindicated in Jesus Christ is the heart of the human experience not that of a private clique. Theological claims about human identity and the cosmos are by nature universal in scope and should constantly refuse modernity’s attempt to sideline them. In what follows, instead of considering Edwards’s account of ‘affections’ directly, I will examine how Edwards’s doctrine of ‘excellency’ may be helpfully modified to explore how affections play a role at the beginning and the end of understanding and endure throughout moral reasoning. ‘Excellency’ was Edwards’s name for the ‘association’ and ‘differentiation’ within God and, distinctly though dependently, within his pluriform creation. Edwards held that everything that exists, including God, is fundamentally relational and can only be understood fully if examined in terms of the differentiation and association of its constituent parts. Harmony consists in the ‘consent’ of these parts which are ‘distinguished into a plurality some way or other’.139 The agreement or consent of one aspect of differentiated reality with another is what Edwards called ‘excellency’. God is relational and exists in the perfect agreement of excellency with himself in the Trinity. God has set this dynamic relationality within creation itself so that all reality is excellent in so far as its constituent parts are both differentiated from and harmoniously associated with each other. Human consciousness, when it engages properly in this God and this world, perceives an object’s harmonious agreement within itself and with other entities, and envisages appropriate action towards that object. A key element of that consciousness is affective, arising from ‘the sense of the heart’, a sense which is in principle available to all people qua people but in fact peculiar to those people who are Christians. Edwards holds that it coheres with this that the harmonious identity or agreement of all things is the fundamental principle and goal of divine consciousness and activity and so should

139 J. Edwards, The Mind, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vi. Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. W. Anderson (Yale University Press, 1980), 337.

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also be the fundamental principle and goal of human consciousness and activity.140 The capacity of human qua human to perceive harmonious differentiation and association is dependent on the nature of the human mind. Edwards claims that there are two faculties in humanity, understanding and inclination (or will). The understanding is ‘capable of perception and speculation’ while the inclination (will) is the way the soul of a person ‘is inclined with respect to the things it views or considers’. Affections have a physiological aspect to them as changes in ‘the motion of the blood and animal spirits’ and are the more vigorous exercises of the inclination either approving (accepting) or disapproving (rejecting) some object.141 Crucially, the inclination does not do this apart from the understanding. Indeed affections— vigorous inclinations—are expressed through the understanding. This union of understanding and inclination in affection is what Edwards means by the ‘heart’. Vigorous inclinations (affections) may eventually lead out to action and thus Edwards considers affections the springs of action. Thus although two faculties are named by Edwards, his proposal is that the two are inseparable and that the affections are the demonstration of the manner in which they are united. Like LeDoux, Edwards is unwilling to carve up the mind into functional pieces. The affections disclose the inclined understandings which are the heart of a man by leading him to certain actions, the actions towards which the heart is inclined.142 In addition, the Christian has the sense of the heart, a new foundation (not an extra faculty) laid in the soul by the Holy Spirit, which should approve and be attracted towards the harmonious relation of all things. The sense of the heart is truly expressed in a Christian’s holy affections which, when worked out in holy practice, are the substance of true religion. Truly spiritual

140 Edwards, The Mind, 332ff.: ‘This is the universal definition of excellency: The consent of being to being, or being’s consent to entity. The more the consent is, the more extensive, the greater is the excellency’ (336). ‘One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such a case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore, no such thing as consent’ (337). For commentary, see S. H. Daniel, ‘Edwards as Philosopher’, in S. Stein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (CUP, 2007), 163ff. 141 J. Edwards, Religious Affections, in The Works, ii, ed. J. Smith (Yale University Press, 1959), 96. 142 Edwards, Religious Affections, 95ff.

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affections approve or disapprove of, incline or disincline towards objects, precisely in relation to whether those objects are interacting harmoniously by differentiation and association and are tending towards the excellency of agreement or consent. These affections arise as inclinations of the mind as it perceives and is drawn in affection towards God and creation in their respective differentiation and association. This is of the essence of Edwards’s epistemology. Unless the beauty of holiness ‘is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing: for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood, that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding.’143 Daniel interprets Edwards as saying that to the extent that a created mind perceives something without understanding how it fits within the divine economy, it does not really perceive that thing at all. To the extent that a mind fails to appreciate the order and harmony of things—and therefore the way in which things are differentiated and associated—it fails even to be a mind.144

Thus the Christian mind is characterized by a sense of the heart which issues in holy affections which arise from right understanding and incline to objects in relation to the excellency for which they are intended by God. The affections approve or disapprove depending on whether they encounter agreement or disagreement, consent or lack of consent to excellency in the interrelation of the objects they consider. Affections and agency are also intertwined since, on account of the attractiveness of the excellency of harmony, this approval or disapproval has a motive quality whereby holy affections are springs of action which incline the whole man to holy practice, an active attraction to the good and the right and an aversion from evil and wrong, the sure evidences that the affections are truly holy. Edwards believes that this sense of the heart, by which affections arise, has considerable competence in moral epistemology. It is a taste ‘which relishes the sweetness of true moral good, tastes the bitterness of moral evil’.145 By the power of the Spirit, it ‘enables the soul to see the glory of those things which the gospel reveals concerning the 143 144 145

Edwards, Religious Affections, 274. Daniel, ‘Edwards as Philosopher’, 169. Edwards, Religious Affections, 301.

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person of Christ’ and ‘discerns the beauty of every part of the gospel scheme’.146 Thus Christians’ affections enable high-quality understanding which bears considerably on their actions. For the Holy Spirit’s instruction ‘consists in a person’s being guided by a spiritual and distinguishing taste of that which has in it true moral beauty’ and ‘this holy relish is a thing that discerns and distinguishes between good and evil, between holy and unholy, without being at the trouble of a train of reasoning’ so that when ‘a holy and amiable action is suggested to the thoughts of a holy soul; that soul, if in the lively exercise of its spiritual taste, at once sees a beauty in it, and so inclines to it, and closes with it’.147 On this account, immediacy of affective understanding is at one with an immediate affective inclination to action. For the possessor of such holy affections, there is no necessity for an exercise of moral reflection whereby the good is painstakingly penetrated and described or, indeed, for moral deliberation whereby right action is considered at any length prior to decision. Rather, Edwards compares the activity of the sense of the heart with grasping an object’s beautiful proportions or the balanced arrangement in a piece of music. The moral decision which accords with excellency is judged ‘spontaneously . . . without a particular deduction, by any other arguments than the beauty that is seen, and goodness that is tasted’.148 Edwards thus envisages a kind of perceptual immediacy about the good and the right in all affairs as they are rooted in the gospel: a soul may have a kind of intuitive knowledge of the divinity of the things exhibited in the gospel; not that he judges the doctrines of the gospel to be from God, without any argument or deduction at all; but it is without any long chain of arguments; the argument is but one, and the evidence direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory.149

In this instance, Edwards does speak of argument but then defines that argument in terms of a single movement from evidence to conclusion. The soul thus comes easily and quickly to the divine excellencies of the gospel which is the central form of the excellencies

146 147 148 149

Edwards, Religious Affections, 302. Edwards, Religious Affections, 281. Edwards, Religious Affections, 282. Edwards, Religious Affections, 298–9.

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of all things since it reveals the glory of God to man. It is from this glorious gospel that Edwards’s account of goodness in general and rightness of moral action proceeds. The ‘view of this divine glory’ entails a moral vision of the interrelation of the good much like ‘when the light of the sun is cast upon’ the earth rather than under a ‘dim star light, or twilight’.150

Eschatology and affections While there should be some caution about Edwards’s confidence in the accuracy of Christian affective understanding, Edwards’s account resonates well with the earlier description of affections in terms of attracted intentionality. Moreover, it brings fresh conceptual insight to this enquiry, arising from his doctrine of excellency, association, and differentiation. So far it has been argued that human affections are initial recognitions of value in the world as it appears, which is in more or less close agreement with the world as it is in Christ, and that affections endure principally by the power of memory. The two outstanding sets of questions posed at the start of this section may now be addressed. In answer to (1), I claim that affections recognize values as first ethical facts precisely in their differentiation from and association with a multiplicity of other values interrelated in the totality of the moral order as it is and as it will be in Christ. These are the beginnings of ethical reasoning which reach out towards their end in the sense that they recognize the way that any particular object stands in relation to objects of the same kind with their teleology, to objects of different kinds with their teleologies, and to the goal of all kinds of objects within creation, new creation and the Christ in whom all things hold together. This connection of perceived value to the moral order lends to affection its conclusive quality. For by interpreting the vindicated moral order in terms of Edwards’s doctrine of excellency, the pattern of differentiation and association describes both the moral order’s objective, dynamic aesthetic and a subjective, attracted relation to that aesthetic order. The different kinds with their different teleologies are designed to be differentiated and associated with each other in harmony. However, the thoroughgoing nature of fallenness has 150

Edwards, Religious Affections, 307–8.

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brought disharmony into the structure of the moral order and especially into human creatures. Such disruption, though severe, does not prevent the possibility of human recognition of the way that the moral order is designed for differentiation and association. Thus, when we ask how humans are intended to participate mentally in the moral order as a whole, we answer that we participate through differentiation and association. They do this not as isolated individuals but in communities, through intersubjective verification of the harmony. On this account, affections are pre-reflective recognitions of an object, with its generic and teleological definition, in association with the moral order’s overall shape (gestalt) and goal.151 For example, parents might be drawn in sorrowful recognition to the poor condition of other parents’ sickly child, construing the sickness in terms of their own similar child and the children’s common good of health and even in terms of the Kingdom of God where sickness is no more. Sickness, for all it can teach us of human interdependence, is not harmoniously associated with the excellent beauty of all things and is not the ultimate condition of the human genus. Thus sickness is a proper focus for a negative affective understanding such as sorrow or even hate. Or again, a group of citizens’ anger might intersubjectively grasp the injured right which follows from sex slavery and people trafficking both in relation to the excellency of a properly ordered society and in relation to the eschatological freedom of the children of God. Or again, a father might joyfully recognize the marriage of his son both in relation to his own marriage and in relation to the marriage feast of the Lamb. Finally, a group of citizens might recognize in wonder, joy, and sorrow their elected leader in terms of the authoritative strength of her office, the excellencies of her plans to do justice, and even as a pale reflection or analogy of the coming Kingdom. These affective recognitions do not afford a comprehensive account of a complete system of differentiation and association. Rather, they are construals of one thing with respect to another within the teleologically, generically, and eschatologically defined moral order. In the case of sorrow or anger, they are initial and limited observations that things are not as good as they might be. Whether or not the objects of sorrow or anger are correctly recognized depends on the 151 Cf. O’Donovan, Problem of Self-Love, ch. 2, for the interrelation of cosmic, benevolent, and rational love.

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extent of correlation, in a person or social organism, between memory, an order of value and the moral order as it is in Christ. The affections of sorrow and anger place together some of the jigsaw pieces of reality in a way which will make reflection and deliberation about action possible. It attends both to the fact that the pieces should fit together and to the reality that, in their present arrangement, they do not. The affections of joy and wonder see shadowy reflections of the fit between how things are, how things ought to be and how they will be in Christ. Joy might also accompany sorrow and hate, construing the object of affection in the hopeful terms of the perfected (eschatological) excellency to come, thereby altering the sorrow and hate expressed. A sorrowful understanding of a convict’s current condition might be accompanied by joy in the man’s redeemed immediate and long-term future made possible by God’s grace. This creational-eschatological approach opens up the possibility of a sophisticated accounting for a plurality of affections towards the same object, the conceptual lacuna in modern political thought which was noted in Chapter 1.152 As we will see in Chapter 3, multiple affections may be structured together through forms of institutional life in political society in such a way as to stabilize and regularize a range of affective understandings of similar objects over time. The overarching point is that whatever affective recognition or recognitions a human creature experiences, the object of that recognition will be in some way associated with and differentiated from the pluriform range of goods which constitutes the goodness of creation, the future form of that creation, and the good Creator who authors and sustains all good. This is so whether or not a person realizes it to be so. On the one hand, Christians might self-consciously affectively recognize the concordant and discordant relations which exist between things in the differentiated, associated, divinely created moral order and between that order and its Maker. But on the other, the affections of all people may also by general revelation be drawn in these directions as they remember the beata vita of long ago, meditate on the creation now, and long for a better life. But for those without Christian faith and the indwelling Spirit, unable to perceive the significance of Christ, the resources for the activity of association and differentiation in the moral order are found in the shared order of values offered by their 152 P. Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, Political Theory, 28/1 (2000), 54.

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community as an interpretation of the world as it is, in the albeit inchoate memory of the blessed life which all desire and in the shadowy forms of the vindicated moral order which they perceive around them. But the Christian believer is conscious that the moral order has an explicitly creational and eschatological form. The resurrection of Christ is the first fruits of the fulfilment of that order and has directed attention to its ultimate fulfilment in the new heaven and the new earth. Christian affective recognitions perceive present values in terms of this creational-eschatological shape of associated-differentiated life, the pluriform order of mutual relations held together in Christ. With these observations in mind, we may now address again the questions of stability and enduring affections. Stable, enduring affections do depend on memory as argued above. Our memory of life within the world is full of patterns of differentiation and association which we have received, consciously and unconsciously, through our affections. Our memories therefore contain an affective awareness, whether accurate or inaccurate, of how the objects we have experienced approximated to the excellency for which they are intended. Our enduring affections, rooted in these memories, are thus stabilized through attraction into the internal structure of the established moral order and attraction towards that moral order’s goal. In this way, the beginnings of understanding, attracted into the associated-differentiated moral order, share in the stable steadiness of both the moral order’s current harmony and its future peace. The enduring quality of affection as a beginning of understanding depends on the memory of the integrated shape of the moral order and the anticipation of its future transformation. Two interrelated ways of answering (2) follow from our response to (1). On the one hand, affections have a conclusive quality because, as discussed, they recognize the goodly shape of the end while yet at the beginning. However, although the sorrow of parents for a sickly child may grasp in a moment the healthy future the child should have, there remains the task of reflection and deliberation, the often long and hard task of moral reflection, sleepless nights, and deliberative action. Affection runs ahead without taking in the penetration of the structure of the illness, the complexity of operations, nutritional decisions, and ongoing therapy but seeking to grasp the end which is the good of health. In running ahead, affections by no means render reflection and deliberation irrelevant but rather do not attempt to do

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that for which they are not fitted. This is a normal feature of creaturely life and does not require, for its justification, any particular appeal to special revelation. On the other hand, there is the case when affection truly does supervene at the end of a train of reasoning and practical action. The child’s complex health needs have been painstakingly explored, deliberated over, and resolved. All that remains, it appears, is a joy which is not a beginning reaching forward to a conclusion but is itself a conclusion, which perceives aright the fitting harmony now present in the child’s body. Although this is how joy within the world may appear, according to Christian eschatology such joy is not a conclusion, properly speaking. For this joy—though in some measure right and proper—is still provisional and unstable. It is an understanding of the child’s current good health which will need to be reconsidered in light of subsequent developments and decay during the course of her life. Just like the applause of audience members who have mistaken a moment’s rest between movements for the end of a musical performance, an eschatologically over-realized joy in recovered health fails to perceive itself as a provisional judgement on value. Such joy is, in truth, both an end and a beginning, as all provisional judgements must be. Though our intuitions about affection may suggest otherwise and in contrast to fairy tales, the realism of Christian faith holds that affections are never complete conclusions in this life—‘our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee’.153 Affections remain beginnings which offer a path to further reflective and deliberative activities. Thus, when Lacoste described the penury of affection, he spoke better than philosophy alone can know—though Lacoste also knew this. Christian eschatology frames the penury of affection in terms of its provisionality as a way of understanding the world in light of the gospel of Christ who became penurious to make many rich.154 Jesus entered into the provisionality of human understanding in order that humanity might come to share in the riches of complete understanding, the genuine joy based on the truth which will characterize those who together worship God in his kingdom. The provisionality of joy with respect to a child’s health is but one example of the overall provisionality of knowledge in the world, even explicitly theological knowledge. When people rejoice in the peace

153

Augustine, Confessions, 1.i.1.

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2 Corinthians 8: 9.

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won at the end of war, this seems a case of affection following prior understanding or knowledge rather than initiating it. The apparent causal connection between the knowledge that hostilities have ceased and the affection seems to indicate a chronological sequence whereby affection enters only at the end and not at the beginning. These appearances are only partially misleading. Affection does follow from that awareness of peace which awakens and attracts affective understanding. However, there is also a deceptive dimension to these appearances. For the causal link is not akin to scientific cause and effect where one marble hits another and sets it going. Instead, joy in peace remains present in memory and in hope throughout war. Moreover, true understanding only begins when the attracted, cognitive affection receives the reality with which it is presented—when a people’s joy is awakened in the presence of peace. Other forms of knowing may precede joy’s appearing—the gathering of information, for example—but not the understanding which begins to perceive the value of that in which a community participates and which is followed by reflection and deliberation. Affection’s quality as the beginning of understanding continually preserves our awareness that our knowledge is at present provisional and always in need of deepening participation in the created order and in Christ in whom all things hold together both now, in the end, and beyond.

CONCLUSION The task to this point has been to describe a moral concept in detail and its political significance in outline. An account of affections as the attracted beginnings of understanding which endure through memory and construe particular values in terms of the moral order and the coming new creation has been offered. Such an approach supplies an outline interpretation of the cognitive, public, intersubjective work which affections accomplish in political societies. Now it is necessary to extend this enquiry by exploring the detail of affections’ role in political relations, the task to which I now turn in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.

3 Affections and Political Institutions I have now developed an account of the nature of affections and their role in human moral reasoning. I have suggested, in a schematic fashion, the form affections take in political relations as the beginnings of moral reflection and deliberation which initiate intersubjective verification of value. Further investigation is now necessary to answer the questions posed in the first chapter’s interactions with Walzer, Lacroix, Muller, and Nussbaum. Accordingly, in the final three chapters, this enquiry will give a more detailed picture of how affections shape the political relations which subsist in human societies. This chapter begins that task by looking specifically at how affections play a role in the internal workings of certain structural features of political societies, specifically the institutions of representation and law. These institutions are highly germane to the democratic deficit and the form of public discourse in contemporary Europe to which I shall return in more depth in Chapter 4. These are not new themes. Arguing against the cast of mind which led to the social upheavals of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke wrote that according to this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections

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is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law.1

Burke believes that ‘affections’ and especially ‘public affections’ are somehow vital to the personal, representative embodiment of institutions and the workings of law. However, he leaves the way that affections play this role undefined and imprecise. This is unfortunate because the affective dimension of political life is too important to be left underdetermined. The rationalist descendants of the philosophy Burke opposed not only disregard the distinctions between passions and affections which he would have taken for granted but also operate at a high level of technical definition and thus appear to know more about the inner workings of political relations than those who gesture inchoately towards affections. While bearing in mind Aristotle’s dictum that we should not seek more precision than the subject matter allows, this discussion has sought to give more precision than Burke offered and will now put that precision to work.

I. MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S POLITICAL ESCHATOLOGY I will approach the question of affections’ role in political relations from an explicitly theological direction. Chapter 2 indicated how eschatological commitments may shape accounts of affections. Edwards’s aesthetic doctrine of excellency was adopted as an interpretation of the cosmos vindicated in Christ. In this chapter, Martha Nussbaum’s political thought will also be shown to have a surprisingly eschatological character which contrasts with notions of representation and law which draw primarily on the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Without using the language of ‘eschatology’, her account of political emotions is organized around an ambitious way of dealing with ultimate questions of human existence with which both Jewish and Christian eschatology have been traditionally associated. For example, Nussbaum defines the ultimately desirable human condition as ‘mature interdependence’ characterized by ‘internal transcendence’. In that 1

E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (OUP, 1999), 77–8.

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condition, a human has left behind childish self-obsession and joined together with others in compassionate evaluative recognition of her own and others’ frail neediness in pursuit of a compassionate political community. The eschatology is essentially interior to the narrative of each human life in a political culture as it develops towards (or away from) maturity. The human life which develops into a true maturity embodies internal transcendence, finding its excellence within this life and not aspiring to escape the limited, fragile nature of human existence. Nussbaum believes that this kind of transcendence is antithetical to the ‘external transcendence’ of typical Christian theological ethics.2 Understanding the significance of Nussbaum’s distinction between internal and external transcendence and its influence for political affections is central to this chapter. Consider the role which death, one of the traditional four last things of Christian eschatology, plays in her political thought. For Nussbaum, death’s inevitability should warn humanity against attempting to transcend the mature interdependence which represents their ultimate purpose. The fragility which characterizes all life before death is the ultimate condition of humanity in which all should learn to live. Life’s end is ever-present and repeated in successive generations as they live out their fragile lives to greater or lesser degrees of mature interdependence. In such a world, ‘the characteristic excellences of human life are unintelligible outside of the context of human finitude’.3 Human finitude provides the conditions whereby human creatures can develop and pursue ‘the right goal for such a creature [which] is the “internal transcendence” of full virtue’.4 The conceptual weight this eschatology of internal transcendence carries becomes clearer as Nussbaum discusses political emotions. For her, compassion is the paradigmatic emotion which sustains a political society defined by interdependent fragility, whereas disgust and shame are almost always dehumanizing, anti-political emotions. M. Kavka, ‘Judaism and Theology in Martha Nussbaum’s Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 31/2 (2003): 343–59. 3 M. Nussbaum, ‘Transcendence and Human Values’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64/2 (Mar. 2002), 446. 4 Nussbaum, ‘Transcendence and Human Values’, 447. This virtuous internal transcendence, a life unavailable to the immortal Homeric gods, is well-expressed in the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean whereby hitting the target is difficult but achievable, presumably consistently in the case of the virtuous person who transcends normal human shallowness to live an excellent life. M. Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (OUP, 1990), 379. 2

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Nussbaum explores child psychology and sociology to explain why these latter two emotions are almost always unwise aspects of political society. In her view, they undermine political society’s common life because, through them, the established ‘normals’ subordinate and oppress a range of out-groups. Disgust is never conducive to determinations of wrong or right since its genealogy stems from a (largely male) unwillingness to countenance the self ’s vulnerability and eventual death.5 It is an evaluation of that which is sticky, oozy, or otherwise threatening to people’s sense of self-sufficiency and bodily permanence. Members of an out-group are disgusting because they embody such a threat or because their characteristic actions are disgusting. The obvious example for Nussbaum is the male, heterosexual American’s disgust at homosexual males. Shame, because of its origin in the disillusionment of infants’ narcissism as they encounter their lack of omnipotence and interdependence, is reckoned similarly dubious as a political emotion. Such childishness is a failure to understand the limited human condition in a world of upheaval. To make an independent existence which transcends frailty one’s goal is to return to an ashamed, infantile immaturity. Although a more generalized shame may occasionally be politically beneficial—the shame of middle-class America to care for poor America6—this other ‘primitive shame’7 is never politically beneficial. Shame’s relationship to the law illustrates Nussbaum’s approach to both shame and disgust. Dan Kahan suggests that it might be right for some convicted offenders to perform ‘some clearly humiliating ritual before the public gaze’ as part of their punishment. Nussbaum denounces this as ‘bringing back the brand on the face’,8 a way of degrading other members of the community. She is particularly concerned about the possibility of the permanent shame and degradation which accompanies the irrevocable loss of the vote following conviction for felony under US law and which would accompany castration for sexual offences were that sanction permitted and 5

Cf. M. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2004), 80, for Nussbaum’s chief opponents, Lord Devlin and Leon Kass. The latter argues for the deep wisdom of disgust which lies beyond argument. Cf. M. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (OUP, 2010). 6 Nussbaum, Hiding, 212. 7 Nussbaum, Hiding, 177ff. 8 Nussbaum, Hiding, 175; cf. D. Kahan, ‘What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?’, University of Chicago Law Review, 63 (Spring 1996), 591–653.

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utilized.9 These penalties permanently exclude people from appearing in society without the shame from which they should, as adults, be increasingly emancipated. These judicial examples illustrate Nussbaum’s view that shame is unhealthy for political institutions. Its dark genealogy in shattered narcissistic dreams oppresses those who feel ashamed and dehumanizes those whose shaming evaluations humiliate others. For shame ‘involves the realization that one is weak and inadequate in some way in which one expects oneself to be adequate’.10 Such expectation normally arises from a deluded view of humanity which falsely prizes independence and fails to recognize the permanent weakness, fragility, and mortality which characterizes the human condition. To institutionalize people in shamed and shaming relationships opposes the development of mature interdependence both in individuals and in a political culture and so undermines the development of that internal transcendence. To make shame permanent is to exclude people from their ‘eschatological’ future. It follows that shame and disgust normally encourage representative institutions and a political self-consciousness which is stagnantly selfcoincident and narcissistic, representing the self to the self without the ability to learn from those who are differentiated from social norms upheld by the ‘normals’. These emotions reassert ‘normalcy’, thereby shutting down criticism.11 For Nussbaum, this social pattern ignores the ultimate human goal of mature interdependence amidst diversely fragile humans. Social contract theory hides our true, interdependent humanity from us and presents to us only ‘the image of the citizen as a productive worker, able to pay for the benefits he receives by the contributions he makes’.12 The concept of representation it offers is that of a community of ‘competent, independent adult[s]’ who represent similar selves to similar selves,13 a myth which occludes the diversity and dependence of society. It especially conceals the disabled or rather normalizes some disabilities and renders abnormal other disabilities. The political representation which accompanies such an account, whether conceptualized as Rousseau’s delegate or Hobbes’s Leviathan, will similarly fail to represent a community’s wide, interdependent diversity, for it will treat that community as similar, independent persons united in a contract to constitute the 9 10 12

Nussbaum, Hiding, 249. Nussbaum, Hiding, 183. Nussbaum, Hiding, 177.

11 13

Nussbaum, Hiding, 217ff. Nussbaum, Hiding, 312.

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representative institution. Such a contract does not offer a plausible interpretation of the diverse many not deemed competent to ‘sign up’.14 Nussbaum’s alternative explores the mode of our public appearance and especially ‘the minimum needed to appear in public without shame, as a citizen whose worth is equal to that of others’.15 As in the judicial commitment to compassion discussed in Chapter 1, political representation should be built around protecting and promoting ‘capabilities’16 rather than contractarian rights which hide our fragile interdependency. Nussbaum’s political representation is thus an interpersonal recognition of equality amidst permanent, diverse disability. Sustaining this ongoing recognition requires a facilitating environment characterized by ‘a political conception of the person that makes sense of the fact that we all have mortal decaying bodies and are all needy and disabled, in varying ways and to varying degrees’.17 That environment is the political liberalism characteristic of the best, as Nussbaum sees it, of modern Western nation-states. She argues that liberalism is ‘frightening . . . we know where we are if some of us are “normal”, independent, productive citizens, and others have their eyes downcast in shame. What liberalism requires of us, however, is something more chancy and fearful, some combination of adulthood and childhood, and aspiration without the fiction of perfection.’18 Nussbaum’s ‘political eschatology’ of internal transcendence is thus founded on the psychological claim that mature human existence is only practicable when people’s political representation is not perfectionist but a constant representation of weakness and need to weakness and need in all its diversity but without the evaluations of shame or disgust. Such emotions, unlike compassion, neither constitute nor are conducive to healthy evaluative recognitions of one’s own bodily vulnerability or others’ vulnerability. The institutions of law

14 For an alternative, sympathetically amending Rawls’s original position, cf. S. M. Okin, ‘Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice’, Ethics, 99/2 (Jan. 1989), 246, where the original position is presented ‘as a device of empathy and benevolence’. ‘If the principles of justice are founded, as I have suggested that Rawls’s are, not on mutual disinterest and detachment from others but on empathy and concern for others—including concern for the ways in which others are different from ourselves— they will not be likely to lead to destructive rules that have tragic consequences when applied to those we love’ (247). 15 16 Nussbaum, Hiding, 284. Cf. discussion in Ch.1. 17 18 Nussbaum, Hiding, 341. Nussbaum, Hiding, 319.

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and representation should, therefore, be adapted to promote communal compassion and to prevent the presence of this dehumanizing shame and disgust.19 This political eschatology is seen climactically in her account of disgust and death. She accepts that there is a limited role for disgust at the prospect of death and decay, recognizing that it ‘seems unlikely that we could ever be at ease with our own death and the decay that surrounds it; insofar as disgust grows out of our uneasy relationship with decay and mortality, it seems likely to surface sooner or later, and it may be necessary in order to live’.20 However, she is uncertain as to whether we should be totally at ease with these inevitable features of human existence, arguing both that political society should embrace with neither fear nor loathing the decay and brevity of our lives . . . [but that] to ask of humans that they not have any shrinking from decay or any loathing of death is to ask them to be other than, possibly even less than, human. Human life is a strange mystery, a combination of aspiration with limitation, of strength with terrible frailty.21

Nussbaum has compared this eschatology with the Christian narrative which I shall shortly explore through Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts. She believes that fragile human existence is understood by the Christian narrative of the incarnate participation of God in human experience, a notion quite distinct from the unhealthy external transcendence of the Greek gods. For Nussbaum, Christianity seems to grant that in order to imagine a god who is truly superior, truly worthy of worship, truly and fully just, we must imagine a god who is human as well as divine, a god who has actually lived out the nontranscendent life and understands it in the only way it can be

19 Cf. M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (CUP, 2001), 405: ‘The relationship between compassion and social institutions is and should be a two-way street: compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; and institutions, in turn, influence the development of compassion in individuals. As both Rousseau and Tocqueville show, empathy and judgment of similar possibilities are profoundly influenced by the ways in which institutions situate people in relation to one another: sharp separations impede these mechanisms, and similar situations promote them. Similarly institutions teach citizens definite conceptions of basic goods, responsibility, and appropriate concern, which will inform any compassion that they learn. Finally, institutions can either promote or discourage, and can shape in various ways, the emotions that impede appropriate compassion: shame, envy and disgust.’ 20 21 Nussbaum, Hiding, 95. Nussbaum, Hiding, 121.

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understood, by suffering and death . . . the universal compassion for human suffering which one associates with Christianity at its best is difficult to imagine apart from the paradigm of human suffering and sacrifice exemplified in Christ.22

Moreover, she notes that not only Christ, but to a great extent God the Father, and the Jewish God, can be said to participate in the human form of life through love, and thus to have, in that connection, relationships and excellences of the human type. But again: as with Christ, this is on account of a willing abnegation of perfections and forms of transcendence that are in principle open to God.23

On this reading, Christ’s incarnation opposes an external transcendence that trains people to aspire to lives without fragility and mortality. Such an aspiration is politically detrimental because it ‘ends up devaluing the mortal and the human in favor of the immortal and divine’. However, despite this apparently favourable reading of the Christ narrative, Nussbaum sees Christian ethics as characteristically in tension with the incarnation, tending in an otherworldly direction and disempowering moral action in the world as it is.24 In particular, it is the incarnation’s ‘aspect of materiality that Nussbaum finds lacking in a good deal of Christian ethics; or, more precisely, it is the desire of a Christian ethic to extirpate this materiality that raises her critical eyebrow’. She perceives ‘that the teleology of Christian praxis is at odds with the values embodied in its foundational narrative. For what Christianity seeks . . . is to find its way out of history, out of materiality.’25 While mature humans will strive to increase life expectancy, to eliminate as many categories of disease as possible . . . to prolong any single life as best one can . . . external transcending seems to undercut the motivation to push hard in this direction. If one thinks that the really important thing is to get over to a different sort of life altogether, then this may well make one work less hard on this one.26

22 23 24 25 26

Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 375–6. Nussbaum, ‘Transcendence and Human Values’, 447. Kavka, ‘Judaism and Theology’, 344. Kavka, ‘Judaism and Theology’, 350. Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 380.

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For Nussbaum, a Christianity (or a Judaism) which urges external transcendence tends to steal people’s motivation to act rightly and live well in this world. This eschatological vision of internal transcendence has important political ramifications. Nussbaum follows Rawls by commending the idea of a ‘module’, endorsing both political liberalism and her account of death, decay, vulnerability, and emotion, which should be attached to all particular religious or comprehensive conceptions in liberal democracies. She believes that her ‘psychological conceptions . . . are broadly acceptable to those who hold diverse religious doctrines, and that they can be accepted as part of a core of doctrines that forms a basic part of the underpinning of a political-liberal society’.27 This belief seems unduly optimistic. While sensitive to human vulnerability and interdependence and alert to tensions within Christianity, Nussbaum’s module enthrones at the heart of politics an eschatological, comprehensive account of human existence which does not sit easily with various religious conceptions. For the notion of internal transcendence employed in Nussbaum’s political psychology is inherently exclusive and puts out in the cold many forms of religiously inspired affection and action in contemporary political society which gain their energy from the possibility of transcending death but also of a transcendent presence amongst created beings. The reason for Nussbaum’s optimism seems to be a lack of subtlety concerning the interpretation of religious traditions. Martin Kavka observes this lack in relation to Nussbaum’s conversion to Reform Judaism. Though sympathetic to Nussbaum’s basic commitment to internal transcendence over against the external transcendence of normative theological ethics, Kavka observes her ‘somewhat simplistic dichotomy, in which Judaism is tied down to being described as either the heteronomy of rabbinic legalism or the autonomy of Reform Judaism’.28 Kavka’s observations raise the question whether Nussbaum’s approach may also be inadequately subtle when considering the contribution of other theological commitments to the formation of public affections. The central insight of the module is

27

Nussbaum, Hiding, 343. Kavka, ‘Judaism and Theology’, 346; Kavka then seeks to excavate some theology from within Nussbaum’s appropriation of Aristotle to her particular brand of Reformed Judaism in order to present Nussbaum’s thought in a more theologically sophisticated light. 28

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that all people are decaying and dying but must neither project disgust about this onto others, thereby denying them the equal treatment they deserve, nor shame others into forgetting their own fragility, thereby concealing our own and undermining compassion. For their own carefully articulated reasons, many religious conceptions incorporate human fragility and interdependence into their own distinctive accounts of compassion, shame, and disgust. But those same religious conceptions cannot concur with Nussbaum’s conviction that decay and death describe the horizon of political consciousness. Although she recognizes religious views that ‘in some ultimate metaphysical sense human life is not very dignified’,29 she disallows their eschatology from having political traction in liberal society. Furthermore, as previously noted, she argues that notions of external transcendence actually undermine motivation for living well now. Thus Nussbaum’s eschatology is, like all thoroughgoing eschatologies, exclusive. There is nothing wrong with such claims to exclusivity—they are part of the rough and tumble of political life. But other narratives offer alternative accounts of death and the future which energize political affections differently. Having examined the Jewish and Christian scriptures, this chapter will seek not only to accommodate and amend Nussbaum’s insights but also to offer a response to her assessment of Christian ethics as otherworldly and antithetical to political flourishing.

II. POLITICAL AFFECTIONS IN DEUTERONOMY, LUKE, AND ACTS Nussbaum’s political module is intended to shape political institutions so that they become facilitating environments for mature interdependent emotions. To respond to Nussbaum theologically, the discussion in Chapter 2 requires elaboration. The account developed there of reflection and deliberation, initiated and sustained through intersubjective verification of evaluative, participative, typically penurious affections which endure through memory and are formed eschatologically through their mode of associative construal, can 29

Kavka, ‘Judaism and Theology’, 343.

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now be given political application through attention to affections’ role in institutions.

Institutions, memories, and cries Oliver O’Donovan defines a political institution as ‘a series of common practices in which the exercise of political authority has a regular position. Institutionalized authority . . . provides a framework within which . . . moments [of authority] may easily occur and easily be recognised.’30 On this plausible description, a political institution provides organizational structure to a community so that it can take action concerning common goods which require the exercise of political authority. A political institution’s practices include, among other things, discussion, consultation, ceremonial ritual, law-making, voting, and law enforcement. These require stability so that the whole community can easily recognize their political authority’s reasons for action concerning the goods they share. Such practices and processes do not exclude the possibility of conflict and disagreement but rather give such inevitable forms of political experience the shape whereby they can become widely intelligible. The stability of an institution’s practices is provided by the established traditions which guide their conduct, communal ‘storehouses’ of memory in a politically active form. Tradition hands on and develops remembered practices but depends on memory to maintain tradition’s content and limit institutional activity. Through traditions, the patterns which govern institutional practices are brought to bear in the present and so a community stably engages in political practice. For example, a legal tradition based on precedent evolves over time as contemporary judgements are constantly referred back to the past opinions of members of the tradition. Those opinions shape present legal activity but do not prevent contemporary legislators and judges innovating and bringing new legal wisdom to bear. The practice of judgement in legal institutions will be developed further later in this chapter. The argument of Chapter 2 enables us to explain how the memories of political institutions, which take form in traditional practices, sustain not only the laws which govern practices but also those affections, to which Burke gestured, that accompany and aid laws. 30

O. O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), 135.

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These remembered affections participate in and evaluate the goods with which institutional practices are concerned, recognize the authority of those who promote the proper ends of those goods, and initiate common political reflection and deliberation. The tradition of a particular community which shares in institutional practices is thus the primary lens through which a community’s affections ‘see’ the world— the world as it appears to the community. In contemporary plural society, such tradition will likely sustain and stimulate conflictual ways of viewing the world and multiple affective forms of understanding. Moreover, this ‘seeing’ routinely happens unconsciously as well as consciously. This subtlety of memory is hinted at in Augustine’s storehouse metaphor and supported by neuroscience, namely that the unconscious memory draws out affective recognitions which are not fully explicable to ourselves and others and yet seem somehow reasonable and fitting to the moment.31 Affections are cognitively attracted from the storehouse into our present experience by some significant object from past experience which we cannot or will not remember. This phenomenon is familiar in psychoanalysis but less commonly discussed in political affairs. Just as an individual may have had past experiences which lie in unconscious memory and bring about affections which are not fully explicable, so too may a community, through collective, unconscious memory, be affectively awakened by particular objects (symbols, events, words, songs, etc.). Their awakening may be to some extent inexplicable. The community may not realize which objects have attracted their affective understanding, let alone agree upon their significance. Nonetheless they feel sure that significant value has appeared to them. In that half-light, they engage in intersubjective verification to discover what has occurred. In this way political affections, such as compassion, sorrow, or joy, sustained by memory, may be true guides to what is or has been of value to a society and political memory can explain both apparently objectless political affections32 and how affections are commonly intersubjectively attracted by remembered people, symbols, objects, or activities.

31 For an approach which proposes that human reasoning is often ‘unconscious, automatic, emotional, and heuristic’, cf. G. Clore, ‘Psychology and the Rationality of Emotion’, Modern Theology, 27/2 (Apr. 2011), 326. 32 Cf. J. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics, 104/4 (July 1994), 826ff.

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A political institution with the authority to attract communal affective recognitions assures that community regularized opportunities for intersubjective political affectivity, whether harmoniously or conflictually, quietly or boisterously. Political affections thus evoked initiate communal, cognitive discernment, followed by intersubjective verification, reflection, and deliberation. They endure through the strength of institutional tradition and memory. They render humble service by drawing a political community into internal reflection about the value of common objects and deliberation concerning the courses of political action which ought or ought not to be followed in relation to those objects. In contrast to a political society which is epistemologically dependent on the presence of virtuous character among its living members, a political society with institutional memory will be humbly open to corrections to stagnant self-coincidence through affective participation in their own past. Political institutions often utilize symbols, songs, or images (for example) as foci for memory and affections to enable people to construe the present in terms of the past and so explore self-understanding and change. In the British tradition, a Scottish Saltire, Union Jack or St George’s cross, footage of the poll tax riots, pictures of VE day, Men of Harlech, and the image of Myra Hindley function in this way. The recurrent presence of such common objects of diverse affections ensures that memories of political disagreements, sporting rivalries, national victories, and terrible crimes evoke affective recognitions which initiate patterns of reflection and deliberation. Thus memory enables enduring affective recognitions to contribute to political discourse. It is always possible that institutional memory operates to prevent change and preserve stagnation. One guard against this is the humble, eschatological cast of mind which transcends the particular human community, relativizing claims to virtuous excellence and stateauthorized memory. Such an eschatology, whether Nussbaum’s or some explicitly religious conception, enables a community to judge against or to praise their own tradition, present conduct, and future plans. Whatever other serious handicaps it has, progressivism also functions in this way, constantly dissatisfied with the present condition of a society, leaning forward, stabilized only by its own selfconfidence, and so always in danger of falling flat on its face. But Nussbaum’s eschatological exclusion of external transcendence attempts to minimize the beneficial resources and better quality disagreements which can emerge from robust conversation between

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different religious eschatologies.33 For David Ford, Christian eschatological wisdom is attentive to the ‘cries’ of the world and ‘immersed in the agonies, conflicts and joys of life, whose intensities are often articulated in cries’.34 ‘Discernment of cries and crying out with discernment are near to the heart of the meaning of a prophetic wisdom that is involved in history and oriented to God and God’s future.’35 Such ‘immersion’ and ‘discernment’, further interpretations of affective participation and intersubjective verification of affection, should be the essence of political institutions guarding against just the stagnation which abuse of institutional memory can achieve. Christian affective wisdom entails participation in others’ affective cries so as to understand and respond to them in light of the eschatological future which God is opening up. O’Donovan writes that this wisdom, when political, ‘is our appropriation of the good afforded to humankind, inexhaustible, limitlessly open to participation, defining the relations of the other goods that we encounter and the communities that they sustain’.36 Political wisdom grasps the differentiated and associated interrelation of goods within the common good which humans seek. Political, affective wisdom is the way this appropriative work is begun, participating in the cries of joy and pain which permeate the past, present, and longed-for future of a political society. When Christian, this wisdom understands that society in relation to God and the eschatological future of the moral order which God has opened up in Christ. In what follows, I will suggest that political affections sustained by just such Christian eschatology offer considerable service to the order of value of a particular community by construing the objects valued by a community in relation to the actual moral order disclosed in the gospel. Accordingly we turn to explore how an explicitly Christian eschatology might shape affections’ role in political institutions. In an interchange with Robert Merrihew Adams about transcendence, Nussbaum appeals to the Torah to support her account of internal transcendence. Without presuming her interpretation to be an unequivocal last word, she writes, ‘to quote from a text that Adams and 33 Cf. D. Ford, Christian Wisdom (CUP, 2007), ch. 8, for a good example of a form of interfaith conversation which seeks better quality disagreements. 34 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 44. 35 Ford, Christian Wisdom 19 (his emphasis). 36 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 73.

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I share: the law “is not in heaven, that you should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? . . . But the word is very near you, in your mouth, and in your heart, that you may do it.”’37 I take this appeal to Deuteronomy as an invitation to explore with Nussbaum the tradition Jews and Christians share. Following her lead, I will examine the political, affective wisdom of Deuteronomy, which combines legal code and national narrative and is rich in ‘emotional reasoning’.38 Its legal specificity concerning embodied, material life suggests that it may help us both take seriously Nussbaum’s convictions about Jewish insight into carnality and avoid the otherworldliness which, she believes, has rendered some Christian ethics dangerous to politics. Israel’s festive institutions, with which we shall be particularly concerned, involve practices that ensure that people live within ‘earshot’ of the cries of people ‘that arise from the intensities of life—in joy, suffering, recognition, wonder, bewilderment, gratitude, expectation or acclamation; and cries of people for what they most desire—love, justice, truth, goodness, compassion, children, health, food and drink, education [and] security’.39 Exploring these intensities and cries may even bring complementary and corrective resources to bear on Nussbaum’s own account of political emotions. Since this is a Christian enquiry, I will also show how the gospel of Luke and book of Acts should shape political affections in relation to institutions of representation and law. Examination of the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth and the early church experience will show how Christian ethics is properly grounded within the carnality of the incarnation which makes coherent the suffering joy of Christ’s body. Such an enterprise should be doubly welcome to Nussbaum in light of her belief that story and narrative are crucial to understanding emotions. Stories, Nussbaum claims, are typically the losers when one emphasizes supra-human transcendence.40 But this is not so with Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts, in which the narrative form and the disclosure of the transcendent are interdependent. Through engagement in these narratives, texts, and themes, we will see how affective,

37 Nussbaum, ‘Transcendence and Human Values’, 451–2, quoting Deuteronomy 30: 11–14. 38 C. J. H. Wright, Deuteronomy (Hendrickson, 1996), 193. 39 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 5. 40 Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 385–6.

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political wisdom arises through involvement in a history—instantiated in traditions, institutions, and practices—which is attentively awakened to God’s eschatological purposes for the moral order vindicated in Christ. While the concerns of modern theory of emotions and this discussion’s concept of affection are in some ways distant from the social, cultural, and intellectual settings of Deuteronomy and Luke-Acts, fruitful connections between them will become apparent. This fructification will in due course be specifically channelled into an exploration of illuminating analogies between the institutions and affections of the people of God and the institutions and affections of political societies today.

Festive joy I begin with Deuteronomy whose multifaceted affective wisdom contains legal, institutional, and eschatological dimensions. Although historical-critical studies have yielded insights important for my purpose, most notably an awareness of the social structure of Israel, the focus here is not on historical-critical questions but on how the final form of the text presents the people’s affective life. A range of authors have recently taken this approach, especially in relation to the moral theology of the Pentateuch. For example, Gordon Wenham observes that, although it is hard or even impossible to discern the moral stance of the Pentateuch’s sources since we cannot know what elements have been omitted, it is nonetheless possible to perceive the commitments of the final author(s) of any one of these books.41

41 Wenham’s conviction is that the implied ‘pious reader wants to know what the canonical author thought’ about the events of the Old Testament rather than what his sources might have thought (G. Wenham, Story as Torah: Reading the Old Testament Ethically (T. & T. Clark, 2000), 7); cf. D. T. Olsen, Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses: A Theological Reading (Fortress Press, 1994), 2, where Olsen comments that historical critical ‘insights are welcomed when they contribute to understanding the final form of the text’. See also R. N. Whybray, The Good Life in the Old Testament (T. & T. Clark, 2002), where he notes that, in the aftermath of two centuries of historical-critical work, scholars are now ‘attempting to present the theology of those who produced the books as we have them’ (1) and that if this is ‘a valid approach it ought to be applicable to any topic that occupies a substantial role in the Old Testament books’ (2). The human affections of Deuteronomy seem to me to be a theme which has a substantial role in a number of the Old Testament books but centrally—in the Pentateuch at least—in the book of Deuteronomy.

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This discussion will adopt Wenham’s rhetorical approach and seek out what the implied reader of Deuteronomy—for whom the canonical, implied authors were writing—might reasonably have been expected to understand about affections from the text’s final form. Such an implied reader will be marked by reverence for the text which, it is reasonably surmised, has been constructed with the goal of influencing such reverent readers and imparting a more-or-less coherent vision of the role of affections in Israel’s life. However, I am less certain about Wenham’s ethical agenda which is ‘to identify patterns of behaviour in the narratives which the authors seem to be implicitly commending and so draw out what they consider to be virtues’.42 He argues that Old Testament writers were commending these virtuous habits and practices so that they would become habitual in the lives of their readers43 and goes on to categorize joy, fear, and anger (among others) as vices or virtues.44 I will consider in due course whether this is a promising interpretation. The festivals of Israel offer insight into the wisdom of affections’ institutional role in Deuteronomy. The festivals’ design as series of common practices which coordinate with the social, cultic, and political institutions of Israelite life such as family, temple, priesthood, law, and town, implies that affections have a cognitive aptitude by providing sophisticated opportunities for affections intentionally to evaluate objects of communal concern. Various affections, such as fear, shame, and hatred, arise at different points in the text. However, Deuteronomy’s structure suggests that joy is the central affection whereby the community is to evaluate common objects, above all through their great common gatherings at festivals. Festive joy is clearly and climactically present in the six pericopes which each recount communal, celebratory, institutional practices.45 The first and last pericopes stand at the initiation and completion of the great work of legal explanation which dominates the centre of Deuteronomy (chapters 12–27) and precedes the covenant curses and blessings. These two pericopes climax in joy at the prospect of establishing places to worship YHWH in the land which the Lord God is giving Israel. The central four are highly organized accounts of Israel’s gatherings, 42 43 44 45

Wenham, Story as Torah, 3. Wenham, Story as Torah, 102–3. Wenham, Story as Torah, 87–102. 12: 1–28, 14: 22–9, 16: 9–12, 16: 13–15, 26: 1–15, 27: 1–8.

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in various institutional settings, for joyful worship. The festivals taken as a whole are shaped so that YHWH may appear to be the true ruler of the people and so that the people may understand themselves as those who live under his authority. Thus the festivals are powerfully political in recognizing the supreme authority of YHWH over the land and the people to whom the land was given. Through the festivals the people come in joyful affection to a communal, intersubjective understanding of self, nation, YHWH, and the cosmos they inhabit. They discover that they are the chosen nation from among humanity, that humanity is the central genus in the cosmos, and that their common life is intended to be the YHWH-ordained order of value which appropriately reflects the differentiated structure of values in the cosmos as a whole. Instead of surveying each of the festive pericopes in turn, I will focus on one which most clearly illumines this enquiry’s theme, namely the feast of tithes at 14: 22–9. In this pericope, we see a design for regular periods of affective focusing on common goods, specifically, the fruit of the land promised to Israel. The people are commanded regularly to conduct intersubjective affective participation which verifies the goodness of the land and its fruit as aspects of the created order in a way that empowers reflection and deliberation concerning righteous action towards those who may, if neglected, cry out for justice. That such affectivity is an integral aspect of a legal code indicates that Israel’s affections are responses to God’s commands—the law says ‘you shall rejoice’! Such commands cohere with the claim that affections are cognitive, attracted participations and not essentially irrational and anti-political. Matthew Elliott has argued that the New Testament scriptures consistently hold that affections are ‘frequently commanded’.46 The same is true of the 46 M. Elliott, Faithful Feelings (IVP, 2005), 261; cf. J. Piper, ‘Hope as the Motivation of Love: 1 Peter 3:9–12’, New Testament Studies, 26 (1980), 216, where Piper comments that the ‘New Testament knows nothing of the philosophical difficulty that affections or desires cannot be commanded. We find commands to rejoice, to be grateful, not to fear or be anxious, etc., all of which demand a change in our affections.’ In commenting on God’s injunction that the people ‘will be altogether joyful’ at the feast of booths (Deuteronomy 16: 15), Christopher Wright writes that ‘Israelites were commanded to rejoice! Just as they were commanded to love, showing that such love was more than a spontaneous emotion, so this fact that joy was commanded indicates that it was more than emotional froth. Praise, thanksgiving, rejoicing—these things were at the core of Israel’s faith and religious life, and, as part of the covenant faith, were matters of choice and will and commitment.’ (Deuteronomy, 201.)

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Hebrew scriptures, as Elliott says when he observes that a ‘way to differentiate the righteous from the wicked in the Old Testament is by how they feel’—the righteous are commanded to have certain emotions towards God, each other, and their enemies.47 Although Elliott does explore the cognitive nature of emotion and recognizes that the festivals are a ‘time of emotional renewal, both in rejoicing and solemn reflection and repentance’,48 he does not develop the nature of the responsibility which the Israelites have for their affections nor the way that affections enable such reflection and repentance, but only shows that emotions may be praised or blamed.49 However, there is more subtlety to the Jewish and Christian scriptures than this. As Deuteronomy’s blessings and curses are recounted, Israel is promised a curse because they ‘did not serve the Lord [their] God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things’.50 A condemnation of joylessness seems puzzling until one realizes that ‘joyfulness and gladness of heart’ which recognizes ‘the abundance of all things’ initiates the people’s moral reflection and deliberation so as to ensure that they obey the commandments and statutes of the Lord with respect to the abundance they share in common. The absence of joy and gladness debilitates the people’s ethical life because they are unable to participate rightly in the land as the Lord’s gift. Thus the reason for cursing is not simply the affective 47

48 Elliott, Faithful Feelings, 81. Elliott, Faithful Feelings, 89. There have been very few book-length treatments of emotions in the Bible, which makes Elliott’s all the more significant. His thesis, although vigorously argued and expertly evidenced, is unclear about the ethical role of emotion. He argues that ‘God either requires and desires that our faith is filled with joy, the jubilant feeling, or he does not. You can not have it both ways’ (Faithful Feelings, 258) and that emotions ‘are a faithful reflection of what we believe and value . . . If we are faithful in making our core heart values and beliefs those of the Bible, our emotions will be faithfully conformed to these truths. God requires that we have faithful feelings as he freely commands us to feel as we should, and demands that we change feelings that are contrary to biblical principles’ (264). These comments, though helpful in that they connect emotion with command and truth, do not sufficiently show the rationale for such a connection, i.e. precisely what reasons for emotion commands afford, how this fits with the place of emotion in moral psychology, and how emotions relate to the external, stable world beyond our own beliefs and values. Without such an account, there is the risk of slippage into the Aristotelian surveillance culture which Nussbaum critiqued. An unexplained demand for emotion underplays the subtlety of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Elliott’s final disclaimer that he has not sought to show ‘how we can change our emotional life to what it should be’ (267) sits uneasily with his earlier remarks. 50 Deuteronomy 28: 47–8. 49

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failure but rather that this failure entailed the diminution of the capacity for godly moral reasoning. The curse is a forensic judgement on failure but also explains what will ensue if the people are not communally, affectively, and wisely participating in the goodness of YHWH and the moral order. By contrast then, if the people do make that participative beginning, the penetration and exploration of the moral order, in its generic and teleological design, may be undertaken rightly so that its differentiation and association is known by Israel and acted upon justly. The feasts are institutions which prevent the loss of affective, political wisdom. At the feast of tithes, rejoicing is to take place in ways which awaken Israel to moral self-consciousness. The festive practices involve both diverse locations for joy and diverse participants in joy. The joy is first focused on the central place of worship (14: 24) while the focus later (14: 28–9) is on the towns. The Levite is present in both and the same reason for not neglecting the Levite is repeated: that he has no portion or inheritance with the people. This reminds the people of joy’s ultimate direction since the Levite’s portion is not the land of the Lord but the Lord of the land. To forget the Levite in the midst of celebration would be to forget the LORD.51 But when the location changes, the participants change. Deuteronomy 14: 28–9 describes a triennial variation on the regular, institutional practice of 14: 22–7 which is explicitly inclusive of the diverse needy in the towns.52 Joy in the land and its fruits must be expressed by the full range of the Israelite community. Indeed, the very existence of the triennial variation suggests that the celebration of tithes cannot be characterized by properly joyful recognition unless the subjects of the intersubjective verification include all the people, including the needy. There seems to be a twofold rationale for the affective design of this feast and the festivals at large. (1) First, the feast of tithes enables the people to focus affectively on the land God has given so as to see its relationship to the needy and to God himself. Joy in the land’s goodness initiates reflection and deliberation concerning the moral order of value and moral obligation in relation to value. This joy appears conclusive but actually retains that initiatory quality explored in Chapter 2. The reason for this is threefold. To begin with (a) the joy seems conclusive because of the sheer physical satisfaction which 51 52

G. McConville, Law and Theology in Deuteronomy (JSOT Press, 1984), 74. Cf. 16: 9–12 and 16: 13–15, esp. 16: 11–12, 14; also 26: 1–15, esp. 26: 12.

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the goodness of the land brings. Joy in the land is embedded in the embodied practices of the festive institutions. The sheer physicality of the feast’s fruits binds together 14: 22–7 and 14: 28–9 in one overarching affection of joyful participation. The provision for longdistance travellers (vv. 24–6) emphasizes that joy is bound up with the practices of shared eating and drinking. With this in mind, there might appear to be little content to joy beyond satisfying what one’s heart desires, a conclusive joy if ever there was one. But (b) the festive joy is arranged so as to awaken the people to the neediness of the poor in light of the goodness of the land and the goodness of the One who gave it. Far from being a conclusion, festive joy initiates moral thought and action. Everyone ought to benefit from the land because, at the Exodus, everyone was equally saved from Egyptian slavery and the land was graciously given to all. Thus when the shamed fatherless, the fearful sojourner, and the sorrowful widow share in the people’s joy by intersubjectively verifying the land’s goodness, the joy which permeates this moment of recognition enables the people to construe themselves afresh in unity. But amidst unity, the range of people’s social conditions is not elided but rather gathered and recognized. The experience of communal joy at the triennial feast energizes a quickened attentiveness to the variegated need for common goods among the poor and needy. The recognition of the goodness of the land in general presses people to enquire as to whether the land is proving good for the poor and needy in particular.53 Joy is thus the people’s participation in the Lord’s blessings which initiates moral reflection on the land and its diverse inhabitants and deliberative just action. The people travel, in Lacoste’s terms, from value to norm as they joyfully recognize the land’s value and reflect on the norms which define deliberations concerning how they are to treat the land, one another, and especially the needy among them. The deep joy of the festival is essential to aid just obedience to laws. For example, in relation to the imperatives of the sabbatical year (15: 1ff.), Wright describes ‘Israel so rejoicing in God’s blessing that they 53 The materially poor are not the only ones to be recognized in affection. For a contemporary set of needy neighbours at risk of being forgotten amidst material abundance, cf. O. O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (OUP, 1984). O’Donovan comments: ‘We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is irreplaceable . . . the significance we have discerned in those we have loved is a significance which God attributes to all members of Adam’s race’ (59).

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fully obey God’s law’.54 Regular feasting epitomizes YHWH’s design for Israel’s life which takes seriously the ongoing presence of those who are in danger of being forgotten if joy does not constantly awaken the people at large to their responsibilities. The renewal of joy year on year is the renewal of Israel’s capacity for moral reflection and deliberation. Joy is re-energized and restabilized to encourage righteous action for the common good amidst the ongoing needs of the community. Finally, (c) the presence of the Levite, as already discussed, demonstrates that joy in the land has an essentially transcendent orientation, being ultimately inseparable from joy in the Lord of the land. The Levite has no portion of his own because his portion is the Lord himself. Therefore, joy in the land is not conclusive because this would be to mistake the gift for the Giver. Instead, joy is provisionally mediated through the land and thereby attracted to the Lord of the land. In the place the Lord shall choose, the elect people’s joy initiates the deeper reflection on the goodness of YHWH. This first threefold aspect of the rationale for the feast’s affective design has an inherent moral logic, a deeply Jewish connection between joy and what Martha Nussbaum called external transcendence. For the externally transcendent YHWH preserves the people that they might rejoice in the land and so be compassionately attentive to their obligations to the needy. YHWH achieves this through the festive institutions which facilitate compassion for the needy only by first facilitating joy in the land which is shared by the people as a gift. Without the externally transcendent dimension, embodied in the landless Levite, the sheer material goodness of the land would become a snare, trapping people in patterns of selfishness and injustice, the danger to which the prophets give eloquent witness. Such an interpretation shows that, contra Nussbaum, the transcendent dimension of theological ethics does not distract people from material obligations. On the contrary, it is precisely the doctrinal commitment to external transcendence which earths Christian ethics in the material rituals towards which she is attracted. To cut away the externally transcendent ground of joy is to make Nussbaum’s task of facilitating enduring political compassion more difficult and perhaps even conceptually incoherent.

54

Wright, Deuteronomy, 189.

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To see why transcendent joy is so necessary to compassionate obligation, consider again Wenham’s adoption of virtue theory to interpret Old Testament ethics. Wenham’s view was that the Torah holds out traits of character which are meant to become habitual in the lives of readers. However, this seems an unlikely rhetorical strategy for the composer(s) of Deuteronomy. For the legal provisions and narrative of Deuteronomy exhibit a stark realism about the possibility of radical moral progress among the people. Soon after the law concerning the feast of tithes, we find the command that ‘you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother’ (15: 7), but rather that you ‘shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land’ (15: 11). Deuteronomy expects that Israel’s hearts will harden and transform their affective understanding so that they neither rejoice in God’s openhanded gift of the land nor compassionately recognize the cry of the needy for its fruits. The final form of these legal provisions seems to reflect a realism borne out by experience. Taken in this light, the provision for yearly renewal of affective understanding indicates forgetfulness of the needy rather than an optimistic expectation of steady habituation into virtue. This is not to say that the festivals would not have some beneficial influence on the behaviour of the people. Rather it is to suggest that, while it is reasonable to claim that some traits of character are held up as admirable in the Torah and that obedience-to-law is a major theme of the Jewish scriptures,55 Wenham has underplayed Deuteronomy’s own expectation that stubbornness and hardness of heart will be primary marks of the people of God. The stubborn sinfulness of the people is known from the start and is consistently worked out through the narrative. To be sure, there are moments of great hope when Moses emphasizes the possibility of the people actually doing the law (30: 11–14), the passage that Nussbaum tentatively suggested supported her approach to internal human transcendence. Yet, soon afterwards, Moses’ long experience of leading this people begets a bleak assessment of their future obedience (31: 27–9). This is not to say that the law does not command the people to live righteously. Such obedience remains a possibility and its fragmentary realization is an expectation of the writers of Deuteronomy. But it is also the case

55

Wenham, Story as Torah, 79ff.

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that they expected Israel stubbornly to disobey. This expectation is vindicated by the narrative. Thus it seems that, contra Nussbaum, the Judaism of the particular rituals and institutions that attend most closely to the materiality and ‘carnality’ of life, indicate that the exclusion of the transcendent will make the emergence of internal transcendence all the less likely. For the possibility of doing the law depends on loving YHWH and walking in his ways (30: 16). The text goes on to warn that ‘if your heart turns away, and you will not hear but are drawn to worship other gods’ (30: 17) then destruction will follow. YHWH is to be loved not on the scale of any one ordo amoris but as the Creator of the cosmos of value. Moreover, it seems that, contra Wenham, the rhetoric does not invite people to become virtuous but rather to behold their own stubbornness and invite them back out towards joyful dependence on YHWH.56 Terms which relate to affections should not be subsumed into the category of virtue as in Elliott’s claim that ‘[e]motions are among the most important Christian virtues’.57 Affections are not to be equated with virtues but rather are the awakened beginnings of reflection and deliberation concerning the particular obligations to act justly towards one’s neighbours. In seeking to subsume affections into habituated virtue, we risk obscuring God’s design for Israel, namely the way that affections are intended to bring epistemological renewal to a community’s political relations. Wenham’s interpretation would suggest that people adopt just that form of virtue ethics which will sadly deepen impenitence, for all the reasons given in Chapter 2. Although he lays out the biblical material carefully and winsomely, virtue language is adopted with little justification when he moves to moral systematization. The present account of affections takes forward the conversation which Wenham and others have initiated by cautioning against conceptual slippage and offering better conceptual apparatus. (2) The second and complementary aspect of the rationale for the affective design of Israel’s Deuteronomic feasts is the power of memory to stabilize the affections of the people. Two festivals

56 Such an insight seems to be behind Philip Melanchthon’s abrupt comment that most ‘people seek in Scripture only topics of virtues and vices, but this practice is more philosophical than Christian’. P. Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes’, in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. W. Pauck (SCM Press, 1969), 22. 57 Elliott, Faithful Feelings, 260.

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prescribed at 16: 9–15 show memory’s role in Deuteronomy: the feast of weeks, in which the people recognize the goodness of the harvest and remember that they were slaves in Egypt; and the feast of booths whereby the people, including the needy, rejoice in the gathered produce while living in the booths which remind them of the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. During this latter feast in the sabbatical year (15: 1ff.), the great reading of the Law takes place (31: 9–13). At this time of intense, joyful recognition of their present blessings, energized by their memory of salvation from slavery, the people are reminded of the laws and statutes for their common life. In these festive, institutional practices, the affections of the people are guided from value to norm, from an initial joyful recognition of the goodness of God and his gifts to reflection on that goodness and deliberative engagement in the laws which order their lives in relation to God and the goods they share in common. Festive affection precedes the people’s attentive obedience to the laws which protect and promote the common goods which they celebrate in joy. Memory of Egypt and YHWH’s saving acts in leading the people out of Egypt stabilizes, sustains, corrects, and refreshes the people’s festive affections. Joy in the land’s goodness endures through memories of the sovereignty, faithfulness, and power of YHWH. This interrelation of memory and affection is the heartbeat of Deuteronomy and is beautifully expressed at 26: 5–11, a lyrical narrative relating Israel’s deep reasons for joy, amidst the offering of the first fruits and tithes, which climaxes in another call to comprehensive joyfulness. They remember that a ‘wandering Aramean was our father [and that] he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous’, that they went into slavery but that then they ‘cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression’ (26: 5, 7). Of the fifty-two times when Egypt or the Egyptians are mentioned in Deuteronomy, only one can be seen in any kind of positive light (23: 7). The rest are either highly negative due to the experience of slavery (e.g. 5: 6, 5: 16, 6: 12, 6: 21, 7: 8, 9: 14, 13: 5, 13: 10) and other evils (11: 10) or geographical references which are tinged with these negative connotations (e.g. 25: 17). Consider 25: 6: ‘the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labour’. The implied reader will be deeply aware of how God’s people suffered and ‘cried to the Lord’ (25: 7). The frequent calls to remember the ‘iron furnace’ (4: 20) of

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Egyptian slavery are not simply invitations to remember that Israel were slaves. They are calls to remember or, for later generations, to imagine the affective experience of being slaves, the cries of sorrow and hope. In accord with the pattern of differentiation and association, the past distortions are construed in terms of the present salvation so that the harmonious excellency of God’s work is admired. Moreover, the people remember their suffering in Egypt as they joyfully participate in present abundance in Israel and this joy then empowers moral reflection and deliberation concerning right action towards poor neighbours crying for justice in the present. Thus the practices of the festive institutions sustain this eschatological movement between the affective memory of Egyptian affliction to the experience of the promised land of plenty in the presence of the Lord. It is a movement of morally energizing, eschatological differentiation and association as the community attends to their cosmic moral obligations by contrasting the slavery of Egypt with the peaceful corporate life in the land. The interrelation of past Israel, Egypt, the Lord, and present Israel provides the deep logic that structures the joy of the people and the institutions which give organized form to the community. This joy permeates the narrative, frequently repeated in Deuteronomy, that their very existence as a nation is dependent on and structured by the Exodus from Egypt, the house of slavery, through the merciful and mighty works of YHWH. Ultimately, rejoicing has this profound, all-permeating significance for Israel because of the comprehensive One who ordains their institutions and who has supplied the reasons for rejoicing. Joy, focused in material, festive celebration, brings to mind the One who is the source of their joy, YHWH himself. And as joy penetrates all the life of the people of God, so all the people are bound together in common understanding. Just as ultimate Augustinian joy based on the truth is rooted in a memory of God himself, so ultimate Israelite joy springs from the memory of YHWH and his works. Returning once more to the feast of tithes, we see that the inclusion of the needy in the triennial celebration of the feast of tithes depends upon the interrelation of memory, joy, and right action. The various institutions in which the community participates provide the structured social context for this cognitive joy to draw people into participation in YHWH and his works so that the people might reflect, deliberate, and act rightly. Amidst the nations who walk in darkness, this nation is the people through whom light will dawn.

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Christian joy This enquiry into affections in political relations now turns from Deuteronomy to Luke and Acts. For a Christian eschatology of political affections could not stop with the Hebrew scriptures but must proceed to the scriptures which explicitly describe the significance of Jesus of Nazareth. Two brief, preliminary points should be made concerning these New Testament texts. First, it will be assumed that Luke and Acts should be considered as two parts of a single corpus, as suggested by their respective introductions (Luke 1: 1–4; Acts 1: 1–3). Although single authorship of this single corpus is not essential to our account, the weight of the early church tradition is behind one named author, Luke. This discussion’s ascription of the writings to ‘Luke’ will follow that tradition.58 Second, single authorship does not imply a singularity of source for the material of LukeActs. Indeed, the introductions explicitly state that Luke is compiling multiple sources. However, Luke’s commentary on the narrative, both directly and through his arrangement of sources, has created a coherent line of thought which makes investigation of an aspect of that thought—the place of affections—a plausible task.59 The following exploration of Luke-Acts will climax in an analysis of Acts 13–15 where evangelical joy initiates the moral reflection and deliberation which leads to decisive events in Christian eschatology and political thought. This climax makes sense in light of the affections which permeate Luke’s account of Israel’s institutions. As the gospel begins, Zechariah is performing his representative duty at the temple, Israel’s central institution, around which the great festivals of Israel are celebrated. Surrounded by the gathered, attentive, and prayerful people, leading their praise of the Lord God, Zechariah receives a message of joy concerning the child to be born: joy for himself, joy for Elizabeth, his barren wife, and joy for the people. The angel announces that ‘you will have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth’ and explains that the child John ‘will be great before the Lord’ (Luke 1: 14–15). In contrast to the rest of the gospel 58 Cf. D. L. Bock, Luke (IVP, 1994), 17–18, where Bock cites Justin (Dialogues, 103.19), the Muratonian Canon, Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 3.1.1; 3.14.1), the Anti-Marcionite Canon and Tertullian (Against Marcion, 4.2.2; 4.5.3) as authorities for this view. 59 H. Conzelmann, The Theology of St Luke, tr. G. Buswell (Faber & Faber, 1961), 9: ‘A variety of sources does not necessarily imply a similar variety in the thought and composition of the author.’

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and much of Acts, the established leaders of the institutions of Israel—the chief priests, Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, elders, and others—are absent from these events, excluded from the message of joy. While Matthew describes Herod and the chief priests violently opposing Jesus from birth, Luke focuses on the people of Israel, allowing their teachers to appear only briefly to demonstrate Jesus’ wisdom and allegiance to God his Father (2: 41–51). The effect is to connect the people, through the mediation of a single priest, with the joy of the coming Christ. Luke continues by depicting joy as a wise way for the community to begin a participative understanding of what is happening in Israel and its institutions. The ultimate object of joy is introduced at the foretelling of Jesus’ birth. This birth is presented as a new beginning for Israel’s understanding, participating in the old through incarnation within the thick particularity of an Israelite maiden’s womb. The new joy is experienced first by the yet unborn but jumping John as, himself enwombed, he hears the pregnant Mary’s greeting (1: 44). Then comes Mary’s exultant Magnificat joy as she recognizes her own blessedness and the gracious act of God (1: 47ff.). John’s own beginning is patterned after ancient conceptions out of barrenness, such as Isaac’s birth to Abraham and Sarah. What seemed impossible becomes possible and that which could not happen comes to pass by the power and goodness of YHWH: for ‘nothing will be impossible with God’ (1: 37). Though his parents’ joy is great, it is a prelude to that unique joy which attends Jesus’ virginal conception and birth. In John’s case, there is a natural though certainly surprising beginning. In Jesus’ case, the beginning is depicted as the direct, unmediated work of God. Whereas Zechariah enquires, ‘How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years’ (1: 18), Mary asks, ‘How will this be, since I am a virgin?’ (1: 34). This makes the joy concerning Jesus’ beginning and birth ‘unprecedented’ joy for the identity of the second in the Trinity as man is uniquely unprecedented, the new thing which has happened under the sun. Although Christ is unprecedented, his coming was of course typologized in precedents, promised by God and expected by Israel, whose ‘relational continuity and recognition’ renders this joy a fulfilment of Deuteronomic joy.60 For the goodness of God’s land is now fulfilled 60 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 90; cf. 89–90 for O’Donovan’s discussion of John Milbank’s use of the term ‘unprecedented’ which differs from mine.

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in the goodness of the long expected Christ, anticipated even in Deuteronomy.61 Unprecedented joy is a previously unknown affective recognition of this new gift of God in Christ. It is the eschatological joy by which everything—past, present, and future—is now construed in terms of Jesus Christ in whom all things hold together in harmonious excellency.62 Thus John and Mary rejoice in a ruler who will fulfil the promise concerning the institution of the Davidic throne and reign perpetually over the house of Jacob, the son of Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s laughing offspring (Luke 1: 32–3). Mary’s joy in this news initiates the Magnificat in which she rejoices in her God’s mighty leadership of Israel (esp. 1: 51–5): how God has helped his people by reordering their institutional structures, how proud men’s hearts have been confused, how ruling powers have been replaced, and how the hungry have been provided for. Similarly, Zechariah’s now obedient and loosened tongue gives poetic, political form to the people’s joy (1: 67–79). In his song of praise, Zechariah celebrates the Messianic horn of salvation raised up for the people, a symbol of strength which will be exercised against the enemies of Israel, the triad whom Luke construes as the Roman authorities (7: 18–23),63 the demonic forces (11: 14–23), and the corrupted leaders of Israel (13: 10–17). Jesus is presented as the representative leader who will satisfy Mary and Zechariah’s expectation through eschatological fulfilment of institutional types and practices and inaugurate a new institutional representation in accord with the law of God. In these ways, the long-dormant institution of Davidic kingship is not overturned but rather reinvigorated. Mary and Zechariah’s joy in Jesus models how the people in Luke are meant to engage in renewed institutional life. Affective participation in Christ is seen as essential for obtaining Israelite identity and for interpreting political identity among the nations of the world. For without such affective participation, there could be no awakening to the moral self-understanding, reflection, and deliberation which constitute life in the Kingdom of God. Accordingly, Luke repeatedly explores the identity of the people (laos; ºÆ) through their affective attraction to Jesus as he fulfils their institutions, contrasting them 61 62 63

Cf. Deuteronomy 18: 15. Cf. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 246–7. Bock, Luke, 52.

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with the affections of their official leaders. Whereas the people discover their identity by joyfully welcoming their Messiah, their representative who carries forward their future, those representatives who currently fill the institutional structures of the people of Israel, the Pharisees, chief priests, Sadducees, scribes, and Herod, angrily resist the new King. An affective division arises between the people who joyfully recognize their identity in Jesus and their rulers who furiously and fearfully reject it. As the adversarial leaders are shamed, the people rejoice in Jesus’ teaching and power (13: 17); as the disciples rejoice at Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Pharisees are rebuked for attempting to quench the people’s joy (19: 36–40). Other affections are important in the gospel. For example, while Jesus is vehemently accused by the chief priests and rulers and mocked by Herod and his soldiers (22: 6–11), the people, especially the daughters of Jerusalem, mourn and lament over him on the road to the cross (22: 26–31) and then return home beating their breasts (23: 48). But joy is Luke’s overriding theme, as demonstrated by the joyous ‘bookends’ he provides. The good news is announced in the beginning as charan megalen (åÆæa ª ºÅ; 2: 10) and this great joy is the disciples’ experience at the end (24: 62), reflecting Augustine’s observations that ‘grande gaudium’ (great joy) is the heart of fulfilled human experience. The people throughout Luke’s gospel experience this joy as the beginning of their understanding that Jesus’ representative leadership is for their common good. The structure of their joy is disclosed as they witness Jesus performing a healing, his practice which fulfilled the purpose of the sabbatical institution: the ‘people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him’ (13: 17), thereby construing sickness in terms of the eschatological Kingdom of God. Thus Jesus fulfils the institutions of Israel, such as the Sabbath feast, structuring the way in which affections are attracted and focused. He draws the people into the tradition of Deuteronomy and re-energizes them to remember God’s concern for those who, like the sick, were not sharing fully in the goodness of God’s gifts. The people, by following Jesus and participating in this fulfilled structure, form intersubjective bonds of affection as they recognize together the dawning of the great King of the kingdom who vindicates the generically and teleologically defined moral order by which the concerns of Deuteronomy and their fulfilment in Luke are bound together. The people are attracted to this man, not from any outward appearance, but because he genuinely fulfils both their Israelite identity and their

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human creatureliness. As a fellow, incarnate member of their genus within the cosmic order, he brings coherence to their relations not only with other members of their race but also to the genus of which their race is but one member. By contrast, the leadership’s fearful, angry, furious failure to recognize the goodness of Jesus is typified in the indignant synagogue leader (aganakton; IªÆÆŒH 13: 14). Instead of an attraction to Christ, he hardens his heart against joyful participative understanding. Joy is the way into Christ but the faithless fury of the leaders bars them from epistemological entry. The leaders’ affections do bind them together in common action but only in order to kill and destroy Jesus. For they do not share in the eschatological, affective understanding which Christ brought to the institutions of Israel. Luke and Acts depicts the corrupt Jewish leaders’ affections as so out of step with the past and future of their institutions that they are shut out from joyful participative understanding of the Kingdom of God. But their attempts to destroy Jesus and blot out the dawning of joy are overcome in the resurrection which vindicates Israel and the cosmic moral order, thus reinvigorating and renewing the joyful understanding which then characterizes not only the temple worship at the climax of the gospel but also the ensuing narrative of Acts. For by the Holy Spirit given in Acts 2, the people of God awaken to self-conscious identity in the Christ who has fulfilled all the institutions of Israel and established a new and living way for global humanity. Their joy in the resurrection of Jesus draws them into reflection and deliberation about their new life and conduct. Acts’ primary example of this reasoning concerns the Gentiles’ status in the plan of God. On this issue hangs the legitimacy of the claim that Christ’s Lordship is universal in its scope, a matter at the heart of the institutional life of ethnic Israel and the first churches. Peter’s vision (Acts 10) and report to the council are followed by the birth of the Gentile church in Antioch. The Jerusalem church sends Barnabas to investigate. Barnabas goes to Antioch and, ‘seeing the grace of God, he rejoiced’ (11: 23). At this momentous event in the history of the plan of God, Luke, who has depicted the good news as charan megalen (Luke 2: 10) for all people, returns to his theme again: Barnabas saw and rejoiced (echare, Kå æÅ). This joy is a wise, epistemological, attracted experience, a moment of awakening by the Holy Spirit, which is succeeded by continued moral reasoning. Barnabas’s joy perceives how the differentiation of the human genus into

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Jew and Gentile was now being eschatologically fulfilled in their association together in the harmonious excellency of the church and how the new global situation, following the resurrection of Jesus, shapes and informs all previous political identities. This joy, though drawn towards humanity’s eschatological, teleological end, is the beginning of Barnabas’s and the church’s understanding. It is followed by Barnabas’s year-long stay with Saul (Paul) in Antioch before their joint missionary journey. There they witness the Gentiles rejoicing as they too understand that the good news is for them as well as the Jews and perceive the pattern of differentiated, associated excellency (13: 46–8). Thus the affective recognition of what was happening is intersubjectively shared and verified. What was the source of the new affective, intersubjective recognition which energized the tradition so that its institutions could be reconfigured in light of Christ? Luke’s focus on the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church suggests that it was the Holy Spirit who enabled the intersubjective verification. After this intersubjective recognition, they are appointed to go to Jerusalem to discuss developments with the church; and so they go, bringing the wisdom of charan megalen (åÆæa ª ºÅ; 15: 3) to the church as they travel. But this affective half-light did not lead immediately to the carefully worded and considered letter to the Gentile believers (Acts 15: 22–9). For the intersubjective sharing gave way to the reflective admiration of the cosmic work God was doing among the Gentiles and the process of communal deliberation yielding a norm as a basis of action in the form of the letter to the Gentiles. Thus, after Paul and Barnabas’s arrival, the Jerusalem church council of Acts 15, a ‘model for the political process’,64 hears two decisive pieces of evidence: Peter’s testimony concerning God’s gracious gift of the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles (15: 7–11) is followed by Paul and Barnabas’s account of the miracles God has done among the Gentiles (15: 12). Only then does the council bring their reflection and deliberation to a conclusion in the letter prescribing norms for the different churches’ common life. Barnabas’s joy, in recognizing God’s work, was the eschatological, participatory half-light which preceded this process, not giving the final word but offering the first. Through Lacoste, I maintained that the inseparability of cognition and affection is 64 B. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens, tr. M. Kohl (OUP, 2004), 298.

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basic to a rich account of moral reasoning in political society. In Acts we read that Barnabas recognized God’s grace and rejoiced and that the churches exercised a prudence that wisely attended to the troubled cries of the Gentiles, imperilled by the threat of an intolerable ‘yoke’ (Acts 15: 10, 19), and sought the common, harmonious good of all the people under Christ’s authority. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the churches’ affections achieved a recognition of God’s representative work, an awakening to what God was doing in the world. They were not the fullness of moral reasoning but initiated and directed its proper exercise under the leadership of God’s Spirit. The quality and endurance of the people’s intersubjective sharing of affective recognition therefore depends ultimately on the sovereign presence of the Holy Spirit amongst all believers, sharpening their memory and stabilizing their life in Christ. This is the fulfilment of Chapter 2’s Augustinian pattern whereby deep stability was found in the memory of Edenic joy based on the truth and in worship of the God revealed in Jesus Christ. In the gospel, joy is brought close in the person of Jesus Christ. Through him, the Holy Spirit enriches the affective penury bound up with our fallen condition.

III. REPRESENTATION, LOYALTY, AND LAW These discussions of Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts indicate how affections play a role in institutions of representation and law. Joy is the central political affection. Just as joy in the land constituted the participative understanding whereby Israel might recognize YHWH, reflect on his goodness, and deliberatively obey his law concerning the poor and needy, so joy in the gospel and in Jesus constituted the participative understanding whereby the churches recognize their representative leader, Jesus Christ, and, by the Spirit, establish and obey norms for their common life. This description enables conceptualization of the role of affections in political societies in general. For the scriptural presentation of affection gives content to what Burke meant by ‘public affections’, showing how affections are essential if people are to live lawful lives under the authority of their representatives. Affections constitute the engagement of the community in the matters for the sake of which representation and law are instituted. They are aids to law, correctives to our practice of law and the way

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that we recognize those representative authorities who give us reasons for obeying law. The eschatological shape of affections in scripture also provides a critical standpoint whereby affections in all institutions may be described and assessed. The joyful fulfilment which Christ brought to the institutions of Israel through the church by the Spirit stands as an analogical consideration for affections in the institutions of every political society. Moreover, through Christ, given to unite the nations in harmonious wisdom, not least in their affections, the Holy Spirit quickens memories and guides affections that the stubborn and hard hearts of the nations might turn to their Creator God. With this Christian eschatology of political affections arising from the Jewish and Christian scriptures within ‘earshot’,65 recall the general concern with understanding the democratic deficit and renewing the shared understandings of contemporary political societies. Representation and law have already been identified as important aspects of this concern. To explore these further, I will conduct a conversation between Martha Nussbaum and Oliver O’Donovan, neither of whom has written about each other but both of whom attend to the emotional or affective dimension of institutions. Chapter 1 and the earlier part of this chapter showed how Nussbaum’s corrective development of Millian liberalism explores the role of emotions, especially compassion, disgust, and shame, in political institutions. There is much upon which O’Donovan and Nussbaum agree, especially in their scepticism about the adequacy of social contract theory to conceptualize political society and a conviction that affections (or emotions) have a cognitive aptitude. However, O’Donovan’s Christian eschatology is at odds with Nussbaum’s eschatology of mature interdependence. This axis of disagreement substantially shapes the different roles which affection (or ‘emotion’) plays in their accounts. The argument will be that our concept of affection enables an interpretation of O’Donovan which yields a more convincing view of political affections than Nussbaum’s upheavals of thought.

Representation O’Donovan claims that political institutions provide the structure within which political authority can be recognized. He goes on to

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Ford, Christian Wisdom, 5.

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describe how ‘God raises up those who will bear authority. The mysterious alchemy of the affections elicits recognition, a people see itself in the face of an individual thrown forward for the occasion, and representation occurs.’66 Recognition of a representative is a ‘complex balance of the cognitive and affective’,67 ‘like the recognition we accord to a face or form, the recognition of Gestalt, grasped at once in a moment of acknowledgement and welcome’.68 It is O’Donovan’s view that this ‘affective dimension is entirely absent from official theories of representation in the modern West’,69 such as social contractarianism.70 This is not to say that affections are not at work in politics but only that they are conceptually absent from official concepts of representation. Indeed, the entire argument of Chapters 1 and 2 is that affections are inescapably at work in all political relations, often in powerful ways which profoundly shape people’s reflection and deliberation. Whether in specific forms of advertising or through the intricacies of political rhetoric, affections are routinely attracted, guided, and manipulated for political purposes. O’Donovan’s point is that political theory has blinded us from understanding this reality and receiving wisdom for indwelling our inescapably affective political relations. O’Donovan’s insight echoes Burke’s criticism, noted above, of ‘that sort of reason which banishes the affections [and] is incapable of filling their place’.71 Burke’s interest in the embodiment of institutions in persons is also paralleled in O’Donovan’s account of the affective welcome of God-appointed, personal political representatives. This affective dimension may be illustrated through examining the nature of political institutions, those organized forms of community life which embody a tradition of practices. Affections within institutions participate intersubjectively in the memory held by tradition in order to make connections between the community’s past, present, and future. The representative should provide a personal focus so that bonds of affection between representative and represented might be renewed or, in Burke’s terms, that there might be the 66

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 164. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 180. 68 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 161. 69 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 163. 70 I have already noted Okin’s interpretation of Rawls: while agreeing with O’Donovan’s basic charge, she reinterprets Rawlsian contractarianism in an empathetic manner. 71 Burke, Reflections (OUP, 1999), 77. 67

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creation of ‘love, veneration, admiration, or attachment’.72 This is the ‘leadership’ whereby a representative person or group enables those represented to discover their political identity and the forms of life which maintain and develop it.73 Leadership presupposes hierarchically differentiated vantage points on common objects of affective recognition. The common affections—common, evaluative participations in common objects—occur amidst diverse societal roles. Political representatives, through the attractive power of their position, strength, beauty, knowledge, or skill may summon the affective recognitions of the people to a common intersubjective verification. Intersubjectivity is thus not an essentially non-hierarchical notion. Indeed, for many practical political purposes within certain institutions, intersubjectivity is hierarchical since in all societies there are both representatives and represented who share in affective recognition of common objects but who are differentiated as to their authority. Here we find further, illuminating agreement with Jonathan Edwards who extended his doctrine of excellency in a political direction. In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards argues that ‘it pleases God to observe analogy in his works . . . and especially to establish inferior things in an analogy to superior’.74 He envisages an analogy from Being in general—the excellency of divine things, disclosed to mankind definitively in the gospel—to some discrete (or private) aspect of Being considered on its own. The agreement of the latter within itself is beautiful inasmuch as it resembles the complete harmony of the former to some shadowy extent. Just as a man may give cordial agreement to Being in general so he also may give natural agreement, a secondary sort of virtue, to reflections of Being in general. Edwards sees such secondary beauty in political institutions as they approximate the harmony of Being in general: ‘[t]here is a beauty of order in society . . . As when the different members of society have all their appointed office, place and station.’75 Therefore,

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Burke, Reflections, 77. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 72. 74 J. Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, viii. Ethical Writings, ed. P. Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1989), 564. 75 Edwards, Nature of True Virtue, 568; elsewhere, he also speaks of the common illuminations of the Spirit by which ‘God may greatly assist natural men’s reason, in their reasoning about secular things’ and this includes their ‘natural abilities in political affairs’ (Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ii. Religious Affections, ed. J. Smith (Yale University Press, 1959), 207). 73

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in terms now familiar, the differentiation of the parts of a political society is the premise for their associative harmony. Not all can be representatives if any are to be represented. Hierarchy is non-problematic and even aesthetically pleasing.76 For political representatives within a hierarchy to achieve what they wish and so perform their task effectively they must have the authority of the tradition. They may also be performing their task well if the way that they represent directs the tradition into the common good, a responsibility which derives partly from the providential source of political authority in God’s gift and partly from the consent of the people. Representatives personally fill certain community institutions in offices such as king, Member of Parliament, councillor, or judge, embodying a tradition of practices held in cultural memory. If the representative adequately embodies the tradition then those represented will recognize the representative as someone who holds authority for them. Such a representative has the authority, mediated through traditional institutions, to draw people’s affections in specific ways towards understanding, reflection, and deliberation concerning common objects.77 When a community follows its representative with intersubjectively verified affective recognitions among themselves, this is what we will call ‘loyalty’, a form of shared, affective affinity of understanding from the led towards the leader and amongst those who are led. Loyalty is thus the common form of all affective intersubjective unity between representative and represented, whether the affection itself is joy, sorrow, hatred, or some other affection. It does not consist in blind allegiance but is rather a committed, communal way of beginning to understand the world in relation to a leader who directs that understanding. Whatever affective form loyalty takes—whether hatred of enemies, compassion for the needy, or joy in just

76 Note that this account of representation certainly does not in itself overturn the equality of representative and represented under human and natural law. For these terms, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 94–5. 77 Nussbaum is critical of ‘pernicious forms of social hierarchy’ (Hiding, 340) and ‘unequal and hierarchical social relations’ (348) which systematically fail to take the disabled into account. My thesis is that a measure of social hierarchy is necessary if people are to experience the wonder, fear, and awe of representative leadership and so be quickened, affirmed, or challenged in their loyalties and enduring, intersubjective affections including compassion for out-groups for whom Nussbaum is concerned.

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judgements—it should be understood as preliminary to moral reflection and moral deliberation.78 Recalling the questions which arose with Lacroix and Walzer, loyalty is the form of those shared understandings which are essential to the renewal of democratic politics. True loyalty is thus not blind but is a form of affective understanding that leads into further moral reasoning. Loyalty is perverted where it does not lead into consideration of whether the leader’s account of the good and the right reflects the community’s own order of value and, beyond that, the cosmos as it is. This perverted form of loyalty is always a hazard in politics. But civic participation is not going to be renewed simply by ever louder calls for increased voting rates but rather by more wisdom among both representatives and represented. Thus for representatives to perform their tasks well, they must not only be effective in attracting loyalty but must also be drawing out appropriate affections concerning objects as a prelude to moral reflection and moral deliberation. For example, depending on their point of view, representatives may seek to attract shame, compassion, or indignation towards those who remain on state benefits while being fit to work and towards those who exploit them for either electoral advantage or financial gain. To this we add that a good political representative distinguishes matters which require affective political attention from those which are not political but are of ‘public’ or private concern, where ‘public’ designates that region of political society which, in most Western nation-states, is beyond the familial but not essentially to do with coercive authority and legislation—voluntary societies, social organisms such as credit unions, churches, and other communities of faith. The logic of our distinction depends on an insight particularly associated with Augustine that political authority was added after the corruption of the cosmos as a limited institution which was to preserve humanity and the ecosystem through coercive force in the form of legislation and judicial action. Such a position does not diminish politics which ‘does not have to be “natural” for it to warrant moral status within Christian experience’79 but rather limits its scope. For its coercive aptitude is ill-fitted for tasks such as ensuring domestic harmony 78 On loyalty cf. J. Perry, The Pretenses of Loyalty: Locke, Liberal Theory, and American Political Theology (OUP, 2011). 79 E. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 56.

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between men and women, parents and children. The task of the political is thereby distinguished from such institutions as family and church which, for Luther at least, existed before there was need for coercive political force acting to remedy the effects of sin.80 This recognition of the family recalls Chapters 1 and 2 where childhood and narrative were recognized as important influences on the formation of affectivity, especially in the notion of affections as ‘beginnings’. The affirmation of the family as the good, created place where affections are formed is excellent protection against an account of affections which is abstracted from familial and community narratives. However, at the same time, the distinction of family from political authority must be carefully defined to prevent the development of environments for abuse. Families are intended for the beginnings of affective understanding but not as their sole environment. Some family structures restrain extensive contact with others beyond narrowly defined, familial limits. Marriage to close relatives, a custom prevalent in many parts of the globe, sustains social solidarity but prevents wider patterns of interaction which serve human development.81 By contrast, Brent Waters, expounding the Puritan Richard Baxter, comments that ‘the family is naturally oriented towards pulling its members out beyond their respective self-interests, thereby equipping them to embrace larger spheres of human association’. The creational gift of the family is not anti-social. Rather its intersubjective affectivity prepares people, more or less well, for wider spheres of intersubjectivity. But for Baxter and contra Aristotle, the ‘family is [not] the foundation of the polis’ but rather ‘a providential witness that also intimates an eschatological fellowship’ in the life of the church.82 This ultimate, ecclesial affective experience is the topic of 80 M. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, in Luther’s Works, i, ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann (Concordia, 1958). Luther comments on Genesis 2: 16 that ‘[h]ere we have the establishment of the church before there was any government of the home and of the state; for Eve was not yet created. Moreover, the church is established without walls and without any pomp, in a very spacious and very delightful place. After the church has been established, the household government is also set up, when Eve is added to Adam as his companion. Thus the temple is earlier than the home, and it is also better this way. Moreover, there was no government of the state before sin, for there was no need of it. Civil government is a remedy required by our corrupted nature.’ 81 Cf. J. Hordern, ‘Families’, in A. Draycott and J. Rowe (eds.), Living Witness: Explorations in Missional Ethics (Apollos, 2012). 82 B. Waters, The Family in Christian Social and Political Thought (OUP, 2007), 35.

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Chapter 5 and sublimates even the family in the life of righteousness and justice which surpasses Okin’s revised Rawlsianism. Wise political representatives will perceive the provisional nature of political authority in relation to institutions which are not characterized by coercion, preserve the conditions for affectivity to flourish in them but also discern where invasive political action will undermine just those facilitating environments which children need. As the feminist Joan Tronto comments, the public realm is not simply ‘an enlarged family’, into which familial and non-familial and private are collapsed.83 Families, churches, and civil society in general must not be elided with political authority but do require the assistance of political authority amidst the corruption of the world.84 The representative’s peculiarly political task is to awaken a people affectively through their order of value to some particular aspect of their common life which requires their judgement, a judgement which may then be effected by coercion. A political representative is thus an ‘authority . . . I depend on to show me the reasons for acting’85 concerning distinctly political affairs. In a participative, consultative democracy, a representative should attract political affections in order to initiate common moral reasoning, gain loyalty, and create shared understanding. Representation, in awakening people to objects of value, energizes and orders often conflictual processes of affective intersubjective verification. The task of representation is neither mimicry nor manipulation of popular affectivity but rather judicious attraction and humble participation leading to the measure of intersubjective reconciliation which is possible. This mediated loyalty concerning particular objects into which we are drawn affectively by representatives for the purposes of common moral reasoning is accompanied by a more direct sort of loyalty which is between the representative in his representative office and the represented. We recognize such a representative with ‘awe, a wonder that is both delight and terror’.86 This wondrous awe is an affective

83 J. Tronto, ‘Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care’, Signs: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society, 12/4 (1987), 651, cf. Gregory, Politics, 163–75, for an Augustinian reception of such feminist insight. 84 Cf. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 261–92; Augustine, City of God, 19.16–17; cf. Gregory, Politics, 175. 85 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 132. 86 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 132.

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awakening, evoked by the ‘peremptory’ appearing of representative authority among a people.87 Those who find themselves represented begin to understand their representative both in delight at the representative’s limited, political vocation for the common good and in terror at what may befall them individually or corporately, whether coercive punishment or social deterioration, if they fail to live rightly in pursuing that common good. Wondrous awe is thus the most basic affective form of loyalty between representative and represented. By analogy from Proverbs 1: 7, this fear is the participative beginning of political wisdom in the world as it appears to a political community. As with affective recognition in general, wondrous awe does not entail easy or immediate agreement on practical, political questions but rather initiates and sustains moral reflection, deliberation, and action. Since it is God who raises up authority, this initial awe which forms loyalty is ultimately rooted in divine providential activity. God’s providence, in giving representation to people in their traditions, awakens people by summoning their affections to the works prepared for them within hierarchically differentiated intersubjectivity. Some providentially attracted affections have a revelatory quality and may result in a continuation, renunciation, or embrace of a tradition or its representatives, in whole or in part. Providence operates through reminding the people of their tradition via their representatives. The people’s affections, focused through institutional representatives, recognize aspects of their past life by the power of memory, thereby initiating reflection and deliberation in the present. Returning to Chapter 1’s illustrations, consider how an affective admiration for those who fought in the Black Watch, focused through the representative laying of a wreath, resources reflection on the continuing excellence of the British Armed Forces and deliberation concerning how this significant common object ought to be developed.88 Effective representatives make use of such moments in a people’s life in order to develop the loyal intersubjectivity which sustains effective action. If they fail in their task of eliciting wondrous awe— perhaps through the incongruence of the wreath-laying with their 87

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 134. For more complex cases, consider the ceremony on the occasion of the withdrawal of British troops from Basra in Apr. 2009 or the joint, Unionist-Republican acts of commemoration for the dead of the Irish troubles. For a case of representation which is not officially political but has political weight, consider the representative sorrow of the people of Wooton Bassett who, on behalf of the nation, greeted the dead of the British armed forces returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. 88

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military or political policies—then the measure of their authority to attract loyalty is diminished. God’s providence, normally inscrutable but occasionally more transparent, oversees the development of loyalties and the rise and fall of political authorities.

Preserving loyalty The interrelation of this differentiated, eschatological, affective intersubjectivity called political loyalty with the democratic deficit may be explored by considering two conceptual threats to loyalty. The first is Kant’s ‘good will’, described by O’Donovan as ‘affective independence’, ‘an affective disposition wholly free of self-reference, beyond the reach of reflection and sceptical doubt, a simple and undialectical embrace of the good’.89 O’Donovan charts the development of the affectively independent subject whose service to society was at the cost of undermining society’s institutions. Affective independence made all authorities irrelevant, as though the final redundancy of politics had come about already. [Such an] individual has also been cut off from the worldliness of moral order; and since the order of creation is the only point of reference to judge what is good for created beings to do, he is left with no recourse to practical reason.90 Perpetually oriented to the elusive moment of immediacy, the modern subject stands aloof from his own kind, reflecting objectively upon it, subordinating it to the logic of affective detachment, holding back from participation.91

The modern subject’s psychological abstraction from the created order, other orders of value, others of his genus, and even the self, is a perverse anticipation of the day when all crowns are laid at the feet of the One to whom all power and authority has been given, Jesus Christ. Such independence attempts to withdraw from what we have called ‘participation’ and has rendered recognition of representatives who bears the authority of a tradition nigh on impossible. It is a refusal of the ‘worldliness of the moral order’ and denies the generic, teleological nature of reality, terminating in practical unreasonableness ad infinitum. Affective independence is an unwillingness to be 89 90 91

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 299. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 311. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 310.

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awake to the world as it is and is thus not a ‘good will’ but rather a stubborn and hard heart, unable to participate wisely in reality, a grotesque reflection of Jesus’ judgement on his own people of ‘seeing they may not see and hearing they may not understand’ (Luke 8: 10) mirrored in Paul’s words to the Jewish elders in fulfilment of the Isaianic judgement (Acts 28: 26–7). The affections of this subject are perversions which disguise the subject’s actual and inescapable committed participation in the world, undermining intersubjective recognition of common goods, diminishing the possibility of a genuine ‘we’ of verification, and eviscerating affective, epistemological power from political society’s institutions. The representative is effective when he overcomes stubborn, affective independence by providing a meaningful continuation of the tradition which summons the affections of the people into intersubjective participation in traditional orders of value. Through the construal of the present in terms of the past and through projecting a vision for the future, the representative draws on deep reserves of affective wisdom stored in the memory to invite people to engage afresh in the old and new challenges which political societies always face. Representation thus saves people from believing themselves able to linger on the edge of reality and calls them instead to the difficult and necessary business of participatory, political experience. Just as kings of old stirred their troops before leading them onto the field of battle, so social and political representatives today may, in word, deed, and symbol, call peoples into affectively engaged, right action to defend the wronged, punish the wrongdoer, and promote the good. Such representation is a crucial aspect of an enduring answer to sustaining and deepening civic participation. The second threat is proceduralism. The particular concern, in the context of political representation, is with electoral procedure. O’Donovan observes that as the electoral system expands, organs of consultation ossify and fall away. The more the political classes are set to the task of fighting elections, the less they will be free to attend to what they hear. The roar of the heavy machinery of legitimation drowns out the very possibility of listening to voices that reason, plead, celebrate or lament in public. The price of legitimist purity is a high one, paid in practical and moral impotence . . . So the state becomes cut off from the realm of

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public communications, and, by ignoring it, denies its own proper responsibility to it.92

In Ford’s terms, attentiveness to people’s ‘cries’ is the beginning of successful representation while a primary political allegiance to electoral procedure produces a deadening effect on wise affective epistemology which coordinates cries towards the search for the common good. In such circumstances, political elites cannot perceive people’s reasonable, affectively toned cries, common moral reasoning and agency are disempowered, and representatives and represented are cut off from each other, bereft of loyal intersubjectivity. Elsewhere he comments that behind the legalities of the electoral mechanism there must be the social event of representation, the cohering of a more complex network of relations––institutions, sectors, traditions, loyalties—to forge an identification between a people and its government. Election can only be the lynchpin that holds the wheel of tradition in place. So we must ask . . . of regulative electoral rules . . . whether they express the identity and concerns of the people and their enduring loyalties; whether in other words, they successfully represent.93

His point is not that electoral rules cannot be just or that elections are not vital to representation. Would that elections were just and that countries which live under tyranny might have the freedom to choose those who are proven in seeking righteousness! His point is that elections’ ultimate purpose is to serve that which is conceptually prior, namely the common good of the community. I have suggested that the community’s ‘enduring loyalties’ are their shared, repeated, regular ways of participating affectively, through representative institutions and traditions, in the world as it appears to them and the cosmos. The threat of proceduralism consists in that which is conceptually and eschatologically subservient to the common good undermining it by becoming the all-consuming fascination of politicians, electorate, and media alike and tearing people away from the enduring affections which energize and direct societies over decades and generations. These threats to the common good, affective independence and proceduralism, are real in democracies today and must be met with wisdom if loyalties are to be preserved and participation renewed. That wisdom is partly constituted by received patterns of representation 92 93

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 179. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 175.

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which have been found authoritative and generative in political life. In the Jewish scriptures there are exemplary instances of representation familiar to both Nussbaum and O’Donovan, such as Moses, depicted as the representative who can attract and stabilize the nation’s affections within their institutions. As the people stand on the edge of the promised land, Moses, the survivor from the Exodus, remembers the sorrow of Egyptian slavery, the joy, mixed with fear, of the liberation, and the popular self-consciousness at Sinai. He is qualified to summon the people to eat the bread of affliction at the Passover, rejoice at the feast of booths and obey the Lord by going up to take participative possession of the good land. Moses’ memory of the nation’s narrative and God’s part in it is the storehouse wherein resources are found to lead the people to enduring affective recognition of God and the land. Similarly the people rejoice in Jesus’ representative activities which fulfil their institutions so that they appear as community over against the Jewish and Roman leaders. Their joy leads them to do and say what they previously could not do and say by themselves, namely to live as a joyful people characterized by bold preaching and compassionate common life. As the people of God are ‘filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 13: 52) they share in the unprecedented joy of his resurrected Leadership of Jesus. This joy is the enduring, participative way of understanding the world as it is in Christ which, rooted in the memory of YHWH and full of hope of the new heaven and the new earth, stabilizes reflection, deliberation, and actions according to newly recognized norms. These illustrations of representation give shape to a Christian eschatology of the affections which guards against the twin threats and fosters limited political loyalties. Whereas affective independence constantly attempts to reserve itself from participation and proceduralism ignores affective cries, affective wisdom attends to Christ, the cosmos he vindicated, and the eschatological-analogical relation he established between ancient Israel, contemporary institutions, and the Kingdom of God.

Law Burke claimed that ‘public affections . . . are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law’.94 I turn to consider how affections operate in those legislative and judicial 94

Burke, Reflections, 77–8.

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institutions through which communities make pronouncements concerning the goods they share in common. I shall group those institutions under the single name of ‘law’ and call their central common practice ‘judgement’, an ‘act of moral discrimination that pronounces upon a preceding act or existing state of affairs to establish a new public context’.95 Law functions in part as a cultural memory in which affective understandings of wrong and right are concentrated and given articulate expression. Therefore, examining law is important for diagnosing the nature of shared understandings which characterize a community. Within the law, we distinguish between generic judgements given by legislatures as laws which have force for all relevant cases within a jurisdiction and particular judgements given by courts which interpret law and make discriminations in particular cases.96 With respect to both types of judgement, the process often starts with cries of pleading which alert us to a possible need for judgement. The ‘English parliament began life as a “court of common pleas”, a means by which the governed spoke to government [i.e. represented spoke to their political representatives] about their frustrations’.97 The governed also speak to their government about causes for celebration and joy, perhaps petitioning representatives to celebrate, safeguard, and promote some social or cultural good. Whether in frustration or celebration, the initiation of reflection and deliberation about the common good thus arises from the affective cries of the people. Although the people’s judgement, partially expressed in affection, is not a political judgement, it initiates a process towards political judgement. An ‘emotional reaction’ (or, better, an ‘affective attraction’) and ‘the reactive principle’ of government98 are thus closely related. A community may be attracted intersubjectively to what is wrong and bad in fear, anger, or grief and to what is right and good with joy or hope. They fear the threat that some wrong poses to the common 95

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 7. What follows could also be applied to other public authorities such as local councils etc. 97 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 194. 98 The ‘reactive principle’ of government elaborates the insight that political authority is an institution providentially added after the Fall with the task of reacting to defend society against ‘injurious wrongs’ (O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 59–66). The principle does not necessarily tend towards minimal government but to an economy of government which preserves and promotes the ‘society which gives authority its rationale’ (O. O’Donovan and J. O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Eerdmans, 1999), 109). 96

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good; they are angry and grieve a wrong which appears to have been done; they rejoice as they are drawn into some action or state of affairs which serves the common good; they disagree affectively over whether anger or joy are appropriate. Through the court of common pleas, their representative attends to their affections and shares in them through imaginative understanding. For example, a group of constituents may be indignant about the inadequate statutory provision for young men leaving prison while another group may be indignant at the relatively pleasant conditions that such young men enjoy while incarcerated. One group of residents rejoices in the development of a new leisure amenity paid for from public funds as the result of a local council judgement while another group rages. Their representative recognizes this affection, thereby bringing ‘grievance out of the sphere of private action into the field of public judgment’. She participates in their cries but makes possible public reflection and deliberation to verify whether their indignation, joy, or rage is appropriate. For at the level of political discussion ‘the decisive test is not the residual existence of a grievance, but its capacity to arouse general sympathy’. Such intersubjective sympathy may well signal the presence of actual injustice or wrongdoing, thereby drawing the representative’s attention to an injurious wrong. But equally such sympathy may become a ‘great fomenter of public discord’ when justice is not done or does not appear to have been done.99 Accordingly, a good representative will deal with this potential discord by taking the people’s affections seriously without granting them the last word. She will ‘feel their pain’ but then allow that affective understanding to open up further reflection and deliberation. Finally, she will attempt to bring a measure of reconciliation, possibly through some lawful public judgement whereby a duty becomes incumbent on a public body to provide some good to the young men leaving prison or to engage in more consultation with respect to leisure amenities. The judgement is intended as a form of reconciliation, coming down affectively in some relation to constituents’ pleas. Within this description is a distinction between the generic judgements of legislators and the particular judgements of the judiciary. On a generic level, affection, as a humble, penurious way of beginning the movement from values to norms, is well-suited to the

99

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 123.

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representative’s task of discovering law, since it is non-exhaustive in its moral deliverances and encourages further enquiry. When a people’s anger or grief is drawn to some particular wrong, parliamentary legislators (as contrasted with court judges) may be initially focused on that particular case but are not mandated to judge directly on that matter. That task is reserved for the judiciary in criminal and civil suits. Rather legislators make normative judgements in the form of laws which attempt to recognize popular affections which have become apparent through particular cases. For example, in the UK there is a provision, mirroring Megan’s law in the USA, which is known as ‘Sarah’s Law’ (named after a girl who was sexually assaulted and murdered) and made available in response to popular outcry. The provision was first piloted and then expanded and provides for parents to be made aware of the presence of sex offenders in their area. There was a movement from popular recognition of value at the level of particularity, via political reflection and deliberation, to a representative action of norm-giving which itself establishes ‘a new public context’.100 Whether or not the particular new public context resulting from Megan and Sarah’s laws is beneficial is not to the point. What is important here is that institutional representatives who successfully enable this process over time will strengthen loyalties between representatives and represented. Processes of intersubjective verification of affective recognitions will be welcomed as vital aspects of political discourse and reasoning, promoting reflective, deliberative law-making. When Burke wrote that public affections may be correctives, aids, and supplements to law, this seems a plausible explanation of what he had in mind. This interpretation of affective wisdom in law recalls two earlier passages of the argument. First, recalling the brief discussion of Kantian ‘supplements’ in Chapter 1, consider again Kant’s affective independence critiqued above. John Hare believes that at the beginning of moral reasoning for Kant there is a basic feeling, a desire or inclination for something whereby the maxim which is willed ‘takes its matter from our affective lives’.101 There follows at a later stage respect for law, ‘a feeling . . . occasioned only by the presentation by reason of the pure practical law’ which is necessary to bring us to will 100

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 7. J. Hare, ‘Kant, the Passions and the Structure of Moral Motivation’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 69. 101

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the law. This respect is ‘problematic . . . for Kant, because he cannot allow causal influences from the phenomenal realm on the noumenal’.102 The only way to allow for it is as a ‘humiliation’ whereby self-love is dislodged without the will being directly influenced by the feeling. An agent must have sufficient respect to achieve this—a deficient respect will itself be an obstacle to an action of moral worth. Although there is a surface similarity to my account of law and affections, with feeling playing a part at the beginning of moral reasoning, the account of respect is antithetical to the concept of affective political reasoning which I have proposed. An enduring intersubjective, affective participation in the ‘phenomenal’ is of the essence of wise legal practice. It is a humble posture but not akin to Kant’s humiliation. For the humility of the holy one of the gospel was not of that sort. Rather, Jesus’ incarnate participation in Israel’s life of Torah was a humble affirmation of the goodness of earthly affectivity and of the presence of the transcendent in human life. There is a place for humiliation or shame, as we shall see, but I doubt that Kant’s formulation captures it. Second, recall the discussion of Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of excellency. Edwards develops a political application of excellent harmonious association and calls it ‘symmetry’. Human consciousness of such symmetry is by the affections of the ‘natural conscience’,103 guided by the common illuminations of the Spirit ‘as operating on the self ’ as distinct from special and saving illuminations of the Spirit ‘as dwelling in the self ’.104 Having considered geometrical symmetry, he develops a metaphysics which construes excellency as symmetrical relations between entities.105 Edwards especially applies symmetry to the justice enacted by the laws of society, the proper proportioning of duties and obligations amongst relatives, friends, and neighbours. When justice is done it is an example of secondary beauty and Hare, ‘Kant, Passions and Structure’, 65–6. Edwards, Nature of True Virtue, 589–99. 104 Edwards, Religious Affections, editor’s introduction, 24. 105 J. Edwards, The Mind, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vi. Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. W. Anderson (Yale University Press, 1980), 381: ‘There is a beauty in equality . . . How unbeautiful would be the body if the parts on one side were unequal to those on the other . . . how unbeautiful would a building be if no equality were observed in the correspondent parts.’ Edwards also considers the asymmetrical proportionality of parts in a whole, as with the strokes which go together to make up the well-drawn flourishes of a master penman. However, asymmetry is less important to Edwards when he comes to political justice, as we shall see. 102 103

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secondary virtue, analogous to the beauty and virtue of Being in general. The governing principle of this secondary form of moral virtue—which is very distant from true virtue—is ‘desert’, a principle which Edwards develops in the context of the discussion of selflove, which in turn is expressed in gratitude towards those who love us and anger for those who hate us. In short, ‘all the moral sense that is essential to those affections [of gratitude and anger] is a sense of desert’.106 Desert is a strictly symmetrical principle, ‘that we should desire they themselves should suffer in like manner as we have suffered’,107 a pattern he describes as ‘the beauty of vindictive justice’.108 He also argues that ‘conscience naturally gives men an apprehension of right and wrong, and suggests a relation between right and wrong, and a retribution’.109 Conscience, ‘that sense the mind has of . . . consent’,110 has to do with ‘that excellency which most strongly affects’.111 The combination of his epistemological confidence about anger and gratitude and his principle of natural justice are not promising resources for a political society which requires any kind of subtlety in its legal affairs. For Edwards’s advocacy of the principle of symmetry in political judgements in the form of ‘desert’ is a recipe for unwise and even ugly judicial enactments. Justice in society does not mean that punishment is symmetrical to crime, that the offender should suffer what the offended has suffered, that the rapist should be raped. Rather, as Oliver O’Donovan has pointed out, society does not echo crime with punishment but rather, in punishing crime, provides an answer to the offender’s act.112 Edwards would naturally reject the idea of the rapist being raped and yet his principle of symmetry, guided by gratitude, anger, and desert, would make for judgements which are not fitted to crimes but which are yet made with passionate certainty. Conceptually, at least, this is a recipe for public judgements

106

Edwards, Nature of True Virtue, 581. Edwards, Nature of True Virtue, 582. 108 Edwards, The Mind, 365. 109 Edwards, The Mind, 207 (emphasis added). 110 Edwards, The Mind, 365. 111 Edwards, The Mind, 356. 112 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 110, ‘Judgment brings an old act back by a new act, an act that corresponds to the old and so expresses it truthfully.’ 107

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which will be followed through with all the ‘beauty’ of a fine piece of geometry but none of the subtle wisdom of a legal tradition.113 Both Kant and Edwards in their different ways miss the way that affections operate in law. A contrast is the English-speaking common-law tradition, to which Nussbaum has applied her account of shame and disgust. In a co-authored article, she shows how the common law has routinely assumed a cognitive-evaluative view of emotions while much modern legal theory has taken a mechanistic view which reckons that emotions are destructive of legal responsibility. For Nussbaum and Kahan, if we do hold that ‘emotions involve evaluative thought we naturally begin to ask questions about the sort of evaluations reasonable people ought to make’.114 For example, any ‘good account of why offenses against person and property are universally subject to legal regulation is likely to invoke the reasonable fear that citizens have of these offenses, the anger with which a reasonable person views them, and/or the sympathy with which they view such violations when they happen to others’.115 In jury service reasonable people are called on to give a verdict on their peers which will, to some extent, take account of the affections of the accused. When a son becomes angry and kills those who assaulted his aged, housebound father, is his affection reasonable and so some sort of mitigating factor? In a classic set of cases, to which Nussbaum often returns, is the anger of the cuckold, which led him to kill both adulterous wife and illegitimate lover, reasonable? The jury is called on, in the terms of this discussion, to verify intersubjectively the accused’s affections and to enquire whether they were reasonable and whether, if reasonable, they are mitigating factors. In this way, the jurors represent society by sharing in the affections of the victim (indignation against the accused—the angry son or cuckold) and the defendant (indignation against the wrongdoers—the assailants or adulterers), allowing both to influence the jury’s reflection and deliberation. But contra Kahan, Nussbaum holds that shame and disgust are never helpful in judging particular cases or general laws. Instead, ‘indignation’ or ‘outrage’, ‘expressing a reasoned judgment that can 113 For further commentary on these themes, cf. N. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and its British Context (University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 62–80. 114 D. Kahan and M. Nussbaum, ‘Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law’, Columbia Law Review, 96 (Mar. 1996), 287. 115 Nussbaum, Hiding, 7–8.

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be publicly shared’,116 is the appropriate public response to unjust action which threatens capabilities.117 Nussbaum distinguishes anger from disgust and shame on the grounds that ‘the notion of harm or damage lies at the core of anger’s cognitive content’ and therefore the reasoning from which anger stems ‘can be publicly articulated and publicly shaped’.118 Anger must be proportionate to the finite wrong of particular offences. Where it is not, anger can lead to the desire to humiliate and to shame, which, because it is directed at the person as a whole, is looser in its connection to a particular offence and so has greater capacity to mark someone for an extended period or even destroy a person permanently. Anger takes the person seriously as a responsible creature. Shame, in its pernicious form, reckons a person subcreaturely and subhuman. Though shame may play a better political role than Nussbaum allows, her analysis of anger (which might also be called ‘indignation’) seems compelling. On a theological level, private anger is subordinated to the public exercise of just wrath (Romans 13: 1ff.) and to the final promise of publicity that ‘vengeance is mine and I will repay’ (12: 19). As we learn from the incident of the enraged devotees of Artemis (and Mammon!) (Acts 19: 21–40), wrong civil anger was well-known to the early church since it was often directed against them. But Paul calls the church at Ephesus to ‘be angry and sin not’ (Ephesians 4: 26). The Ephesians were right to be angry at wrong, thereby recognizing injustice, and yet they were not to sin. Instead, in the context of the church, they were to entrust ultimate judgement to the higher judge, recognizing the provisionality of their own indignation. Their representative would take their private grievances against one another and make them a matter of public, eschatological, wrathful judgement, to be resolved in his death and resurrection. Paul’s warning to the Ephesian church raises the question of how political anger is to be ordered rightly. For, by analogy from the eschatological relativization of anger in the church, political societies need a way of enabling people to be angry at injustice and yet not to sin, especially through extrajudicial violence. What is required is an institution whereby the affective recognition of private anger may initiate reflection and deliberation and thereby contribute towards a public judgement in the form of generic law which may be effectively 116 117

Nussbaum, Hiding, 99ff., 170. Nussbaum, Hiding, 344–5.

118

Nussbaum, Hiding, 99.

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acted upon for the common good in particular cases. Representative, political authority, at both national and local levels, is that personal institution which makes affection communally beneficial while limiting its capacity to bring about unlawful action. Through representation the affections of the people may be understood, provided with appropriate political expression, and judged worthy or unworthy of general sympathy. The representative is called to understand the affective wisdom of the laws in the polity’s legal tradition and to connect them, through the exercise of authority, with the particular circumstances of the people. When this happens through the common practices of political institutions, the moment of authority occurs and is recognized as authoritative.

IV. COMPASSION AND SHAME REVISITED These eschatological reflections on representation and law lead us back to the central considerations of this book, namely how to describe the shared affective understandings of a society and what forms of understanding are politically beneficial. Representation and law have the capacity to enable people to experience affective unity. There are many ways that people could experience affective conflict with one another, thereby undermining political unity; equally, representation and law provide ways of being affectively united which are not beneficial, such as an unjust anger or a joy in what is evil. In what follows, I will consider the alternative forms of political affective understanding which follow from the eschatology of Deuteronomy, Luke, and Acts as interpreted through Oliver O’Donovan and the eschatology of mature interdependence and internal transcendence as interpreted by Martha Nussbaum. These alternatives concern the incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Jesus Christ. Subtleties concerning the interrelation and interpretation of these features of the good news of Christianity are neglected in Nussbaum’s scepticism about whether Christian ethics can foster beneficial public affections. Such subtleties are important because, as Nussbaum realizes, narratives shape societies’ long-term, cultural forms of understanding. In particular the ‘fear of death, which in some form is ubiquitous, will be powerfully shaped by what one thinks death is, and whether one believes there is

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an afterlife’.119 This in turn helps to explain ‘intersocietal differences in the emotional life’.120 Nussbaum also realizes that ‘the Christian idea that god is also fully human and has actually sacrificed his life is, if it can be made coherent, a most important element in the thought that god actually loves the world’.121 My reading of Luke’s narrative of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, fulfilling Deuteronomy’s affective logic, has attempted to offer such coherence. This Christ entered political experience in order to enable humanity to reimagine politics, shedding new light on facilitating environments for affective understanding. In particular, it was suggested that the global joy which the Christ-event has occasioned is intended to reshape how we interpret all political affections. This incarnation of God overcomes the divide Nussbaum observed between gods and human politics which characterized Homeric and Aristotelian conceptions, in which the anti-political experience of transcendent gods neither illuminated nor denigrated human politics.122 That kind of transcendence Nussbaum quite reasonably rejects. And yet she also sidelines an aspiration for a life beyond death which is not characterized by decay and fragility. In this chapter’s concluding phase, I will consider what difference the Christ event makes to the political affections of compassion and shame and argue that politics should take account of a certain kind of transcendence for the sake of its own affective health.

Compassion First, there is the role of compassion. The compassion which is shaped by Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection demonstrates that external transcendence brings public benefit. By contrast, political representatives who seek to promote Nussbaum’s ‘mature interdependence’ are committed to facilitating an environment for affective understanding that excludes from public reasoning affective recognitions of the infinite significance and eschatological perfectibility of human life. The resurrection of Christ trumpets the news that,

119

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 152–3. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 152. 121 Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 376. 122 Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 373–4; cf. M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (CUP, 1986). 120

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though fragility, decay, and death are real, they are not ultimate. For, although Christ suffered and died in the body, he was raised up in the body. This resurrection does not encourage what Nussbaum suspects, namely a withdrawal of concern about the here and now, an abstraction from the particularity of human existence and the demands of justice. Rather, the bodily resurrection of Christ reaffirms the bodily life of humanity. Human ‘carnality’ is not done away with or diminished. Instead, its future condition is guaranteed and this promise encourages humanity to embrace without fear its current condition. The letter to the Hebrews explains that it was ‘for the joy set before him’ that Christ endured the cross, the suffering which Nussbaum herself admires.123 But the subtlety of the suffering is that its meaning is taken from what it precedes—its sequel gives the coherence which Nussbaum desires. For it is not only a suffering in solidarity—though it is certainly that. It is also a suffering to overcome suffering. Human bodily life is affirmed in both the solidarity and the overcoming but our current condition is not valorized as the final disclosure of all human experience, as Nussbaum’s account of mature interdependence and internal transcendence would suggest. The resurrection of Christ summons political representatives not to exclude the transcendent dimension from the affective understanding which characterizes a polity. For it is just this which gives depth and intelligibility to the grief and compassion which attend decay and death by construing them in terms of the joy and hope of new bodily life to come. Charles Taylor, while recognizing the otherworldly temptation which Nussbaum warns against, observes that ‘the transcendent can be seen as endorsing or affirming the value of ordinary human attention and concern, as has undoubtedly been the case with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with decisive consequences for our whole moral outlook’.124 In other words, the transcendent God, having descended to participate in the bodily life of humanity, rises again, promising renewal and turning humanity back ever more deeply into an encounter with our frailty and mortality. The incarnation of external transcendence reshapes affectivity by bringing joy

123 Hebrews 12: 2; cf. J. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire’, Augustinian Studies, 36/1 (2005), 212–13. 124 C. Taylor, Review Article on M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18/4 (Dec. 1988), 813.

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and hope centre stage. Far from becoming otherworldly, it provides clarity for participation in the everyday life of the world and the tasks of political justice with which Nussbaum is concerned. The difference in approach can be illustrated first on a personal level and second on an institutional level. On a personal level, Nussbaum movingly describes her experience of her mother’s death at the outset of Upheavals and returns to it repeatedly in the text. I experienced the death of my mother but as a 5-year-old boy rather than as an adult. In light of this book’s argument concerning shared but conflictual affective understanding and intersubjective verification, it seems appropriate to consider our experiences of maternal death side by side, putting my confidence in the goodness of the incarnate, risen Christ in respectful conversation with her commitment to internal transcendence. I have already considered Augustine’s reflections on his weeping over the death of his mother. Nussbaum’s narrative too is drenched in tears. She entered the hospital room in April 1992 where her mother was laid out, ‘dressed in her best robe’. She ‘wept uncontrollably’. Further ‘agonized weeping’ followed in the weeks afterwards. She recalls that ‘it seemed appropriate to be angry and not possible to be angry at mortality itself ’.125 This experience for Nussbaum was about ‘nothing less than how to imagine life. To struggle against grief is to strive toward a view of the universe in which that face does not appear luminous and wonderful, on every path, and in which the image of that lifeless form in a posture like sleep does not stand out . . . above the flat landscape of daily life.’126 My own mother, Helen, was ill for some time with a form of cancer called myelofibrosis which took hold in her bone marrow. In June 1986, on the day she died aged 33, my father brought me home from school and gently told me the news in the kitchen where she had laughed and loved in her colourful clothes. Kind friends were there that day and have remained with us throughout our lives. I wept then but wept afresh in later years as my participation in her life and death through memory matured into a fruitful appreciation of its meaning for familial experience and relational intimacy. There was anger too but this sorrow and anger gained new meaning over time. For I met the incarnate God who had compassion on a widow at Nain, stopping her son’s funeral to restore him to life.127 This was the man who wept 125 126

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 20–1. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 86–7.

127

Luke 7: 11–17.

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at Lazarus’s tomb, comforting his sisters Martha and Mary, thundering in anger at death itself and raising Lazarus to life again.128 These wonderful events were but foretastes of what was to come. For Lazarus and the widow’s son would continue to experience frailty, decay, and death. But Jesus was the man who endured the cross, the epitome of all suffering and injustice, and rose again in order that he might bring both compassion to the world and an end to the suffering which evokes compassion. As a member of my species, he shared my sorrow and my anger and pioneered a fully human affective life, fulfilling Torah’s rich affective wisdom and disclosing the future shape of life. In his dying he cared for his mother, entrusting her welfare to a friend. Through his suffering, death, and rising from the dead, he revealed himself as the conqueror of death—the resurrection and the life. And so my joy now is, like Martha’s, in the memory of my mother and the blessings her life brought. But my joy is full of hope for her resurrection from the dead to share in the inheritance of the new heaven and the new earth. For she suffered and died putting her trust in Christ for the certain hope of deliverance from death. My joy and hope do not occlude sorrow but give it an intelligibility which energizes compassion for those who are in any kind of sorrow here and now. For Nussbaum, anger at mortality was not appropriate, not because anger itself was irrational but because mortality, for her, is not a reasonable object of anger. For me, anger at mortality is coherent when construed amidst joy and hope at my mother’s resurrection with Christ. The transcendent God who has come to dwell with us has made this possible by the Holy Spirit poured out among us. Over time and shared by many people, such a way of understanding death shapes institutions, such as health institutions, fitting people both for the life of the world to come and the life of the world here and now. And so, second, on an institutional level, I suggest that a political environment where such theological perspectives are accommodated in public communications and discourse allows for a subtler range of affective understanding concerning the sickness, death, and decay which characterize the current human condition. Political representatives and laws are increasingly occupied with health in contemporary Western nation-states characterized by ageing populations. The

128

John 11.

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loyalty of the people to their government depends significantly on whether that government can be trusted with healthcare. I suggest that Nussbaum’s philosophical approach to death will foster public emotions which are not as publicly beneficial as those fostered by the Christian eschatology outlined here. That eschatology understands our aspiration to bodily perfection and attends to the reality of current imperfection. For Christ’s death and resurrection not only demonstrate that death and decay are not humanity’s goal, verifying our sadness, compassion, hope, and fear concerning sickness and death, but also vindicate our joy in the goodness of this life and our hopeful aspiration for permanent joy based on the truth in the presence of God in the new heavens and the new earth. Nussbaum’s approach excludes these redemptive notes from political discourse. The form of Judaism to which she adheres insists ‘on finding the worth and meaning of a life within history, in its choices and striving in this life’.129 In order to concretize these concerns, consider how these different approaches to death shape affections in health institutions with respect to palliative care and physician-assisted suicide. Palliative care seeks to limit the pain of a dying person and facilitate a way of dying which avoids intentional killing. Physician-assisted suicide, on the other hand, involves overcoming pain and controlling the dying process by intentionally bringing life to an end. This is achieved by the patient, who is supported by a medical practitioner in exercising control over the manner and timing of her death. Nussbaum supports a ‘limited right of access to physician-assisted suicide’ and holds that ‘the choice to end life, by a mentally fit person, should be respected’.130 If we connect this policy with her account of emotions, it seems to me that compassion will be less appropriate towards the patient opting for assisted suicide than the palliative care patient since 129

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 641. Nussbaum’s views on whether there is any life after death are not obvious from the writings I have considered. In reflecting on Mahler, she comments that ‘in Jewish eschatology the afterlife is not a bright, but a shadowy place rather like the Homeric underworld’ which is ‘given light only by the achievements of the person within this life’ (640–1). But it is not clear that this is her view nor even her interpretation of Reform Judaism. Her political recommendations do not logically depend on there being an afterlife of any sort and certainly not the full resurrection life which is an aspect of orthodox Jewish eschatology. 130 M. Nussbaum, ‘Human Dignity and Political Entitlements’, Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics (US Independent Agencies and Commissions, 2008), 351–80.

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the timing and manner of assisted suicide are more fully controlled by the patient and by the society which allows such an event to take place. Recall that Nussbaum’s compassion, her paradigm political emotion, is oriented to the uncontrolled experiences of life which, in this instance, is the uncontrolled experience of sickness and death. Therefore, if the timing and manner of death is substantially controlled by the patient, compassion will be less appropriate. In crude terms, the more societal assistance one has to kill oneself, the less compassion one should expect to receive. This seems a reasonable albeit somewhat unpleasant conclusion from Nussbaum’s ethics. Death will be experienced not as an uncontrolled upheaval but as a controlled subsidence. The question follows as to whether this approach to death and compassion is politically wise. It is not obvious that giving public approval to assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia) builds social and political solidarity. Christian compassion, by contrast, construes fragility, decay, and death in terms of the Christ whose life, death, and resurrection conquered death. In his dying, he did not collude with suffering and death but overcame it in hope of joy, promising life beyond death to all people. Palliative care’s combined realism about death and refusal to collude with it coheres with such a belief in the ongoing life of each person beyond death. In refusing to control death by intentionally bringing it about, palliative care accommodates a variety of theological narratives around the experience of dying and death. In palliative care, compassion is not reconcilable with killing people or facilitating their suicide even amidst very great suffering. Compassion for the dying is therefore not indexed to the extent of the agent’s or society’s control of the patient’s circumstances but involves commitment to particular person in their suffering condition. Nussbaum has argued that, in this context, to ‘impose the comprehensive doctrine of a particular variety of Christianity on all citizens is to violate their dignity’.131 But it is not only a Christian view of the end of life which would hesitate before supporting assisted suicide. In any case, her doctrine, as we have seen, is itself sophisticated and comprehensive. A political compassion formed by Nussbaum’s eschatology would usher in an anti-transcendent environment in healthcare institutions. Political representatives will do well to take

131

Nussbaum, ‘Human Dignity and Political Entitlements’.

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seriously the fragility of life but, in humility, they should leave open the question of transcendence and not overreach their political competence. Moreover, O’Donovan has observed a dark underside to the liberal emphasis on ‘the exclusive importance of compassion’ in medicine. It is a compassion which ‘when it is driven to it, will arm itself with superior technique’, for its ‘strength over the enemy lies not . . . in its ability to appeal to nature, the way of wisdom, but in its ability to resort to artifice, the way of progress’. The abandonment of a belief in a moral order leaves ordines amoris and their concomitant affections adrift, their compassion not ordered to a cosmos nor to Christ but, in the end, controlled by the very technical innovations which people have devised to control the world. For O’Donovan, by contrast, the proper ‘limits [of human life] will not be taught us by compassion, but only by understanding what God has made’.132 As noted in Chapter 1, Nussbaum believes in no such creation as the secure environment for human flourishing but trusts in judicial compassion to protect human capabilities. In particular, judges are to guard the first capability on Nussbaum’s list, of being ‘able to live to the end of a human life of normal length’ or until ‘one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living’.133 Once life is not worth living then the compassionate option will be to allow the dying person to take as full control as possible of the end of life. But, as we have seen, in allowing such control, this ‘compassion’ itself becomes highly attenuated and barely worth the name. The control of death by the patient, overseen by society in the form of judges and physicians, seems, on Nussbaum’s own argument, to be antithetical to the compassion which, she believes, should characterize a humane society. Therefore, just as judges overcome the uncontrollability of the world in Nussbaum’s general political theory, so assisted suicide overcomes the uncontrollability of death at the end of a citizen’s life. Such a position seems hard to reconcile with mature interdependence. This bid for control over death is the inevitable outcome of a conception of the world as essentially uncontrolled, where internal transcendence is everything and Providence is nothing. Inasmuch as it undermines compassion, it brings about a return, by a surprising route, to the very apatheia which Nussbaum so sought to avoid and

132 133

O’Donovan, Begotten or Made?, 10–12. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 416–18.

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which Augustine criticized on eschatological grounds.134 On a political level, the bid for control brings about a disintegration of society at the point of death. At the very moment when the illusion of control is tested to breaking point, people are left to encounter death at a time of their own autonomous choosing. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ tells a different story of the vindication of a man who suffered and died not at his own hands but at the hands of others, in hope of the joy set before him. His bodiliness, from conception to grave to the Galilee seashore, discloses wisdom for worldly living and the first fruits of the world to come. The resurrection of Christ summons humanity to demonstrate a compassion which suffers to the end with people, refusing to assert total control over suffering and death, confident that these are not the end but rather the beginning of bodily transformation. Such a vision of suffering, interdependent solidarity which does not collude with death can be a source of immense moral unity in a nation’s life, as much among the infirm elderly as among the fearful middle-aged. Witness the instinctive support for hospice care in villages, towns, and cities of the United Kingdom. An ageing world population, especially in the West and China, will ask more and more challenging questions of the younger, tax-paying sectors of their societies. This will place new pressures on political representatives to cope with a potential compassion deficit between the relatively healthy and the ever-increasing proportion of elderly, decrepit, and mentally ill. Nussbaum’s compassion seems less likely to hold people together in active and effective care than a compassion energized and formed by the Christian gospel whose promise of joy in the new heaven and new earth sustains the affective unity of people who here and now continue, amidst suffering and death, to meet each other in suffering care.

Shame Second, there is the role of shame. The ascension of Jesus is the precursor to his final return, descending to bring in the new heavens and the new earth, a kingdom of perfect and permanent peace. Contra Nussbaum, this makes shame in the current era a beneficial 134

Augustine, City of God, 14.9.

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political affection. O’Donovan’s eschatology makes shame in the face of our limitations a sensible form of self-understanding for it construes those limitations in terms of our failures to govern ourselves with wisdom. The political judgements of earthly authority involve a ‘confession of shame in the face of necessity, a sense of tragedy about the cutting-short of reasonable interaction. So for Augustine the just man wages even just wars in tears.’135 He weeps not because war is unable to enact any measure of just judgement but because that justice which is done is only provisionally just and because even the resort to force is itself a certain kind of tragedy. This tragedy concerns a humanity not yet in full communion with one another or God, a notion distinct from the tragic awareness into which Nussbaum would have judges and legislators educated. For it is situated within a quite different eschatology, as I have already discussed at length. Nussbaum applauds Augustine’s restoration of emotion to a place of value in the good human life through his focus on vulnerability, weakness, and what she obliquely calls ‘the uncertainty of grace’, by which she seems to mean the state of being dependent on a gracious God.136 She recognizes that Augustine, over against the proud Platonists, ‘renounces the wish to depart from our human condition’ and that the equality of all in God’s sight ‘has certainly been among the foundational ideas in moving society toward equal concern for the deprived, the poor, and the different’.137 Thus she seem to accept that transcendence, far from making people otherworldly, actually drives them back into affective participation in the world. However, as she recognizes, this is where Nussbaum’s own conversion to Reform Judaism becomes crucial as she criticizes Augustine for undermining mature interdependence in being so heavenly minded that thisworldly, political concerns are merely provisional and so of no great importance.138 Compassion is focused solely on our neighbour’s sinful condition and therefore ‘Augustinian love is committed to denying the importance of the worldly losses and injustices to which my neighbour may attach importance, in order to assert the primacy of the need for God and the potential for grace.’139 She notes that Augustine says that people should be loved individually, ‘not only the good parts but also the flaws and faults’ and, as such 135 136 138

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 15. 137 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 541. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 547. 139 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 552. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 552.

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imperfect people, they are to be loved ‘in themselves’.140 But then she doubts whether Augustine believes that we are to love individual people since ‘what one loves above all in them is the presence of God and the hope of salvation’.141 For Nussbaum, this renders Augustine highly unsatisfactory as a guide to the emotional life—he cares neither for this life nor for individual people in it. But the deepest criticism is reserved for Augustine’s ‘politics of Eden’, in which humans were sexual, but in a deep way nonerotic: they had no passionate attachment to pieces of the world; so long as they were good, they were not curious or striving. We might say that in our sense they were without emotion. It is thus a very basic fact about humanity—our need for objects, our keen hunger to know and to control the sources of good—that is original sin. And thus a basic aspect of our humanity becomes a fitting object of boundless shame; it is this very condition that renders us hopelessly alike so far as merit is concerned. The politics of Eden is this: be ashamed of your longing for objects, your curiosity to know them, and your very wish to originate independent actions. Be so ashamed that you see this as radical evil, and yield your will before the authority of the church. But also: be consoled, for this is merely a provisional world, and the actions you would like to undertake here do not matter greatly; all of your suffering will ultimately be made up by the transcendent beauty of coming into the presence of God.142

This trenchant critique has some traction especially in Augustine’s complex approach to sexuality and lust, a thorough consideration of which would take us too far from the matter in hand. However, as Nussbaum herself recognizes when discussing transcendence, I would suggest that ‘matters are more complex’ than she allows.143 What Nussbaum is rejecting is a mixed picture, containing some things which Augustinian Christianity would also reject but at the same time accepting as inevitable and permanent what Augustine believes to be a temporary indigence suffered as a result of human sin. The basic problem concerns the description of human sinfulness. For Nussbaum, Augustine’s approach has ‘too much abjectness . . . too much unwillingness to grant that a human being may in fact become, and 140 141 142 143

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 549. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 549–50. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 555. Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 378.

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be, good’.144 She believes that this condition condemns humanity simply to be ashamed of what we are and to ‘cover ourselves, mourn, and wait’,145 since death is ‘irrelevant, real suffering in this world is irrelevant [and] all that is relevant is coming into God’s presence’.146 Nussbaum’s accusation of otherworldliness and dismissal of human sinfulness invite a restatement of the benefits of shame in politics. Augustine holds that, just as you love the sick person that he might be well in this life, so you love the flawed and faulty person that he might be righteous in this life. Augustine’s moral thought is hardly restricted to otherworldly concerns, whether he is addressing righteous action, political justice, or personal health.147 However, Nussbaum seems to interpret all Augustine’s moral and political thought in terms of the sexuality of Eden. Augustine’s account of sexual love in Eden and in the current era is both more ambiguous and more theologically rich than Nussbaum allows.148 In particular, Nussbaum does not give due weight to Augustine’s warning against the possessive grasping which perverts proper human affectivity. Gregory observes that grasping ‘was a way of death, but Christ showed Augustine a way of loving that ascends to life’.149 Nussbaum criticizes Augustine for not ascribing to Edenic humanity just the grasping characteristics which are, on Augustine’s view, features of fallen humanity—‘our keen hunger to know and to control the sources of good’, a notion quite distinct from living in loving fellowship with God. Augustine’s Adam and Eve indeed are ‘without emotion’ on Nussbaum’s account of emotions—they are content rather than striving, dependent on God rather than seeking to be independent arbiters of good and evil, and under the sovereignty of God rather than desiring to control the sources of good.150 Nussbaum’s critique, therefore, would amount to a normalization of the instability of the corrupted world and the

144

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 550–1. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 556. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 552. 147 Augustine, On the First Epistle of John, Homily, 8.11; cf. O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine (Wipf & Stock, 2006), 123. 148 Cf. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, not referred to by Nussbaum; cf. P. Ramsey, ‘Human Sexuality in the History of Redemption’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16/1 (Spring 1988), 56–86. 149 E. Gregory, Politics, 287. 150 Cf. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, 204. 145 146

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desire of humanity to exert control rather than life according to God’s moral order.151 Indeed, God drops out of Nussbaum’s analysis altogether to be replaced, somewhat strangely, by the ‘church’ as a dominating force.152 Such an assessment does not argue with the fundamental Augustinian claim about human sinfulness but simply rejects it. By contrast, Eric Gregory has argued persuasively that love and sin must be held together in defence of a flourishing liberal democracy. For ‘Augustine sought not to bury but to redeem the moral and emotional dimension of life “in this time”. In particular, by highlighting the summary and fulfilment of the law in terms of the two love commands, he would try to open the cultural space for emotional investment with those who suffer injustice and to accentuate the practical responsibility this entails.’153 Over against Nussbaum, Gregory argues that Augustinian love protects the neighbor from the human tendency to consume one another, to exhaust others with our enjoyment of them rather than 151 Although Nussbaum’s eschatology has no room for heaven and hell, two of the traditional last four things, the goal of mature interdependence is in some strange way characterized by a reflection of both in the form of social solidarity amidst permanent death. 152 For an earlier critique of religion, cf. M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2009): ‘We see a society, above all, whose every enterprise is poisoned by the fear of death, a fear that will not let its members taste any stable human joy, but turns them into the grovelling slaves of corrupt religious teachers’ (103). For evidence that this theological shortsightedness is not an isolated feature of Nussbaum’s thought, consider her eccentric appeal to an edict of Emperor Constantine, which specifically forbad marking the face of criminals with tattoos or brands. She quotes directly from the edict which explains that the face ‘has been fashioned in the likeness of the divine beauty’ (Nussbaum, Hiding, 172). She then explains that Constantine was ‘precisely’ emphasizing the face as ‘the mark of our humanity and individuality’ (221) but she strangely makes no reference to God. Her willingness to put store by Constantine without offering any discussion concerning his theological rationale is puzzling. Constantine’s point is surely that it is only as representatives of the divine image that we can discover in ourselves and each other the value which sustains and energizes meaningful social life. We may appear to each other without shame when our faces are not disfigured by man’s judgement but rather recognized by others as signs of God’s creative love. As we appear to each other, we are able to form intersubjective bonds of affection as we recognize and value together the common goods of our community. Representation enables this process for the representative ‘bears the people’s image, makes the people visible and tangible, to itself and to others. Yet the representative does not bring the people into existence, but simply makes it appear’ (O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, 157). On this point cf. Robert Spaemann who observes that the modern, unsituated subject ‘has no face’ (Personen (Klett-Cotta, 1996), 144). 153 Gregory, Politics, 38.

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participate with them in the enjoyment of God. Neighbors can really be my neighbors when they are not just my neighbors in my world. Love overcomes any absolute bifurcation of utility and delight. It attends to the individual person as a wonderful creature participating in the luminous beauty of God. The neighbor is concretely loved in her own particular identity as a ‘rational soul’, and not simply as a general instance of a common humanity or derivative of a love for God. But a neighbor’s sui generis identity participates in the differentiated reality of God’s creation.154

Such love certainly is not reduced to simply waiting around nor does it dismiss curiosity as Nussbaum believes. Rather it restrains just that possessive controlling dimension of human nature which Nussbaum holds to be basic part of humanity but which Augustinianism cautions against. This is a deep disagreement, not about vulnerability and weakness, but about our human capacity to respond wisely to its reality and therefore about the corruption of the human condition. Nussbaum’s rejection of the Augustinian analysis of sin means that she undervalues the role of shame. As regards the significance of shame in sexuality—a minefield if ever there was one—Nussbaum does not allow for the movement from creation where the primal couple were ‘naked but not ashamed’ to corrupted creation where shame became reasonable because of sin. John Cavadini’s more sympathetic reconstruction of Augustine’s thought suggests that our fallen perspective on sexual intercourse makes imagining it uncorrupted by selfishness impossible. For Cavadini, interpreting Augustine, ‘lust, with the potential for shame, left a doorway to repentance’, and so has an advantage over Stoic self-control which refuses the embrace of Christ and so refuses repentance.155 As Bonhoeffer comments, shame ‘expresses the fact that we no longer accept the other as God’s gift but instead are consumed with an obsessive desire for the other’.156 But to the extent that sexual intimacy is emancipated from such consumptive obsession in the partnership of man and woman, received as the gracious gift of God, shame is mercifully alleviated although not altogether eliminated, for where such lusting obsession replaces loving, intimate, sexual

154 155

2000).

Gregory, Politics, 44. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, 212; R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind (OUP,

156 D. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, iii (Fortress Press, 1997), 101.

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fellowship, there shame will always be appropriate. When considered in this light, the political dimension cannot simply be separated from the sexual in Augustine not least because the pride of man is associated precisely with the libido dominandi embodied by Rome itself. On the political level, Nussbaum ascribes shame to disappointed, infantile, narcissistic desires for omnipotence which are endlessly destructive of self and others. For her, when Augustinian Christian theology shapes the political, this shame even energizes violence against unbelievers and ‘God’s enemies’ as believers make a bid for omnipotence and refuse mature interdependence.157 But this is at best a very partial reading of the public benefits which shame offers. As noted above, political shame properly concerns first the embarrassing necessity of the resort to public force—necessary because of our moral failures—and second the essentially limited nature of the judgement such force effects—limited both because of our lack of insight and the difficulty we have in carrying our judgements through effectively. In a world of sinful people, shame is a highly important public affection, whereby citizens may understand the limitations of their earthly powers and yet act to do justice. The inadequacy of our reflective and deliberative powers to the task of just judgement, whether in peacetime or in war tearfully waged, is a permanent feature of fallen humanity. Moreover, in law, shame accompanies modern society’s preferred form of sanction, namely incarceration. To inform someone that he is not fit to live in wider society, even for a short time, is to bring shame on that person. Nussbaum rejects this but one wonders what emotions Nussbaum expects prisoners who have committed serious crimes to experience. She certainly offers no real alternative to incarceration per se but rather seeks so to humanize prisons that shame is no part of the prisoner’s experience.158 However, the worthy desire to make prisons more liveable, by, for example, improving sanitary conditions, cannot obscure the declaration of guilt against a convict and the fact of the loss of freedom which he experiences, both of which are closely associated with a feeling of shame. Nussbaum’s dislike of shame seems to be connected more to her lack of a doctrine of redemption from shame than from the structure of the affection itself which seems an accurate affective understanding of the condition of being excluded from mainstream society because of a definite offence. But where we

157

Nussbaum, Upheavals, 548.

158

Nussbaum, Hiding, 247ff.

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no doubt agree is that such shame should not be a permanent condition. Law which judges put into effect must be accompanied by the restorative acts of society which lead offenders out to share again in the joy of social life. A government which was not conscious of its own shameful incapacities would be more liable to humiliate in just the sort of way which Nussbaum rightly condemns. The tendency of political authority to overreach itself is a bid for a certain sort of omnipotence akin to Nussbaum’s infantile narcissism, but also signals forgetfulness of the presence of its Creator. Shame therefore occupies a beneficial role in human shared understanding, for it prompts investigation of humanity’s nature which is neither equal to God and yet is ‘a little lower than the heavenly beings’159 and able to participate in the kingdom of the ascended Christ. Wise shame discloses to ourselves that we are not failed gods but rather failed human creatures graciously called to a vigorous life now which prepares for the renewal of the face of the earth. Nussbaum believes that there ‘is so much to do in this area of human transcending (which I imagine also as a transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result) that if one really pursued that aim well and fully I suspect that there be little time left to look about for any other sort’.160 However, transcendence of the sort which I have discussed in this chapter, which involves the descent, ascent, and promised return of Christ, provides a context in which shame is intelligible as the affection which preserves the conditions for human flourishing by cautioning government against overreaching itself in pride. Moreover, far from disempowering participation in this world, the transcendence of the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended Christ, for whose return the cosmos awaits, actually energizes people for affectively wise, bodily participation in the cosmos here and now.

CONCLUSION: JOY AND AWE The curses of Deuteronomy warned Israel that joylessness, among other sins, would result in the loss of their common life in the land.

159

Psalm 8: 5.

160

Nussbaum, ‘Transcending Humanity’, 379.

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The Hebrew scriptures trace the people’s narrative from the entry into the land after Moses’ death all the way through to their stubborn domestic injustice, disastrous foreign policy, repeated defeats, and final exile to Babylon. The joyful participation in the land is lost and the Deuteronomic festivities are no longer undertaken. Instead, the people sit down by the rivers of Babylon and weep. The narrative proceeds to the advent of the Lord’s anointed, Cyrus king of Persia, who enables the people to return to the land. In the time of his successors that return climaxes in the ministry of Nehemiah, the people’s representative who leads them in the rebuilding of their common life. While yet in Babylon, he weeps and fasts as he shares in the troubles of the exiles who have already returned (1: 3ff.). On his arrival at Jerusalem, he organizes the people towards civic renewal and attends to the practice of judgement. When some of the people allege ill-treatment at the hands of fellow Israelites who are exploiting the poor through usury in a time of famine, Nehemiah says: ‘I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and officials’ (5: 6–7). Here we see the renewal of the pattern of wisdom we discovered in Deuteronomy. Nehemiah hears cries concerning the good land which is meant to be shared by all the people, reflects on the cries, deliberates upon action, and acts in judgement according to the law of God. Following this renewal of judgement and the completion of the city wall, Nehemiah renews the institution of the law as a whole. When the people weep because of the words of the law (8: 9) at the feast of booths, Nehemiah redirects their affective understanding to the goodness of the land and their God, teaching them that the ‘joy of the Lord is your strength’ (8: 10) and commanding them to feast and celebrate. Their reception of Nehemiah’s wisdom is accompanied by the ‘great joy’ (8: 12; cf. Luke 2: 10) which constitutes their understanding of his words and leads to obedient action in the form of proper celebration. After that joyful recognition of God’s goodness they sorrowfully recognize their own and their forefathers’ sin by which they enter deeply into reflection on the wrongdoing which has characterized the nation’s life (chapter 9) and so proceed to a commitment to repentance sealed with a covenant (9: 38). Joy is the strength of the people. Their joy in the Lord is an enduring understanding which stabilizes them in moral wisdom for the sake of political renewal. It endures through their renewed memory of God’s faithful goodness, the source of stable understanding in their common

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life of reflection, deliberation, and action. Following this festive occasion, the institutions of representative leadership (priestly and tribal) and legal judgement are renewed as the variegated life of urban and rural Israel is re-energized, climaxing in the dedication of the wall, the sign of their reinstitution as the city of God. On this festive occasion, the affective recognitions of the people are carefully orchestrated through the summoning of priests, Levites, and leaders, the preparation of choirs, and the walk of witness around the walls. The result is a powerful display of Yahwistic understanding as ‘they offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women and children also rejoiced. And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away’ (12: 43). YHWH is the reason for their ‘great joy’, drawing out their attracted understanding to perceive the reality of his rule in the land he had promised. That understanding, given expression in loud celebration, is then announced to the nations who hear it from afar. The people’s cries of joy as they return to the laws of Deuteronomy recall how YHWH himself once cried out, ‘Oh that they had such a mind as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever’ (Deuteronomy 5: 29). The intersubjective fear of the Lord in loyal, wondrous awe is the beginning of eschatological, political, affective wisdom, framing all the affective understanding, reflection, deliberation, and obedient action which follow from it. The joy of the Lord, intentionally attracted to the land of the Lord and the Lord of the land, is the basic affective form which that loyalty takes in Israel’s life. In this way, affective understanding is rooted both in locality and in the transcendent God of the whole earth who dwells among the people of his choice. Joy and awe are thus the expansive affective understandings which are appropriate to the Kingdom of God. Within these affections, the more narrowly defined affections of indignation, compassion, and shame which accompany the law become intelligible as they relate to wrongs we do or experience and the judgements we make within the moral order which God has created and vindicated in Israel and in Christ. This interrelation of joy, fear, anger, compassion, and shame seems to be the affective meaning of O’Donovan’s claim that the ‘ways of judgment are more specified than the ways of life’.161 Fear

161

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 32.

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of Almighty God, joy in his Son Jesus Christ, in whom the ways of judgement and the ways of life are held together, and joy in the created order, now vindicated and held together in Christ, are the proper beginnings of wisdom for those awaiting consummation in the new heaven and the new earth where unprecedented, unimaginable joy based on the truth will be the understanding of the people of the awesome God. But this consummation has not yet been achieved. The people of God still participate in full creaturely life among the nations of the world. Therefore, the discussion now turns to consider the implications of this enquiry’s findings for the life of nations and international bodies (Chapter 4) and for the life of churches among the nations (Chapter 5).

4 Affections and Locality In this chapter, the enquiry returns to questions which first appeared in the Introduction and in Chapter 1. There I considered a variety of ways in which affections influence political experience but also questioned whether contemporary political theory had attended properly to this affective dimension of political processes. Chapter 2 described affections as intersubjective, participative, intentional, and attracted beginnings of political reflection and deliberation which endure through memory and construe objects according to some kind of eschatology. And Chapter 3 considered affections’ role in two key political institutions, representation and law, and explored the political significance of particular affections such as joy, compassion, and shame in those institutions by contrasting the rival eschatologies of Oliver O’Donovan and Martha Nussbaum. The enquiry turns now to consider again the democratic or ‘motivational’ deficit in political life by taking up a prominent discussion in contemporary political theory.

I. CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM The social and political culture which followed the Second World War has acted as an intellectual incubator for discussion of the place of affection in the life of nation-states. The aftermath of the Holocaust and the long-lasting impacts of diverse forms of nationalism have galvanized political thought and action to seek to protect the peoples of Europe from any repeat of the massive disasters of the twentieth

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century and realize a European democratic consciousness.1 The process of ‘European integration has helped Western European countries to gain some distance from their own pasts, as these pasts ceased to serve the particular post-war function as moral foundations of individual nations; integration lessened the need for national self-assertion, for homogenous narratives of national continuity.’2 In this context, extensive debate has surrounded the possible role of various sorts of ‘patriotism’ in sustaining liberal democracies and international organizations such as the European Union. The debate itself has only gained momentum because of the uncertainty which exists across Europe about what does and what should hold nationstates together as communities of collective agency. Increasingly, that question has focused on what should unite a number of nation-states in continental or regional political unions.3 The idea of ‘collective agency’ does not entail a naïve account of all the people in a territory consciously working towards a single goal. Instead, collectivity is typically refracted through some sort of representation, as discussed in Chapter 3. On the one hand, more associated with the term ‘liberal’, ‘collective agency’ may refer to a common practice of upholding the rights of others sharing in the same political society through the deliberations and decisions of elected representatives and through judicial process. On the other hand, more associated with the terms ‘conservative’ or ‘communitarian’, ‘collective agency’ may refer to the shared, traditional practices of a culture, including practices of political representation, by which people assure themselves of their identity and experience themselves as represented. Such descriptions do not attempt to capture the actual reality of any particular political society. Rather, they are differing explanations of how people see their identity represented in a collective form. However, the uneasy concern about alienation of people from politics and of a ‘democratic deficit’ suggests that a sense of identification and representation is far from secure. The breakdown of older patterns of life and the lack of popular confidence in elected officials and even the electoral process itself combine to raise serious questions

1

J. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton University Press, 2007), 30. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 107. 3 I will largely be addressing the European situation here but similar questions may be asked with respect to ASEAN, the African Union, and other international organizations. 2

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about the realization of moral community in any particular nationstate or in larger political entities such as the European Union. It is in this context of uncertainty about what holds communities together that terms such as ‘constitutional patriotism’ and ‘liberal nationalism’ have entered academic discourse. The German context and specifically the work of Jürgen Habermas have provided a focus for these new approaches. Analysis of Habermas’s thought and the responses it has elicited will provide a fertile starting point for exploring the contribution of the theologically informed concept of affection developed in Chapters 2 and 3 towards a political environment which fosters representative and legal institutions which take affections seriously as vital aspects of intersubjective reasoning and agency. Indeed, Habermas’s interest in engaging with religious thought invites such an attempt. For, as noted at the outset, he has explicitly decried naïve scientistic dismissals of religion from public discourse and ‘the blinkered enlightenment which is unenlightened about itself and . . . denies religion any rational content’.4 By contrast, Habermas has argued that a philosophy aware of its fallibility and precarious foothold within the differentiated framework of modern society . . . insists on the generic, though by no means pejorative, distinction between secular discourse that claims to be universally accessible, and religious discourse that appeals to revealed truths . . . The respect that goes hand in hand with [the] cognitive stance of refraining from judgment is founded on respect for persons and forms of life that clearly derive their integrity and authenticity from religious convictions. But it is not just a matter of respect. Philosophy also has good reasons to be open to learning from religious traditions.5

For while ‘post-metaphysical thinking is ethically modest in the sense that it is resistant to any generally binding concept of the good and exemplary life’, religious traditions ‘can preserve intact something that has been lost elsewhere . . . sufficiently differentiated expressions of and sensitivity to squandered lives, social pathologies, failed existences, and deformed and distorted social relations. A willingness on 4 J. Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of What is Missing (Polity Press, 2010), 18; cf. B. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship (OUP, 2004), 268–72, 312ff. 5 J. Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations of the Cosmopolitan State?’, in Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity Press, 2008), 109.

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the part of philosophy to learn from religion can be justified on the basis of the asymmetry of [these] epistemic claims.’6 In particular, continuing Chapter 3’s eschatological theme of death and political identity, he recognizes the failure of modern reason, in the absence of faith, to produce ‘a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rîte de passage which brings life to a close’.7 Moreover, he mourns ‘the transformation of the citizens of prosperous and peaceful liberal societies into isolated, self-interested monads who use their individual liberties against one another like weapons’ and that evidence ‘of such a corrosion of civic solidarity can be found in the larger context of the politically uncontrolled dynamics of the global economy and global society’.8 Bringing these insights together, he has suggested that it is ‘in the interests of the constitutional state to conserve all cultural sources that nurture citizens’ solidarity and their normative awareness’ and that this ‘conservative turn finds expression in talk of the “postsecular society”.’9 Although I will have cause to differ from Habermas’s description of the way that ‘religion’ stands vis-à-vis philosophy and politics, there is no doubt that this is an important invitation to participate in philosophical-theological dialogue, an invitation which is gladly taken up in what follows.

Habermas’s constitutional patriotism In an essay on the past and future of the nation-state, Habermas summarizes the conceptual framework within which his doctrine of constitutional patriotism operates by describing how the ‘tension between the universalism of an egalitarian legal community and the particularism of a community united by historical destiny is built into the very concept of the national state’.10 He argues that the universal principles which are expressed in the procedures of liberal democracy are currently both dependent for their enactment on the particular legal constitutions of particular nation-states and in tension with Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations’, 110. Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, 15. 8 Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations’, 107. 9 Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations’, 111. 10 J. Habermas, ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship’, in C. Cronin and P. De Grieff (eds.), The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, tr. C. Cronin (MIT Press, 1998), 115. 6 7

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those constitutions. Habermas believes that this tension should be held in such a way that the cosmopolitan or universalist emphasis governs and, where appropriate, undermines the tendency of particular cultures towards an ‘ethnocentric’11 self-interpretation. This position entails a conceptual uncoupling of ‘norms’ from ‘facts’. For the sheer facticity of traditional, localized identity, defined by territoriality, taking ideological form in nationalisms, is ‘intrinsically susceptible to misuse by political elites’,12 resulting in the neglect of universal norms. Habermas’s analysis of political existence in terms of facts and norms depends in part on the claim that ‘norms for a reasonable conduct of life cannot be drawn from the natural constitution of the human species any more than they can from history’.13 On Habermas’s view, theories which gain anything from philosophical anthropologies such as that of Max Scheler14 or from the ‘ambivalent bonding force of archaic institutions’ are indebted to ‘metasocial guarantees of the sacred’ which are now thoroughly discredited.15 No longer is positive law to be related to objective natural law which Habermas claims is ‘administered by the Church’.16 Instead, a new account of facticity has emerged whereby in ‘contrast to convention and custom, enacted law does not rely on the organic facticity of inherited forms of life, but on the artificially produced facticity found in the threat of sanctions that are legally defined and can be imposed through court action’.17 Habermas holds that such artificial facticity is a legal form which allows coercion only because of autonomous selflegislation and only for the sake of preserving autonomous freedom. This legal form is by no means arbitrary since ‘the facticity of law expresses the legitimate will that stems from a presumptively rational

Habermas, ‘European Nation-State’, 115. Habermas, ‘European Nation-State’, 116. 13 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, tr. W. Rehg (MIT Press, 1996), 2. 14 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 2. 15 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 27. 16 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 26; the claim that the church administers natural law is somewhat strange to contemporary Christian understanding. The most plausible reading is that Habermas is referring to the medieval papal practice of interpreting natural law in the papal court. If so, then his disavowal of natural law has more purchase with respect to its place in the political affairs of the distant past than to its significance for the present and future of Europe. 17 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 30. 11 12

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self-legislation of politically autonomous citizens’.18 The facticity of the conventional, local community which lay behind older legal structures is now to be set aside in light of the only factical resources which matter, a modern legal structure built around the rights and freedoms of citizens. For such citizens, there is now only ‘validity and facticity—that is, the binding force of rationally motivated beliefs and the imposed force of external sanctions’.19 The two are necessarily uncoupled since universal norms are never to be absolutely identified with any particular factical legal form embedded in a particular, factical, territorially defined political society. By framing matters in this way, Habermas makes room to argue that the old concept of a Volksnation is untenably unsafe for postwar, modern Europe in light of the undeniable, twin realities of radical social pluralism in European nation-states and the influence of economic, military, and political globalization. These are leading, Habermas believes, towards the decline of the nation-state and the development of post-national forms of representative identification and consciousness.20 All conceptions of ‘pre-political’21 moral unity will fail to motivate collective popular agency towards the common good but will instead distract people from appropriate routes towards affective attachment to universal principles and the growth of postnational consciousness. His positive proposal is that constitutional rights and principles . . . form the fixed point of reference for any constitutional patriotism that situates the system of rights within the historical context of a legal community. These must be enduringly linked with the motivations and convictions of the citizens, for without such a motivational anchoring they could not become the driving force behind the dynamically conceived project of producing an association of individuals who are free and equal.22

18

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 33. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 26. 20 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 105–7. 21 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 114. 22 J. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism (Princeton University Press, 1994), 134. He claims that the universal principles of human rights and democracy to which ‘constitutional patriotism [adheres] can neither take shape in social practices nor become the driving force for the dynamic project of creating an association of free and equal persons until they are situated in the historical context of a nation of citizens in a way that they link up with those citizens’ motives and attitudes’ (Habermas, Between Facts 19

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Thus in constitutional patriotism, the ‘allegiance’ or ‘affect’23 of citizens is primarily directed to universal, constitutional rights and norms rather than to a pre-political Volksnation and tradition. In Markell’s neat phrase, this is constitutional patriotism’s ‘strategy of redirection’.24 Such a move has, however, proved highly open to misinterpretation. For it has been thought that Habermas has been advocating a thin or ‘bloodless’25 concept of citizenship which effectively bypasses all historical and local particularity by redirecting affect solely and directly to universalist principles. For example, Thomas Mertens, commenting on Habermas’s position, argues that patriotism ‘in such a democracy does not . . . entail loyalty to a specific substantial community, but has the sole meaning of being loyal to the democratic procedures of the constitution. This loyalty is called constitutional patriotism (Verfassungs-patriotismus).’26 However, such an interpretation is not adequate to the subtlety of Habermas’s account. Laborde has helpfully isolated an interpretation of Habermas called ‘neutralist’ constitutional patriotism. These interpreters, like Mertens, have misread Habermas and ‘neglected the deliberative, critical dimension of constitutional patriotism and . . . underestimated the role of political culture in underpinning political loyalty and social solidarity. This is because the neutralist version of constitutional patriotism takes Habermas’ injunction to “uncouple” politics and culture (too) literally.’27 Habermas’s claim is that it is only in the context of a definite legal community in a particular locality that the deliberative process of communication about constitutional principles and rights can be carried on. Thus he holds that what ‘unites a nation of citizens, as opposed to a Volksnation, is not some primordial substrate but rather an intersubjectively shared context of possible mutual understanding’.28 Although then Habermas does not take up the language and Norms, 499); for commentary, see J. Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, Political Studies, 50 (2002), esp. 949ff. 23 P. Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, Political Theory, 28/1 (2000), e.g. 43. 24 Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, 48. 25 Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 5. 26 T. Mertens, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship: Kant Against Habermas’, European Journal of Philosophy, 4/3 (1996), 336. 27 C. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, British Journal of Political Science, 32/4 (Oct. 2002), 596. 28 J. Habermas, ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution? Response to Dieter Grimm’, in C. Cronin and P. De Grieff (eds.), The Inclusion of the Other (MIT Press, 1998), 159.

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of ‘affect’ (or the German affekt) as a specific term of art, this ‘mutual understanding’—elsewhere ‘attitudes’,29 ‘supportive spirit’,30 or ‘loyalty’—seems to be Habermas’s way of describing the affective dimension which has been explored to this point. Setting Mertens’s interpretation aside, we see that constitutional patriotism is not a plan for the total purge of the particularities of tradition, religion, place, and family from political consciousness—an obviously impractical option. Instead, according to one sympathetic interpreter of Habermas, ‘citizens are asked to reflect critically upon particular traditions and group identities in the name of shared universal principles’. Tradition, with its ‘attachments and loyalties’ should not be absolutely excised but should be constantly revised through a ‘critical, highly self-conscious back-and-forth between actually existing traditions and institutions, on the one hand, and the best universal norms and ideas that can be worked out, on the other’. Thus, in order to realize Habermas’s vision of the ‘rationalization of collective identities’, what is needed is not a total abstraction from tradition itself but rather ‘a critical distancing from inherited beliefs’.31 Indeed, Habermas’s thesis—at least in its later form—is not that constitutional rights and principles should necessarily float free of particular, territorially defined, legal jurisdictions such as nationstates, but rather that the facts of a particular legal structure of rights, in a defined community and with suitable, enforceable sanctions, are a logically necessary ‘supplement’ if the universal norms are to have any motivational grounding in people’s lives. Habermas’s ‘philosophical modesty’ which refuses the position of transcendent theorist32 thus tends towards an uneasy interdependence of facts and norms in which modern ‘law can stabilize behavioural expectations’33 since coercive ‘law overlays normative law with threats of sanctions in such a way that addressees may restrict themselves to the prudential calculation of consequences’.34 The relationship is uneasy since calculation of the consequences of sanctions is, by Kantian standards, an amoral form of self-interest which is hardly aligned with the 29 30 31 32 33 34

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 499. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 499. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 28–9. Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, 45–6. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 76. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 116.

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high-minded universalism of post-national rights-based norms. Nonetheless, Habermas argues for the importance of such a historically, institutionally, and territorially situated legal supplement which engages motivation ‘in a manner effective for action’.35 In Laborde’s terms, this linkage between facts and norms is a ‘motivational anchorage’.36 ‘Affect’ is thus the way that citizens are themselves linked to universal norms via their particular, localized, factical situation. Since then, according to Habermas, the relationship between a nation-state’s facticity and universal norms should be viewed as the necessary compromise which draws the people of that nation-state towards those norms, it comes as no surprise that he does not consider the nation-state itself as the final disclosure of the arena in which the democratic consciousness can, will, and should develop. Indeed, he believes that there is a growing post-national consciousness which should be allowed to shape the constitutional patriotism which is peculiar to any particular nation-state and which, in time, will lead to the decline of the nation-state as larger, probably continental, forms of government are able to achieve legitimacy and attract sufficient allegiance to sustain their authority. Constitutional patriotism is thus the affective ‘attitude’ whereby a critical engagement with tradition, leading to post-conventional and post-national consciousness, is sustained. In the German context, for example, an episode of this process was carried out in the so-called Historikerstreit (‘Historians’ debate’) of the 1980s in which Habermas argued strongly for Germans not to attempt to forget the Nazi past but rather to engage seriously in critical remembrance of what occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. In Muller’s interpretation, memory ‘would thus unfold a motivational power and supplement the universalist norms at the heart of constitutional patriotism. It would furnish the basis for a democratic consciousness.’37 So Habermas is arguing precisely not that citizens should attempt to transcend and abstract from their own heritages but rather that they should enter into ‘a continuous civic self-interrogation and open argument about the past’.38 To balance this, it should

35

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 114. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 594; cf. Habermas’s own reference to ‘motivational anchoring’, in ‘Struggles for Recognition’, 134. 37 Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 34. 38 Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 34. 36

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also be emphasized that Habermas is genuinely committed to an emancipation of consciousness from conventional identities given by tradition to individuals, in order that they might enter into the freedom of post-national and post-conventional communicative action.39 This does not contradict his recognition of the importance of particular legal jurisdictions to stabilizing democratic consciousness but rather describes the tension which he sees at the heart of modern European life. Remembering the past does not mean that the future may not develop in a quite different direction, namely towards a post-national consciousness which is armed against ethnocentricity and sustained by a properly affective constitutional patriotism.

A view from Dover beach Habermas’s constitutional patriotism, along with the debate which it has fuelled, is one highly nuanced attempt to address the thinness of many liberal descriptions of political identity and legitimation in the modern Europe. Such anaemic accounts have been heavily criticized by other authors with an interest in the significance of affections for political relations. Roger Scruton, for example, has denounced contractarian theories which are defined by an obsession with autonomy that makes ‘rational choice, rather than irrational sentiment, into the primary social fact’.40 Drawing on the Burkean tradition of barely disguised disdain for those who base their political doctrines in the implausible fiction of a historical contract with no real signatories and no thick web of tradition, he laments the loss of a deep emotional connection with the land of England and mocks the social contractarian ‘we’. He proceeds to look beyond even the ‘we’ of a nation in time of crisis by appealing to ‘ways of forming a first-person plural [that] are [not] so conscious. There are other, more instinctive and more immediate, forms of membership which serve the purpose just as well or better, and which have the desired result of making it possible for people to live together in a state of mutual support.’41 He has in mind here the corporate instincts which arise through kinship and religion. Those instincts, he recognizes, have been dangerous in continental Europe,

39 40 41

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 1–41. R. Scruton, England (Continuum, 2006), 6. Scruton, England, 6.

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but took a gentler form in England, under the influence of ‘home’, that localized ‘focus of loyalty’42 which guided these instinctive emotions more moderately. Scruton’s moving and poetic account of the death of this England has much to recommend it. For example, his account of corporate personality catches the outline of the connection between affection and personal representation which we encountered in Chapter 3.43 However, it is not clear from Scruton’s writing that he has quite escaped the unstable opposition of emotion (as non-cognitive) to reason (as cognitive). There is some resonance between Scruton’s description of the ‘we’ of instinctive membership and the account given by Jean-Yves Lacoste of the intersubjective sharing and verification of affective recognitions which was discussed in Chapter 2 and given explicit political expression in Chapter 3. However, Lacoste’s account gives more philosophical satisfaction and is more politically fruitful precisely because of the penurious cognitive aptitude which Lacoste recognizes as the necessary form of affection. Scruton’s lack of attention to the cognitive quality of affection is once again a matter of the self-consciously imprecise conservative style of writing, after the fashion of Burke, a style which is captured in Scruton’s characteristically British observation that ‘the deeper emotions could only be debased by their expression’.44 Scruton’s underdetermined approach has not been persuasive to those who fail to appreciate how ‘in all relations of love and loyalty, the face of the other remains the focus of emotion—the sign and incarnation of the spiritual essence’45 and who, sadly for Scruton, hold the whip-hand in the destruction of the old England upon whose face he loves to gaze in the deep caverns of his memory. His lyrical critique of a certain form of liberalism which is inimical to this account’s concept of intersubjective affective recognition is worth quoting at length since it unveils what is at stake in the ongoing debate between liberalism and conservatism. He believes that the defenders of liberalism secretly and without acknowledgement desire that which conservatives naturally inhabit, namely 42

Scruton, England, 19. Scruton, England, 71ff. 44 Scruton, England, 49–50. 45 Scruton, England, 84; Scruton’s comment reflects O’Donovan’s description of recognizing a political representative as ‘like the recognition we accord to a face or form’ (The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), 161). 43

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an experience of membership that will open the heart, and also close the mind. At a certain point the strain of living without an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ becomes intolerable. On the lonely heights of abstract choice nothing comforts and nothing consoles. The Kantian imperatives seem to blow more freezingly, and the unfed soul eventually flees from them, down into the fertile valleys of attachment. But where shall he rest? To whom will his loyalty be owed? What flock or herd or army can he join, who looks on all of them with the merely vicarious loyalty of the envious anthropologist? The answer is this: to find an enemy, to create a new kind of membership in the spirit of battle. The enemy is the one who believes what the liberal so tragically fails to believe––the one who feels the loyalties to which the liberal ought in conscience to attach himself but which his own thinking has destroyed. To turn on the conservative is, in a peculiar way, to partake of his conviction, just as the Huron Indian absorbs the courage of his vanquished enemy by eating his still unvanquished heart.46

Scruton’s instincts are in tune with the overall direction of this thesis and his attention to land and locality highly perceptive but further precision is required to address the shortcomings of liberalism which Scruton rightly observes.

Habermas and Scruton The contrast between this essentially English, conservative critique and Habermas’s more obviously continental response to contemporary threats to the cohesion of moral communities opens up a fruitful line of thought. While Scruton laments, at great and lyrical length, the disenchanting and death of a land mysticism which now lies vanquished, slain by the cultural dragons of ‘a Labour party committed to “globalisation”’ and the BBC,47 Habermas describes the patriotic affect which citizens of Europe should feel for the universal procedures of liberal democracy when suitably instantiated in their own legal traditions and historically conditioned constitutions. However, despite Habermas’s European liberal credentials, he escapes Scruton’s general 46 R. Scruton, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, in The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Carcanet, 1990), 326; cf. ‘This phantom—appearing now as the “just society” of the contractarians, now as the “full communism” of Marx—poisons our attachment to the realities through which we might, in our fallen condition, live and find fulfilment.’ (Ibid. 327.) 47 Scruton, England, 198, 257, 232–3.

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critique since he sees the necessity of some sort of loyalty. In this sense, Habermas distances himself from the deep freeze of a certain kind of abstract Kantianism by arguing for a constant movement between the valleys and the heights, the local and the universal, a life between facts and norms. Indeed, surprisingly, both Habermas and Scruton share a number of basic concerns which are also concerns which this discussion has been at pains to emphasize, namely the importance of affection, memory, institutions, ‘stability’, and some kind of distinction between the strictly political dimension of political societies and their cultural or factical dimension. Thus, although they are offering divergent responses, they seem to be observing the same cultural malaise and addressing similar moral and political themes. However, lest it be thought that they agree on a fundamental level, it is important to note their most substantial, philosophical difference which emerges in Scruton’s insistence that every political order depends, and ought to depend, upon a non-political idea of membership. And to the extent that it emancipates itself from that idea, I claim, to that extent does it lose its motivating force, just as individuals lose their moral identity and will, to the extent that their prejudices, pieties and moral instincts are cancelled by the abstract imperatives of the ‘pure rational chooser’.48

Habermas’s attempt to purify citizenship from the myth of a prepolitical Volksnation aims at rendering null and void the motivation which Scruton proclaims as essential to collective agency. Thus while Habermas looks hopefully for the possibility of a post-national consciousness whose affection is drawn to constitutional principles embodied in supra-national, continental institutions, Scruton is highly sceptical about the demise of the nation-state and argues instead that a consciousness of being at home in one’s locality is essential to collective agency and political representation. In contrast to Habermas’s account of constitutional principles becoming enduringly linked with the motivations of citizens, Scruton states that political ‘institutions exist in order to mediate and adjudicate, not in order to mobilize and conscript’49 and holds that the heart of agency should not be thought accessible to the machinery of government but rather flows from the depths of rootedness in land, religion, and kinship 48 49

Scruton, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, 303. Scruton, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, 310.

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group. Such an observation returns us, by another route, to our earlier appreciation for the significance of family and childhood in the development of affectivity. Thus his challenge to writers like Habermas who deny the prepolitical its proper place is that ‘the political sphere cannot stand so serenely above the loyalties which feed it’.50 His point is that the prepolitical is the basic way that shared affective connections which foster moral community are established and that the political which is called into service to act in judgement in society cannot be conceived as standing apart from a particular people as if it were the creator of the social organism it governs. For all his laudable attention to memory, institutions, and affect, Habermas’s account of the uneasy interdependence of facts and norms is, from Scruton’s perspective at least, undone by the basic denial of the significance of pre-political unity. From an explicitly theological perspective, Scruton’s observations reflect the Augustinian distinction between political authority and the society which gives political authority its rationale.51 But this distinction has a crucial eschatological dimension which Scruton’s land mysticism does not allow for. The pre-political unity of a people is not accessible now as if the political could be simply stripped away to leave behind pure sociality. The present life is, in this sense, always political. Scruton knows this but, although sensitive to Christian political thought, he does not draw out the possibility of human emancipation from diverse political identities into the eschatological freedom of the Kingdom of God. The deep structure of Augustinian thought which distinguishes the city of God from the city of this world keeps alive the distinction of society from political authority by witnessing to a post-political era which will dawn at the second advent of Christ. A community’s political affections may thus not only reflect their pre-political self-conception but also their post-political destiny. Scruton’s criticisms of the self-deceptive serenity of the political sphere are accurate but do not go far enough.

Affections and intersubjectivity There is a common and striking omission in both Scruton and Habermas, namely a lack of attention to the very nature of ‘affect’, 50 51

Scruton, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, 310. O. O’Donovan and J. O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius (Eerdmans, 1999), 109.

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‘affection’, or ‘emotion’. While this is not so much of a problem for Scruton’s conservatism, I suggest it has serious repercussions for constitutional patriotism and, in particular, for Habermas’s notion of an ‘intersubjectively shared context of possible mutual understanding’.52 Muller recognizes the importance of moral psychology to constitutional patriotism, observing that it is ‘a mistake not to recognize that cognition and emotion are intimately related—emotions (or at least the ones of concern in political life) are, after all, based on beliefs’.53 But Muller does not explain just how emotions are based on beliefs and why these should be particularly political emotions, nor does he show how such analysis would make a difference to the interpretation of Habermas. Indeed, it seems that much of the debate over constitutional patriotism has proceeded with an insufficiently examined concept of ‘affect’. Such an oversight seems surprising when the whole point of the debate has been to overcome the difficulties which modern people experience when intersubjective affective attachment to universal principles is called for, the motivational and democratic deficit. It would seem obvious to begin by asking about the nature of affect or emotion, the path which this discussion has followed. The consequences of this oversight have been summarized neatly though perhaps unknowingly by Muller himself: almost always discussion of liberal nationalism, constitutional patriotism, and similar concepts appear to come down to decisions along the lines of ‘Well, I take a little more emotion,’ while someone else might say, ‘Well, I’ll get by––just by reason.’ Put less frivolously, it might appear that these debates are undecidable, unless we actually have some very complex empirical studies that would somehow yield the right moral-psychological ‘mixture’ of reason and emotion in, for instance, motivating solidarity, or making citizens want to defend their liberaldemocratic institutions.54

Muller naturally recognizes that such implausible studies are unlikely to be forthcoming and so suggests instead that ‘one ought to be as clear as possible about which moral-psychological assumptions enter arguments about loyalty, attachment and belonging, how plausible

52 53 54

Habermas, ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution?’, 159. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 63. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 14.

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they could be in general, and also to what extent we can do without them’.55 However, although he does not fall into the trap of ‘a little more’ or ‘a little less’, Muller frustratingly fails to deliver a lucid, conceptual explanation of his own moral-psychological assumptions. This failure of constitutional patriots to deliver such an account seems a serious problem for their theories. For an account of discourse and deliberation which does not engage conceptually with the intersubjective, enduring, memory-based affective verification of values will be bound to fail. As I have argued, it is precisely this participative mode of discourse which is inextricable from human experience. But for constitutional patriots, ‘affect’ is the way that citizens are linked to universal norms via their particular, localized, factical situation. Appeals to ‘motivational anchorage’,56 the intimate relation of cognition and emotion,57 the ‘linking up’ of attitudes and principles,58 and ‘the production of attachment’59 are meant to describe this connection. What I will suggest is that, in fact, such terms merely disguise a conceptual lacuna concerning the way that affections actually function in intersubjective political solidarity. What I hope to show is that the theological concept of affection developed to this point will illumine these matters in a way which both shows the true nature of the affective dimension of political existence and explains more convincingly the nature of intersubjective political experience.

II. LOCAL AFFECTIONS In order to do this, I will take up Habermas’s invitation ‘to couch . . . contributions to public discussion in religious language’ and turn again to scripture.60

55 56 57 58 59 60

Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 14. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 594. Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, 63. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 499. Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, 54. Habermas, ‘Prepolitical Foundations’, 113.

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Imperial distortions and unjust judgement A helpful focus is the encounter between the complex, cultural facticity of first-century Palestine and the affections of the Roman political authorities as described in Luke and Acts. The purpose of analysing these texts is not to take one side in the long-running dispute between those who interpret Luke as arguing for ‘the political possibility of a harmonious coeval existence between Rome and the early Christian movement’ and those who see ‘ineliminable opposition’ in Luke’s portrayal of the Roman authorities’ attitude to the church, especially in their treatment of Jesus and Paul.61 Kavin Rowe has argued persuasively that ‘what Acts narrates is not Rome’s perspective of the Christian mission but Luke’s Christian perspective of the church vis-à-vis the Roman authorities’.62 While taking this insight on board, the focus at this point concerns what the affections displayed in the narrative of Luke and Acts indicate more generally about the nature of political authorities and their relationship to the people they govern. With the birth of Jesus, the central object of joy, imminent in the gospel, Luke tells how Caesar Augustus issues a decree ‘that all the world should be registered’ (2: 1) and seeks ‘to “enrol” the people of God’ in his inventory of the world.63 This dull list-making sounds a discordant note amidst Mary and Zechariah’s joyful songs, celebrating the good, global rule of YHWH. And yet this discord reaches an ironic harmony as Roman bureaucracy necessitates Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem, the Messiah’s prophesied birthplace, and Caesar is thus unwittingly enrolled in YHWH’s service. While Caesar is far away in distant Rome hungry for universal domination, the God of Israel is working locally by his Holy Spirit in the thick particularity of a maiden’s womb to bring about the salvation of the world. This opening encounter forms the beginning of a pattern which largely characterizes the ensuing narrative. Throughout Luke-Acts the people of God, both Gentile and Jewish, participate joyfully in Jesus and the unfolding plan of God. But the Roman authorities, with their centre of political gravity geographically distant from the localities 61 K. Rowe, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2009), 53–5. Rowe here offers a brief outline of a number of different interpretative options. 62 Rowe, World Upside Down, 57. 63 O. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (CUP, 1996), 118.

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they rule, display ignorance, confusion, and distortions of affective understanding which yield unjust political judgement and inadequate representation. Pilate’s behaviour at the trial of Jesus embodies this tendency. He shows no indignation at the injustice which the Jews demand or pleasure in giving them what they want. The claim that Jesus is a rival king to Caesar merely elicits confusion and uncertainty, betraying his inadequate grasp of Jewish expectations. His affective attitude is a combination of indifference and then fear as the demands of the crowd become ever louder.64 As a result, Pilate’s recognition that Jesus is innocent does not stop him acquiescing to the Jews’ demands and judging in favour of Barabbas, a man imprisoned for insurrection and murder, crimes explicitly destructive of Caesar’s pax Romana. Pilate’s inability to act according to his judgement, his failure between decision and action, suggests deep confusion about the cultural context he was charged with governing, allied to an affective participation in reality which is rooted in Rome and not the locality and cultural specificity of Palestine.65 The Roman authorities’ affective attitudes are further illumined in Paul’s trial narrative in Acts which is paired with Jesus’ trial in the gospel. The Jerusalem Jews rage against Paul, crying out against him and furiously calling for his death (Acts 21: 27–36, 22: 22–3). There follows a series of encounters with Roman political authority. Amidst the Jews’ rage against Gentile mission (22: 20ff.), a tribune, Claudius Lysias, displays ‘a typically Roman desire to prevent a public disturbance’.66 Unable to participate in the intersubjective affection of either Paul’s joy in the resurrection of Christ or the Jews’ rage, he seeks instead to establish the facts of the case (22: 24) and so prepares an examination by flogging. It is only the tribune’s fear of far-off Rome, attracted by the revelation of Paul’s citizenry, that delivers Paul from this injustice (22: 25–9, cf. 23: 10). Such an affection mirrors precisely the fear shown by the magistrates of Philippi in relation to the disclosure of Paul and Silas’s Roman identity (16: 35–9). This fear is a peculiar version of what Chapter 3 called loyalty and is drawn out ultimately by the Caesar who stands behind Roman citizenry as its

64 For John, Pilate’s fear is specifically oriented to the strange threat which Jesus seems to pose to Caesar’s authority (John 19: 7–16). 65 His decision to free Jesus at Luke 23: 16 is specifically commented upon at Acts 3: 13 where it is confirmed that Pilate ‘had decided to release him’. 66 Rowe, World Upside Down, 65.

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guarantor. In light of its ultimate object, the distant emperor in Rome, this fear is reasonable but oriented away from the locality which Lysias is involved in governing. This characterization is deepened by the bafflement and confusion he exhibits as regards the furious theological debate in which Paul is engaged with the local Jewish people, debates which would not be obscure to a public official who was more culturally sophisticated and attuned to local affections.67 Paul could perhaps have been released at this point but for the ambush plot and, more fundamentally, the fact that the ‘Roman legal machine [had] been turned on’.68 And so, following this episode, Paul is taken to Caesarea to encounter Felix the governor. Felix, though knowledgeable about the Way (24: 22) and therefore more attuned to cultural facticity than Pilate, neither enters into the joy of its participants nor the rage of those who oppose it. Tertullus’s flattery, being so at odds with Felix’s well-known incompetence and ineptitude with respect to the land he is supposed to govern,69 would be heard as deepest irony by Luke’s readers. The governor’s reaction to this is not recorded but when Paul speaks directly to him and his wife concerning righteousness and the coming judgement, Rome’s representative becomes ‘alarmed’ and ends the conversation abruptly. Hoping for a financial reward and favour with the Jews, he leaves Paul in prison for two further years without trial (24: 24–7). Fear again, therefore, characterizes the affections of the authorities. Alarm at the threat that the gospel poses to inadequate forms of justice terminates the trial and leaves Roman authority uncommitted to carrying out political responsibilities justly by dealing thoroughly with the case at hand. As before, this fear is a perfectly reasonable form of understanding but unlike Lysias’s direct fear of Rome, Felix’s fear of the gospel is indirectly coordinated to Rome inasmuch as the claims Paul makes would summon Roman authority to stand to attention before a higher throne than Caesar’s. 67 Rowe, World Upside Down, 67, where Rowe comments that Paul’s ‘brief story about the God of Israel’s turn to the gentiles in the figure of Jesus the Nazarene would be incomprehensible apart from the shared historical and religious framework of Paul and his Jewish opponents, a framework Lysias does not share’. Rowe further observes that, historically speaking, Roman ‘citizenship is not a simple trump’ (68) for someone in Paul’s position. Roman citizens were tortured and flogged on occasion as various examples attest. But Lysias, as a mere tribune, has no authority to act in this way. 68 Rowe, World Upside Down, 71. 69 Rowe, World Upside Down, 71–2.

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Upon Felix’s departure as governor, Festus’s arrival and favouritism towards the Jews threaten further injustice and even murder. This brings about a development apparently unanticipated by the authorities. Paul appeals to Caesar before a judgement is made and sentence is passed, an unusual but not impossible legal move. The appeal itself acts as a commentary on Roman political authorities’ unjust engagement within the locality they govern. It suggests that, in stark contrast to the pattern of Deuteronomy in which just judgement was intimately related to popular and governmental participation in the shared land, the Roman affective orientation was turned away from participation in the local to far-off Rome. As a result, justice in Paul’s case could now not be done in the land but would have to be done in Rome, rendering Festus, along with Agrippa and Bernice, powerless to carry out the demands of their office to the full. Festus, ‘at a loss’ (25: 20) concerning the culturally specific details of the case, is rendered a lame duck ruler by the system he serves, though he is no doubt pleased to get Paul off his hands. Luke’s finishing touch highlights precisely the significance of Festus’s inadequate understanding of his Palestinian context. For it is Festus’s fear of appearing unreasonable to far-off Rome, not the substantive justice of the matter at hand, that leads him to consult Herod Agrippa II on what charges should be made against Paul (25: 24–7). Agrippa, as Paul knows, is deeply knowledgeable about the Jews and their traditions, but arrives on the scene after the appeal is made and therefore only serves to act as a contrast to the ignorance of Festus, Felix, and Lysias. Thus Paul’s own judgement against Rome’s local representatives in the form of his appeal to Caesar serves to demonstrate all the more clearly the inadequacy of imperial justice in its local application. The universal law of appeal to Caesar prevents these local Roman rulers from releasing Paul, as justice would require (26: 32).70 Like Pilate, they correctly recognize an innocent man, but still fail to act justly, albeit for different reasons. And so Roman authority, bereft of the affective participation and contextual engagement which might enable understanding and local, just judgement, appears deeply ineffective in doing what is right locally and instead is forced, by circumstance and law, to pass the apostle to the other side of the 70 Rowe, World Upside Down, 69–70, where Rowe observes that such appeals were not always successful. It is enough for Luke’s purposes, however, that the appeal displays the inadequacy of the local Roman authorities.

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Mediterranean.71 Ironically, just as Augustus’s decree led to Jesus being born in the town of David so the inadequacy of Roman political order necessitated an appeal to Caesar which brought the apostle to the Gentiles to Rome, the heart of the European Gentile world. What Luke’s narrative suggests is that the representatives of the Roman Empire were unable to participate wisely in the trials of Jesus and Paul precisely because of the universal, imperial legal structure and political culture which dominated their consciousness, prevented wise affective engagement, and disabled effective, right judgement. Although Pilate found Jesus not guilty and although none of Festus, Felix, Agrippa, and Bernice could find anything against Paul, yet right judgement was not carried out: the one was executed and the other was unjustly imprisoned and then sent to Rome unnecessarily and without intelligible charges. The purpose of observing this is not to suggest that Luke is seeking to depict Christianity as essentially antiRoman. Nor does failure of the Roman authorities to find charges against Jesus and Paul necessarily suggest that Luke is depicting Christians as good citizens of the empire. Rather, the point is that the structure of Roman rule, which gained its authority from a source at a great physical and cultural distance from the particularities of Palestinian life, rendered its own local representatives incompetent to engage with affective wisdom in substantive issues or to commit, following reflection and deliberation, to right judgements. The Roman structure of law and representative authority led to fear, confusion, and distortion and not those affections of appropriately ordered joy, compassion, indignation at injustice, and shame which were shown to be institutionally beneficial in Chapter 3.

Local identity and cosmopolitan love This analysis sheds new light on the way in which such affective understanding could play a constructive role in characterizing representative and legal institutions. Our study of constitutional patriotism 71 There is other supporting evidence of a similar affective ineptitude on the part of Roman authorities. The proconsul Gallio’s callous disregard for the fate of the synagogue ruler who is beaten in front of his own tribunal is one such case and adds to the picture which Luke is establishing in Luke-Acts as a whole (Acts 18: 12–17). The remarkable fact that Seneca, the famous Stoic, was Gallio’s cousin should not be forgotten.

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and Luke-Acts suggests that the connection between such institutions and the locality they serve is vitally important. Luke-Acts has illumined the significance of the failure of distant authority to authorize the enactment of justice when local representatives do not or cannot engage in culturally sophisticated, localized affective understanding because of ignorance and fear. In the modern European and American settings, the question of locality is closely related to territorial boundaries. This is so whether those boundaries are within nationstates—as when people say that ‘Whitehall’, ‘Washington’, ‘Ottawa’, or ‘Berlin’ do not understand the affairs of Scotland, Alaska, Quebec, or Bavaria—or between nation-states—as when the European Court of Human Rights is used to overturn (for example) established English customs and legal precedents (recall the case of the metric martyrs) or, for that matter, the customs and laws of any of those nation-states which recognize the Court’s authority. An interchange between Richard Miller and Nigel Biggar shows how divergent theological approaches to the meaning of national, territorial boundaries can shape an account of political affections. Miller argues that Christians should construe their lives primarily in terms of metaphysical boundaries so that their loves are cosmopolitan and indiscriminate and therefore not constricted by historically changing, politically defined boundaries. He argues against Christian natural-law accounts which ‘privilege local loyalties and loves’ and proposes instead a ‘critical principle, one that scrutinizes local customs from the perspective of transcendence’.72 Such a position, appealing to the apparent downgrading of natural loves in the gospels, overcome by the fraternity and sorority of the body of Christ, and to the Protestant message of indiscriminate grace to sinners, frees Christians to focus love on those who are genuinely poor in any area of the globe rather than only their local neighbours who share a territory with them. Biggar’s response is to reaffirm the divinely authorized creatureliness of localized loves. In Chapter 3, it was argued that this natural community of the family rightly has a formative influence on the affective development of children, preparing them for wider circles of association. Biggar concurs, arguing that the ‘original dependence of any human individual on an historical 72 R. B. Miller, ‘Christian Attitudes towards Boundaries: Metaphysical and Geographical’, in J. Coleman (ed.), Christian Political Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2008), 79–80.

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community’73 gives rise to a basic natural law duty of gratitude and love to that community which has cared for the individual who has come into the world, received nurture, and learnt to live. Moreover, such gratitude is not solely familial but also takes form as communal or national loyalty which, in the modern setting, is defined in part by territorial borders. In contrast to the fearful loyalty of Roman authorities to Caesar, this national loyalty takes particular form in gratitude towards past and present political representatives and other public servants who, through dispositions on behalf of society, preserve the defence and peace of the realm in which families and other institutions can develop. But even within a national territory, since doing all of the common good is not possible for any one person, each should seek to pursue that part of the common good which is practical for him and trust that God is providentially drawing these contributions together. It follows that the most natural people to whom we should do good and to whom we owe gratitude are our benefactors from our own people in our own place. However, lest one imagines that this is simply a recipe for social stagnancy or an inward-looking parochialism, Biggar notes that what ‘one owes one’s family or nation is not anything or everything, but specifically respect for and promotion of their good. Such loyalty, therefore, does not involve simply doing or giving whatever is demanded, whether by the state, the electoral majority, or even the people as a whole . . . True patriotism is not uncritical.’74 In other words, gratitude is typically not the only affective response a community or sector thereof experiences in relation to one’s political representatives—loyalty, as noted in Chapter 3, may take affective form in such diverse phenomena as anger, awe, sorrow, compassion, or even shame. Moreover, Biggar proceeds to argue that the purpose of national loyalty or ‘patriotism’ should never only be for the good of one’s own nation but rather that local loves are the fertile soil in which more wide-ranging loves may grow. It is not that we should grow out of national identity and loyalty and into a cosmopolitanism that, floating free of all particular attachments, lacks any real ones, but rather that, in and through an ever-deepening care for 73 N. Biggar, ‘The Value of Limited Loyalty: Christianity, the Nation and Territorial Boundaries’, in J. Coleman (ed.), Christian Political Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2008), 95. 74 Biggar, ‘Value of Limited Loyalty’, 98.

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the good of our own nation, we are drawn into caring for the good of foreigners . . . Notwithstanding the tensions that may arise between national loyalty and loyalties that are more extensive, there is nevertheless an essential connection between them.75

Ultimately, Biggar bases this carefully qualified support of national boundaries which support the development of national loyalties in God’s approval of specific national identity in the Jewishness of Jesus and the events of Pentecost. On the one hand, Jesus did not seek to transcend particularly Jewish loves but rather embodied them perfectly in the incarnation. Jesus and the apostles’ teaching did not downgrade localized loves (of family, etc.) but rather reoriented them according to scripture and in relation to other more wideranging loves. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit at Pentecost spoke all the languages of the world to both Jews and Gentile proselytes and thereby affirmed the global, diverse particularity of national and cultural identities in which God may be glorified.76 Arguing in this way, Biggar hopes to show that Miller’s strictly cosmopolitan love is not only theologically unnecessary but also practically implausible. Biggar’s rebuttal may be further elaborated in light of the difference between the transcendent cosmopolitanism which Miller desires and the transcendence which was defended over against Nussbaum in Chapter 3. While Nussbaum has a deeply nuanced account of childhood and culturally conditioned, familial emotional development, her Stoic cosmopolitanism leads her to describe national identity as ‘an accident of birth’ and ‘a morally irrelevant characteristic’. She seeks ‘a more international basis for political emotion and concern’ which has ‘the promise of transcending’ national divisions while at the same time recognizing with the Stoics that ‘local identifications . . . can be a source of great richness in life’.77 Despite this last qualification, her orientation is towards world citizenship and she is inherently sceptical of the benefits of patriotism, especially in her American context. She believes that transcending national divisions through seeing ourselves first as global citizens is of the essence of pursuing a genuinely self-critical and just international order.

Biggar, ‘Value of Limited Loyalty’, 100. Biggar, ‘Value of Limited Loyalty’, 93–7. 77 M. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmpolitanism’, in her For Love of Country (Beacon Press, 2002), 4ff. 75 76

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While naturally affirming the common humanity of all the peoples of the earth and, with Nussbaum, the importance for affections of familial nurture, the argument to this point suggests a different way of understanding transcendence. For the indiscriminate grace of the gospel, which is for every nation, Jew and Gentile, has a transcendent source in God but came first in a particular, national expression in the incarnate Christ—salvation is truly from the Jews. At the same time, the apostle Paul’s teaching on justification by faith, to which I shall return in Chapter 5, emphasizes that Abraham was an uncircumcised Gentile when he believed the promises of God (Romans 4). It was only afterwards that he became the circumcised father of the Jewish nation, a particular people who were called out to become a focus of blessing precisely in their cultural particularity of ritual and remembrance, land and festivals, law and prophecy. This particularization of blessing was a lesson to all humanity in how the transcendent God was graciously willing to dwell with people. But that blessing, promised in Abraham and embodied in Israel, always retained an eschatological, global, ‘cosmopolitan’ orientation—all nations on earth were to be blessed through him and his seed. This experience of a transcendent God who is unashamed of particular identifications was then fulfilled at Pentecost as the transcendent dimension took on multiple locally and culturally mediated expressions. Those gathered in Jerusalem were from the ends of the earth to which they were to return, not bound by the fullness of Jewish law as the council of Acts 15 would determine, but rather free to live as Gentile followers of Christ. Far from being otherworldly, therefore, the integration of the transcendent in Christianity into highly diverse this-worldly cultural identities with all their attendant affective understandings is explicitly expected and commended. In this way the goodness of Israelite participation in the land they were allotted is universalized. But at the same time, no patch of land is now the promised land. The promise to Abraham is fulfilled so that all the planet, in every locality, is the promised planet, allotted to every family, people, and nation. Cosmopolitanism and the unity of global humanity is, therefore, not found by minimizing national differences but by discovering the work of the transcendent God in amongst the diverse nations of the earth. National identity, on this reckoning, is a providential way of critically focusing questions of right and wrong, good and evil, rather than an accident of history from which we are to be emancipated.

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Biggar’s account, elaborated as I have suggested, provides further conceptual resources for understanding the narrative of Luke-Acts and specifically the affectivity of Romans rulers. For their loyalty was primarily to Caesar and Rome rather than to the local area they governed and so they were not affectively oriented to participate effectively as judges in the land of Israel. By contrast, the reason why Cyrus, king of Persia, could quite reasonably be called the Lord’s anointed (Isaiah 45: 1) was that his restoration of Israel to the land at the end of the exile allowed for the authentically locally expressed leadership of Nehemiah and Ezra, the joyful fruits of whose labours in the land were reflected upon at the end of Chapter 3. But the Roman Empire’s universal ambition to conquer territories and its lack of natural loyalty to the lands it governed stands directly opposed to the Pentecostal vision of diverse national identities in which the transcendent God comes to dwell. As we shall see, this is not to suggest that national cultures, including their characteristic affective orientations, are not constantly challenged and summoned to repentance by the coming of this God. Indeed, nationalistic ethnocentrisms are logically excluded by the cosmopolitanism of grace and the eschatology of the coming Kingdom of God. But it is to say that national, localized identity is a natural gift which is vindicated both by the incarnation of the cosmic Christ and the Pentecost of the universal Spirit.

III. CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM REVISITED With these reflections in mind, let us reconsider the difficulties which emerged in the earlier analysis of constitutional patriotism. There are two major lines of agreement between Habermas, Biggar, and the position I have been proposing. On the one hand, there is a joint repudiation of a certain form of ethnocentricity. The preceding chapters’ contrast between particular orders of value and the true moral order of the world, combined with their scepticism about the epistemological fragility of communal virtue, not only aims at similar targets to Habermas’s concern that no particular nation or ethnic group should believe itself to be the supreme arbiter of morality, but also fits well with Biggar’s highly qualified support for a national loyalty when critically framed within the concern for the common good of all nations. All these approaches

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share a concern for ensuring that those who form a particular, national, moral community exercise critical judgement upon it. On the other hand, all parties agree that ‘affect’, ‘affection’, or ‘loyalty’ should be connected closely with reflection and deliberation. Although Biggar only alludes to this by saying that true patriotism is not ‘uncritical’, the larger thrust of his essay indicates that it is precisely by affection for our own people and place that we come to reflection on the common good of all and deliberation concerning what right action should be done towards the larger common good. In Habermas, the connection is more explicit since the post-national consciousness which constitutional patriotism supports only takes substantive form in the ongoing deliberative communication of the community. This deliberation is not a totally radical form of criticism as the ‘critical constitutional patriots’ might suggest. Rather, the more modest question Habermas tries to answer is, as Laborde says, ‘what will motivate people to engage in the self-critical, other-regarding practice of deliberation in a democratic community’.78 In the end, this discussion need not side with one school of Habermasian thought or another. Whether or not the neutralist reading or the critical reading of Habermas is the correct one is not the central concern. Instead, it is enough to see that both Habermas and this discussion argue that ‘affection’ or ‘affect’ is a crucial feature of human moral psychology which influences common, political reflection and deliberation. Although I will shortly have cause to criticize how the connection is made between affection, reflection, and deliberation, there is at least some common ground. Furthermore, Habermas, through his appeal to memory and history, also believes that political affect in the form of constitutional patriotism is sustained through careful attention to the past rather than forgetfulness of it. For him, constitutional patriotism is only continued through critical reflection on German and European history. This claim, in outline form at least, has some similarity to the account of affection and memory in Chapters 2 and 3. However, these agreements by no means reconcile our positions. Indeed, there are substantial differences between Habermas’s account of constitutional patriotism and the account of political affections which has been developed here. The following four points will focus on how a clarification of the concepts of ‘affect’ or ‘affection’ and their

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Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 595–6.

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relation to locality enables a better formulation of the nature and role of patriotism.

The affective dimension First, Habermas himself is not committed to the sheer rationalist individualism of the freezing Kantian heights; rather, his theory of communicative action depends on the mutuality of interpersonal relations and a life between facts and norms. However, as we have noted, neither he nor his interpreters explain what ‘patriotism’ is as an affective phenomenon. We look in vain for thoroughgoing definitions of ‘loyalty’, ‘emotion’, or ‘affect’. For Habermas, the focus is more broadly on the archaic, sacralized, conventional patterns of life which, he believes, are holding us back from post-national consciousness. This omission of a systematic account of political attachment is a serious problem. For the lacuna throws into question the relationship between, on the one hand, the affective attachment to universal principles through the particular legal facticity of nation-states and, on the other, the deliberative, potentially post-national, democratic consciousness which should accompany such attachment. The problem arises with respect to how and whether political affect can achieve what Habermas and others expect it to achieve. It is not obvious that affect is competent to be attracted to or recognize universal norms even when somehow instantiated in ‘supplementary’, particular, traditional, public legal forms. According to Lacroix, communitarians have criticized just such a connection between emotions and universal norms, arguing that ‘universal principles are incapable of establishing a fixed political identity . . . [and that] a political identity must come from, and be sustained by, a force already prevalent within men’s hearts, by the internalisation of a national tradition and of a common substantial culture’.79 However, this criticism has failed to show just why affect is unable to fulfil the role which Habermas and others have suggested it can and should fulfil. For it falls short of showing just why affections will struggle to recognize ‘universal principles’. Civic nationalists do a little better. They hold that the nation-state is a necessary upper limit for united human communities, that the post-national move is therefore a mistake, that liberal democracy within nation-states can be

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Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, 945.

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properly fuelled by a limited nationalism, that ‘universal principles cannot by themselves sustain any particular polity’, and that ‘if we want democracy to survive, we need to flesh it out with the strong feelings and emotions involved in a national tradition’. But these claims are not developed in such a way as to integrate emotion convincingly into political societies. Instead, there remains a conceptual vagueness whereby for ‘civic nationalists, human beings are made up of passions as much as reason’.80 This vagueness is unfortunate because it cedes the appearance of wisdom to hyper-rationalist, highly technical political theories which neglect the affective dimension and produce patterns for political societies which fail to reflect its importance. The difficulty again is the lack of clarity about the relationship of reason and emotion. The general tenor of debate is that, since reason alone cannot organize or explain political societies, we must settle for reason and emotion somehow going together to make up a national or post-national consciousness which will sustain common action within and between nations. The preceding chapters, drawing on the theory of emotions, should by now have shown that, although total clarity is not available concerning the nature and role of affections, more clarity is available than is often supposed. Diagnosis of the causes of this consistent lack of clarity is more complex but needs to be attempted in order to discover what may be learnt from this very important scholarly debate and how that learning might be serviceable in the practical affairs of political societies. Second, the idea of citizens experiencing allegiance to universal, constitutional norms and principles through which they are stabilized and energized as a deliberative community suggests a coordination between affects and norms which relates memory, reflection, and deliberation wrongly so that people will be destabilized within their localities. This has significant implications for the development of the kind of intersubjective solidarity which Habermas himself realizes is lacking in contemporary European nation-states. For instead of affection being a local people’s participative beginning which, stabilized by communal memory, initiates the reflective discernment and deliberative practical application of norms, people are to be attracted directly to universal norms through a constitutional patriotism characterized by a highly circumscribed common memory. Norms which

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Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, 947; my emphasis.

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are transcendent and universal are thought to be accessible to affect in an immediate way without the necessity of reflection, deliberation, and deep engagement with the past. Habermas seeks to avoid this characterization by allowing for the tension of facts and norms to be held in order that the thick particularity of national legal constitutions, which have a local memorial element, might be a stepping stone, as it were, to an allegiance to universal principles. On Habermas’s thesis, affect is not immediately connected with universals but rather is mediated by the facticity of a historical legal constitution and democratic culture which sufficiently instantiates those universal norms in a system of ‘specific rights [that] stem from the decisions of a historical legislature’.81 In other words, the redirection of affect takes the route of historical particularity on its way to universal norms. By seeking to take facticity seriously in this way, Habermas hopes to close the gap and hold the tension between facts and norms in such a way that a post-national consciousness can come to birth even within the worn-out and declining institution of the nation-state. However, although Habermas believes that constitutional patriotism may overcome the ‘democratic deficit’—the deficit in democratic participation and thus of governmental legitimacy—by enabling postnational principles to be recognized more explicitly in localized institutions, there is no indication as to how it might overcome what we might call the ‘affective-epistemological deficit’—the lack of intersubjective affective understanding of universal legal principles which would initially and enduringly attract citizens towards reflection, deliberation, and action with others according to these principles. The gap which exists here is not well disguised by phrases already critiqued above such as ‘motivational anchorage’,82 ‘coupling’ and ‘uncoupling’ of culture and politics, the ‘supplement’ of law, and the ‘linking up’ of motives and principles.83 The mistake which these rather mechanical—even metallic—phrases betray is that diverse adherents to constitutional patriotism have taken affections for granted rather than explored their role in human morality and political relations. They have seen the gap in their thinking—between norms and motivations—and have chosen words which express the need to close this gap by the artificial means of links and couples and 81 82 83

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 125. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 594. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 499.

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anchors. Thus my critique is not a case of Muller’s description of the discussion at large (‘I’ll have more emotion please’) but rather explores a conceptual absence which interprets the various constitutional patriotisms as more-or-less unstable and unreliable routes to an intersubjectively coordinated political consciousness. The instability of constitutional patriotism lies in the fact that political affect is not able to connect people to the universal constitutional principles that are to provide fundamental stability for deliberation. Affections, as suggested in Chapters 2 and 3, do not move in such abstract ways but are complexly attracted to objects and mediated by memory, tradition, and familial life. It is this rootedness of participative affectivity which is the essence of political solidarity. But Habermas’s constitutional patriotism does not make it clear whether stability is found solely in the universal constitution or also in particular legal facticity without which motivational anchoring would not be possible. For it seems that the ‘anchoring’ somehow goes both ways—the motivations of the people of Scotland and the motivations of the people of Bavaria are to be jointly secured and attracted by more stable universal constitutional principles. However, at the same time, the constitutional principles depend for their enduring impact on being instantiated in Scottish political authority and equivalent political authorities in Bavaria. The truth is that this metaphor of anchorage and its partners are far too crude to capture the complexities of affective commitments and attachments within any particular locality which are rooted in diverse memories of highly diverse histories. This then casts doubt on the entire constitutional patriotic enterprise. Is the putative universal constitution like a ship on the seas when related to the sea-bed of the United Kingdom, France, Poland, Germany, and Sweden? Or is it a hot air balloon anchored to the earthiness of those territories? Or perhaps all these are inverted and the constitutional principles are the sea-bed and the earth and our traditional identities and narratives are the ship and balloon. But none of these seem particularly illuminating ways of conceiving the immense complexities of internal and external solidarities and affective allegiances. Nor is such analysis of metaphors an underhand tactic since it presses for clarity at precisely the moral psychological point which Jan Muller, a constitutional patriot, believes is so essential for the success of theories of constitutional patriotism. Indeed, it is just this stretched tension of language and conceptuality which Habermas, with admirable modesty and honesty,

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is willing to name and, indeed, to address through his ongoing engagement with religious, especially Christian, communities. There are good theological reasons for constitutional patriotism’s problems at this point. Its instability and therefore its threat to intersubjective solidarity arises because it distrusts what Biggar described as creaturely natural affection in his defence of national loyalties. The cosmopolitan rights grounded in universal constitutional principles which are the ultimate objects of constitutional patriotism are parallel to Miller’s cosmopolitan loves. Biggar claims that these universal loves undermine localized natural loves, the phenomena which Chapter 2 described as the natural participation of affections in the people, land, and objects which are near at hand, coordinated through a traditional ordo amoris or series of such ordines in a specific national territory. There are universal laws and norms; indeed, the natural law of gratitude which Biggar’s thesis is built upon is just such a law. But an allegiance to universal principles or an indiscriminate love for all people destabilizes the creaturely, limited moral agent whose practical reasoning should begin with affections leading to moral reflection. Such affections should not overreach themselves in attempting participative understanding of all people but rather should be focused first (though by no means exclusively) on those who are near at hand. This creaturely limitation consists in our inability to live beyond the generic, teleological, spatial, and temporal moral order and local reflections of it in traditional orders of value. Thus the moral order is always local to us, taking national forms in ways that endure through memory and that we understand affectively. For example, the memories which surround the Second World War are complexly individuated among and within the nations of Europe and the world at large. Their individuation naturally reflects the different perspectives within and between nations concerning the causes, course, and outcome of the conflict, something of which Habermas is keenly aware. But it is precisely those localized memories, rather than a post-national consciousness, upon which intersubjective affectivity depends. The political benefits of the diverse sorrows, shame, compassion, and gratitude formed within different nations by war arise and endure through national memory, however disputed that memory may be. The multiplicity of memory even within a nation reminds us that affections’ locality is no guarantee of them being well-directed—rather, antagonism and hatred are all too common. Neo-Nazis live on in Germany and in the United

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Kingdom; schadenfreude at another nation’s or group of nations’ economic or military misfortunes is dependent on the perception that one’s own nation has avoided the disaster. Nonetheless, while war and hatred clearly arise out of human corruption, our limited, localized condition does not stem from the curse of Genesis but rather is the given way in which humans are invited to live together before their Creator and Redeemer, a life which is vindicated by the incarnation and by Pentecost. Bonhoeffer, whose personal narrative is peculiarly relevant to the discussion of post-war, post-Holocaust Europe, described created human limits first in terms of the limit which lay at the centre of Adam’s life, in the tree of life at the centre of the Garden of Eden from which humanity could freely feed on God’s gifts, and second in terms of the limit of the other, in the form of Eve, who was given that, being together, they might bear and love the limits of their good creaturely lives. Their bodily co-locatedness, ‘loving the other and being loved by the other’, is then the pattern for human community in general.84 Bernd Wannenwetsch suggests that the ‘joyous reception [of our limited nature] is possible . . . only if we experience these boundaries of our creaturely existence not as ones that separate us from human society and our loved ones but . . . as occasions to connect us more deeply with them’.85 The embodied carnality of people in places is of the essence of their intersubjective attentiveness to the source of shared moral life. In other words, those who are bodily close to us provide the limits whereby we might rejoice in our limited nature and live well in it. For Bonhoeffer this meant such solidarity with the people of Germany, Jew and Gentile, that he returned from the United States in order to live in community with Germans, teach Christ to Germans, act in responsibility to resist a German tyranny, love a German woman, and then die at the hands of his fellow Germans. Such an embodied narrative in such a historical moment stands both as a denunciation of tyrannical, racist ethnocentrism and as an invitation to accept with joy that loving the limited nation of one’s birth is a truly creaturely and Christian calling. It 84 D. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall (Fortress Press, 1997), 80–102, esp. 99; cf. 87: ‘The limit is grace because it is the basis of creatureliness and freedom; the boundary is the center.’ 85 B. Wannenwetsch, ‘Loving the Limit: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Hermeneutic of Human Creatureliness and its Challenge for an Ethics of Medical Care’, in R. Wüstenberg et al. (eds.), Bonhoeffer and the Biosciences: An Initial Exploration (Lang, 2009), 103.

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promises that affective understanding which rests on local attachment, stabilized by local memories, need not make for perverted, immoral action but rather might energize the pursuit of justice and peace. The implausibility of Miller’s proposal lies in the idea that we can love the whole world equally without limits. This cosmopolitanism results in not feeling much for anything in particular because it denies the necessity of special attachments with which Providence gifts us and which equip us for political life. In a similar way, constitutional patriotism’s ‘allegiance’ is at odds with our account of ‘loyalty’ in that it fails to recognize the personal quality of representative institutions. Loyalty to a representative person or group of people is the creaturely form of political life whereby some personal representative acts as a focus for the affective understanding of a group, an intensely human task which facilitates political reflection and deliberation. The incursion of the demand for allegiance to universal, political principles, even via the facticity of historical traditions and institutions, shortcircuits the task of being a creature within traditional, political orders of value and the moral order and thus opposes the necessary and natural, participative attraction of affections towards representatives, neighbours, families, and the common goods of our locality and so undermines the stability which locality brings. Christ’s incarnation and resurrection along with Pentecost vindicated the localized life of natural affections within the moral order, thereby reaffirming its mode of stability while at the same time warning against an uncritical ethnocentrism.86

Fear, trust, and patriotism Third, the account of Roman authority in Luke-Acts shows that, from very early on, the church understood that the gospel of joy announced

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Cf. Augustine, On the First Epistle of John, Homily 8.4, where Augustine comments that love must ‘like fire, first seize upon what is nearest, and so extend to what is further off ’. Though, as Oliver O’Donovan notes (The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine (Wipf & Stock, 2006), 120–3), such a simile underplays the generic differentiation of affection in favour of a quantitative image, it nonetheless strikingly illumines the time-worn principle that charity begins at home. Cf. E. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 294–6, for further Augustinian wrestling with this set of concerns.

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and embodied in the representative ministry of Jesus Christ would be impenetrable to a far-away political authority which claimed universal jurisdiction over lands and peoples it did not adequately represent and thus from whom it would not receive that affective recognition which draws people into reflective, deliberative action. The thick particularity of the incarnation, whereby God dwelt not in every nation but in one nation and tradition alone, set the pattern for the activity of representative authority which was developed in Chapter 3. Although there can be no unqualified parallel between the Roman Empire of the first century and Habermas’s proposed continental political authorities, it is not inappropriate to sound some notes of caution, not least because of the amorality of some of Habermas’s own proposals which were considered above. Habermas’s account of the interdependence of facts and norms seeks to address ‘the incapacity of practical reasons alone to motivate moral action, a gap that only a system of legal sanctions can fill’.87 Neither customary practices nor mere knowledge of what is right nor conscience can motivate moral action according to Habermas and so what is required is the supplement of legal sanctions which offer incentives and threaten punishments.88 As noted earlier, Markell reckons that this self-interested, consequentialist rationale for obedience to law amounts to ‘wholly amoral motives’ for moral action. Universal moral principles are the moral motivation for action while legal facticity is a necessary but compromised addition which only ‘supplements post-conventional morality in a manner effective for action’.89 Thus, until the post-national, post-conventional consciousness become widely determinative of behaviour, amoral self-interest combined with fear of legal sanctions is an essential part of Habermas’s recommendation for moral action.90 87 Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy?’, 47. I note in passing the notion of a ‘gap’ which needs to be bridged, an analysis which accords with the concern above about ‘links’, ‘coupling’, and ‘anchorage’ and also with the concept of stability. 88 Cf. ‘Coercive law overlays normative expectations with threats of sanctions in such a way that addressees may restrict themselves to the prudential calculation of consequences.’ Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 116. 89 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 114. 90 Such a position seems to open the door, however unintentionally, to the worst parts of Hobbes’s account of representation and citizenship wherein the validity of juridical sanctions is interpreted wholly through the self-interest of the citizen who is under judgement. Hobbes distinguishes between the responsibility to obey the laws of nature (and a fortiori, the dependent laws of human society) in foro interno and the

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The strained difficulties which characterize Habermas’s amoral way of holding the tension between facts and norms may be helpfully contrasted with the design of ancient Israel’s life wherein laws concerning, for example, the just treatment of the poor, were read to the people during the festival of the booths in the sabbatical year (Deuteronomy 16: 13–17, 31: 9–13). Affections are first focused on the fruits of the land shared by the community of the people before being drawn to the Torah which sets the normative and narrative context for their reflection and deliberation about what should be done for the common good. The difference between these Israelite affections and the affect of constitutional patriotism is threefold: first, there is no attempt to abstract the norms of the law from the particular narrative of a people’s life; second, affection’s aptitude for enabling reflection and deliberation is focused in joyful recognition of the fruits of the land, in the context of the memory-laden feast of booths, rather than on the norms of the law as such; third, the consequences for obedience and disobedience in the form of blessings and curses are essentially integrated into the law covenant as a whole rather than framed as a compromised supplement which motivates obedience through calculating self-interest. Because of this lineage in Israelite thought, fear is a less embarrassing political affection for Christian political thought than it is for constitutional patriotism. In Paul’s writings, fear of punishment is a proper aspect of a Christian account of obedience to political authority. But obedience to positive law is ultimately attracted by reverence for God whom political authority serves as agents of his wrath and for the sake of conscience. This means that reverence of political authority is always in critical tension with reverence for God’s universal authority. The call to submit to political authority and to render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s is thus not simply to accept what Caesar says but rather to call Caesar to judge justly. When just judgement is not effectively carried out in a local jurisdiction, Paul confronts Festus and appeals to Caesar.91 O’Donovan comments that there ‘is an element of discretion which can never be removed from the obedient subject: it is always the subject’s business to be clear in his or her own trumping of that responsibility by the right of self-preservation in foro externo when confronted with the possibility of death. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. Gaskin (OUP, 1996), 15.36–7. 91 Cf. Romans 13: 4b–5; Acts 25: 10–11.

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mind that this or that command actually requires obedience’.92 He argues that Christians have misrepresented this as if there were simply two choices: obey or be punished. ‘But this is sheer confusion, for if Caesar has the right to punish he has the right to be obeyed; and if we have the right not to obey, we have the right not to be punished for not obeying. Obedient decision is not a choice between alternatives, it is an aspect of recognition. Responsibility for ascertaining that the demand is duly authorized belongs inalienably to those who must obey it.’93 For O’Donovan, recognition of political authority is inescapably affective. And so an absence of subtly variegated affective recognition between representative and represented helps to explain the modern alienation of government from governed and the deficit in critical participation and obedience to law that leads to the amoral solution which Habermas proposes. For ‘true political authority to flourish, there must be a stronger motive of obedience than is furnished by fear of sanction and habitual conformity. People obey political authority because they think they ought. It exercises a moral authority which can command a critically reflective obedience.’94 That experience of moral authority takes form in political loyalties and allegiances, affective affinities between those who accept a common authority. In Israel, divine law is a form of positively determined moral authority and is woven into the narrative, moral psychology and territory of a people. In this way, law evokes loyalty and allegiance. There is no tension between facts and norms—the valleys and the heights—since there is only the land, the law which is organically fitted to the land and its people, and the transcendent Lord who is present with them. The tension lies instead between the Torah and the stubbornness of the people who refuse to accept its wisdom. Such a contrast with constitutional patriotism invites a challenge as to how the ritual practices of an ancient Near-Eastern people might have any bearing on the exercise of political authority in the twenty-firstcentury world of globalized markets, radical pluralism, and mass communication. Habermas’s recognition of the importance of religious communities in the development of a post-secular society suggests that such a challenge is itself passé, not because of some 92 93 94

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 136. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 137. O. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (Apollos, 1994), 28.

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progressivist myth but rather because of the inadequacy of secularized political thought to sustain the intersubjective solidarity which is necessary for the flourishing of democratic life. Roger Scruton’s account of the relation of English law to the English land, dovetailing with Biggar’s approval of localized affectivity, takes the conversation on a step further. The account turns on the peculiar concept of trust in English law whereby property such as land is held in trust by a trustee on behalf of the deceased’s children. It is a form of ownership that ‘consists entirely of duties, with no personal rights’.95 The principle of equity protects the inheritors of the trust from injustice in a way that the law itself cannot. As a result of this law, the ‘idea of ownership as a duty seeped into the national consciousness, and provided a model for the relation between the English and their country. Throughout the nineteenth century we find writers and statesmen explaining patriotism in such terms.’96 For Scruton, English patriotism is a form of trust whereby land is held on behalf of the dead and those who are yet to be born. Family inheritance of land and property fostered an affectivity and bred an intersubjective ‘consciousness’ whereby the nation participated in the inheritance with which it had been entrusted. Trust was thus constituted by shared patriotic affection, a common understanding whereby one’s ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants can be construed as united participants conserving and developing the common good of the land. In contrast to Rawls’s revised theory of justice which recognizes intergenerational ‘ties of sentiment and affections’ only to argue that ‘justice should not presuppose’ them, Scruton’s approach makes the task of seeking the common good turn upon affective presuppositions.97 Trust as a partly affective concept will be developed in greater depth in Chapter 5 where the localized life of churches will be considered. For now, it is enough to see that the central conceptual feature of Scrutonian patriotism which sets it apart from constitutional patriotism is that it is rooted in participative, affective attachment to that which is near-at-hand in our heritage, homes, and future hopes, rather than far away on the level of universal principles. Such patriotism involves an imaginative recognition of unity (if not harmony) between past, present, and future participants in the land. It is 95

96 Scruton, England, 119. Scruton, England, 119 (my emphases). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1999), 111–12; cf. S. M. Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 92. 97

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a form of understanding which welcomes the inheritance which has been bequeathed with affections indexed to the condition of the inheritance such as joy, gratitude, or even sorrow and then proceeds to engage in moral reasoning amidst and sustained by those initial affective recognitions. Thus in Scrutonian patriotism, ‘stability’ is found in home, land, law, and tradition—the valleys where we dwell—rather than in a constant, impractical movement between valleys and heights or the weak presuppositions of the original position. Such an account shows the politically beneficial possibilities of a limited ethnocentricity. For it shows how the deepest energies of communal agency are drawn out not by that which is far away but by that which is near at hand, that which we can see, hear, and hold. In such patriotism we see the element of truth in Scheler’s elision of perception and affection—that we recognize value partly as it resides within the visible, audible, and tangible forms that our locality takes. Turning again to the passage from ancient Israel to the twenty-first century, Scruton’s interpretation of trust in English law has strong parallels to Israelite practice and shows one form of response to the rise of globalization. For the movement towards political judgement in both Israelite and English law is energized and ordered through affective participation in the land as explained by its past, present, and future. Of course neither the United Kingdom nor England should be viewed as covenanted people in the same way as Israel was God’s chosen, covenanted people—no prophets have foretold a Messiah to be born in Windsor nor yet one arising from Middlesbrough in Yorkshire, the way to the sea, along the Tees. ‘Can anything good come from there?’ ask the people of Sunderland and Westminster alike. (Much good does indeed come from Middlesbrough—but not an Anointed King!) Nonetheless, natural affections, which Biggar argued for over against Miller, are present in both ancient Israelite and contemporary English settings. This is unsurprising for, whether it is Israel or England in question, people are always participating in the thick particularity of their lives within the created and vindicated moral order. Thus the goodness of this aspect of English law is good precisely because it reflects God’s design for the life of peoples— embodied in Israel and fulfilled in Jesus—namely that their laws are not formulated apart from the particularity of their lives but rather are judgements concerning their lives within their localities, fields, town, and cities, judgements which emerge from within the logic of inheritance and tradition through intersubjective affective epistemology. The

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reflections on law and affectivity in Chapter 3 point strongly in this direction since the interweaving of popular commitment and legal provisions depend upon the quality of political representation over against the twin threats of affective independence and proceduralism. The democratic deficit can be more precisely diagnosed as a deficit in affective recognition that the laws under which people live are meaningfully connected to the land where they live and the tradition from which they have grown. This is only further exacerbated as law which is not formulated in this fashion detaches people from their land and tradition, desensitizing them to the fact of the alien imposition itself. So land, law, and affectivity, in the form of patriotic trust, must be conceived together if law is to be experienced not as an alien imposition but as that which genuinely represents the tradition of a people in a place. However, matters cannot be left to rest there for, as Biggar says, patriotism should have a critical dimension which is conscious of the susceptibility of human creatures to idolize their own nation’s tradition, customary morality, and virtues. The vindication of the moral order in the resurrection of Christ by no means entails the vindication of every political, affective participation in that order. Ordines amoris are radically challenged by the eschatological promise of the Kingdom of God which both affirms national identities and yet draws people towards a more stable yet no less earthy allegiance to the incarnate Christ. The goodness of law which is embedded within land is that it reflects the creaturely finitude of humanity, a finitude not caused by humanity’s corruption but rather a feature of the embodied life shared by all people allotted by Providence to different parts of the world. But Scrutonian patriotism tends towards a peculiar eschatology, differentiating and associating a community’s dead, living, and the yet unborn almost entirely within the thick matrix of their particular tradition. In stark contrast to a Habermasian eschatology, which envisages the human future as post-national (though perhaps postsecular), Scruton’s patriotism depends on an account of humans whereby their destiny is substantially or entirely explicable within the terms of their locality and tradition. Though, contra Nussbaum, the transcendent has a place, it is very closely aligned with the tradition it transcends. Commenting on the development of England, Scruton claims that ‘the Church became identified with the national mind—a web of knowledge, culture and social aspiration, laid like a net over the countryside, trapping and uniting the forms of local

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life’.98 ‘Like patriotism, of which it was a part, the English religion had been placed beyond question.’99 In the extreme case, to which Scruton sometimes tends, the particular order of value, self-vindicated by age, virtue, or strength, and the created, vindicated moral order are brought so close together as to be largely indistinguishable: Christian religion is gently subsumed into patriotic affection. Such self-vindication is mocked by the ravages of time and comprehensively denied not only by the radical challenge of the Kingdom of God before whom earthly rulers must cast their crowns but also by Chapter 2’s critique of epistemological dependence on communal virtue. True patriotism, an affective attentiveness to tradition and inheritance, will construe past, present, and future participants in the land as a differentiated unity but will always be critically alert both to the quality of human life which surpasses nationality and to the possibility that what is actually good may be quite different from what particular national virtues and tradition define as good. Moral reasoning is always moral learning and a critical patriotism will be attuned to learn something new and surprising rather than settle for ethnocentric myths which offer no helpful resources for practical reasoning about right action in the present. Ironically, constitutional patriotism, despite its attempt to combine facticity and normativity, has so diminished the value of locality while failing to show how its own procedures could sustain the detailed criticism which is required to prevent the dark side of nationalism from emerging, that it cannot effectively engage with the thick particularity of local justice and thereby fails to represent adequately popular anger and joy. Such failure fuels precisely the worst forms of nationalism, the very reverse of what it intended to achieve.100 As a result of this examination of Habermas through Deuteronomy, Luke-Acts, and Scruton, it is possible to say that positive law which is not primarily rooted in the locality which it governs will run the risk of opposing the affections of the people of that place. The English law of the English land has become effective partly through the affective recognitions of a people over time. Such an approach

98

99 Scruton, England, 109–10. Scruton, England, 94. Laborde, ‘From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism’, 600–1: ‘If democratic politics fail to take a stand on matters of cultural identity, these might end up being monopolized by anti-democratic movements, as in the case of the French rightist National Front.’ 100

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removes the possibility of the kind of ‘gap’ between facts and norms which led Habermas to pin his hopes for obedience to positive law solely upon prudential calculation of consequences. And so instead of facticity as a whole being a Habermasian supplement to universal law, affections within locality are Burkean supplements which support and make intelligible the affectively rich law of the land.101 These Burkean supplements, referred to at the outset of Chapter 3, are to be contrasted also with the Kantian notion of inclinations as supplements to duty considered at the end of Chapter 1. They are not additional extras which make duty doable or a universal constitution workable but rather are the humane core of a polity which support the laws which have emerged over the course of that polity’s life. Such an approach might be thought of as communitarian inasmuch as it seems to hold that ‘political identity’ arises through ‘a force already prevalent within men’s hearts [and] by the internalisation of a national tradition and of a common substantial culture’.102 However, that would be to underplay the important theological dimension to this account. For, ultimately it is not a political identity that is at stake here. The point of constitutional patriotism was to provide political principles that could criticize pre-political ethnocentricities in order to develop post-national political identity. However, the purpose of our thesis is to provide theo-political principles that can criticize political idolatries in order to discover, protect, and enable a provisional political identity and an ultimate eschatological identity. Such a proposal would resource a truly critical patriotism which can hold a nation together internally in such a way as to bring benefit to other nations, even those which are far away. A patriotism for the Kingdom of God in the new heaven and the new earth is precisely what is needed for a critical patriotism that can preserve trust from generation to generation within and between the polities of the twenty-first century world.

A post-national future? Fourth, our concept of affection can effectively address not only the thesis of constitutional patriotism but also the changed global 101 102

E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (OUP, 1999), 78. Lacroix, ‘For a European Constitutional Patriotism’, 945.

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situation for which constitutional patriotism was designed. Habermas’s claim is that the emergence of ‘new forms of organization for continental “regimes”’ will mean the gradual disappearance of the old nation-state model, along with its ‘inefficient’ mustering point, the United Nations, which cannot provide the requisite deliberative framework to face the challenges of the ‘globalization of commerce and communication, of economic production and finance, of the spread of technology and weapons, and above all of ecological and military risks’.103 In other words, the challenge which Habermas poses is whether nation-states can be moral communities in the global age or whether they must now be superseded. Since the new moment presents problems which transcend territorial borders in a way never before imagined, and since critical distance on conventional morality and ethnic consciousness through post-conventional morality and post-national consciousness is the route to the ‘rationalization of collective identities’, it seems to Habermas that the political supersession of nation-states by larger political units is now not only necessary but positively desirable. Habermas’s analysis of the challenges facing traditional and conventional cultures not only in Europe but also globally seems accurate on one level. The power of globalized markets, the mobility of capital and labour, the threat of ecological crisis, and the growth of the world population raise fresh questions—or rather old questions in a new form—about how local and cosmopolitan commitments may continue to be reconciled. The development of local affections in the face of immense pressures on family life, profound levels of indebtedness, and false consumerist aspiration are stark. These are exacerbated by an increasing sense of distance from land and forgetfulness about the meaning of land and the content of history. The impression that we can float six feet above the natural environment on updrafts of consumption has caused immense turbulence in many localities and horrendous global ecological effects in the burying of many people in far-off lands under six feet of earth or water. However, the notion that as challenges become more global in their scope people’s consciousness should become increasingly post-national to meet those challenges seems highly dubious when related to the normal, everyday life of the peoples of the United Kingdom,

103

J. Habermas, ‘The European Nation-State’, 105–7.

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Denmark, Poland, France, and the other nation-states within the European Union.104 To detach people increasingly from a local political consciousness seems just the wrong way to attract those affective understandings which can order and energize changed economic and ecological behaviour and popular activity in defence of the common good. Nigel Biggar’s interrelation of creatureliness and territory and Oliver O’Donovan’s analysis of the limits of moral community are helpful here. O’Donovan argues that to ‘see ourselves as a people is a work of moral imagination’ which interprets the reality of the practical engagements of ordinary life. These practical engagements are defined as ‘the reality of what we are given to be and do together’.105 Note the passive voice here, for it coheres well with Biggar’s emphasis on the creaturely givenness of our obligations to our family and our community which call forth our gratitude. Such formulations reflect a rich doctrine of God’s sovereign Providence and suggest that we are not thrown into the world but rather placed and sustained. From here, the eschatological, Augustinian distinction between an Eden without human politics, the present where political authority serves society, and the coming Kingdom of God enables the insight that the givenness of social life is not made by political authority but discovered by it.106 As Eric Gregory comments, ‘Augustinianism, with both cosmopolitan aspiration and attention to virtue’s origins in local communities’ opposes ‘the reduction of politics to state-centered government activity’.107 But a contractarian vision precisely reverses this order by giving political authority the task of identity conferral and rendering all social communications as aspects of a single political vocation. The crucial oversight which this led to, according to O’Donovan, is ‘a false suspicion of the ordinary, a doubt of human nature as known in the simple communication of food, wisdom, and affection. It could not see that a common good could be composed of

104 A focus on the European Union is not meant to suggest that practical difficulties will not arise elsewhere if the realization of a post-national consciousness were seriously pursued—one has only to ponder its application in the so-called African Union or the radical conventional morality and consciousness which persists in the United States of America—but rather because it is in the crucible of recent European history that this conception has developed. See also M. Nussbaum, For Love of Country, for more American perspectives. 105 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 151 (emphasis added). 106 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 154. 107 Gregory, Politics, 9.

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such humble engagements, and thought the only worthwhile mode of human cooperation lay in jurisdiction. It failed to hear the word of Jesus, “Judge not!”’108 Such an analysis, in which Israelite festivals and the metric martyrs’ method of weighing food are accorded immense significance, concurs with Biggar’s affirmation of creaturely localized loyalties and scepticism about Miller’s impractical and too-demanding call to indiscriminate loves. Human epistemology rooted in the ‘communication of . . . affection’ is profoundly complex and reaches in a wide variety of directions through any given human society such as goods, modes of greetings, forms of daily celebration, community or familial wisdom, and the like are seen as suffused with affective meanings. Thus the communication of affections helps diagnose the democratic deficit which is fundamental to the challenge of public discourse which Habermas has attempted to meet with his account of communicative action. For it alerts us to the essential feature of representative politics which is in the common participation of representative and represented in affective understanding, the pattern which was considered in some depth in Chapter 3. The move which has not been fully made by O’Donovan to this point is to explore the inner workings of such communication in political relations. However, it is now possible to see how O’Donovan’s thesis bears on the account of post-national consciousness which Habermas recommended. For O’Donovan’s proposal is that collective agency will only be practically conceivable and possible if it is imaginable by the people who are the agents. For to ‘see ourselves as a people is to grasp imaginatively a common good that unifies our overlapping and interlocking practical communications, and so to see ourselves as a single agency, the largest collective agency that we can practically conceive’.109 As we have already seen, an affective epistemology gives some definition to what might qualify as the ‘largest’ such agency. On the one hand, the ‘supplement’ of facticity was included by Habermas not in order to enable people to be enriched in their affective understanding of their own locality but rather that their consciousness, routed through such facticity, might evolve into a post-national democratic consciousness that could give allegiance to universal constitutional principles and legitimate post-national, continental, political institutions. On the other hand, if affections are modest though enduring 108 109

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 157. O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 150.

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in their epistemological aptitude and, by natural justice confirmed through special revelation, primarily attracted to that which is near at hand, localized, and particular, then we should be cautious to assert that the energies which make collective agency both conceivable and possible either ought to or could energize a collective agency which is post-national. The impracticality of post-nationality would thus be partially attributable to its inability to sustain an affectivity which can initiate a people’s unity in representative collective, deliberative agency. This is a serious practical problem precisely because resistance to the contemporary challenges which Habermas and his religious collocutors jointly recognize requires a robustly deliberative democratic environment for opinion and will formation. For if the conditions of such an environment are in part affective and if affections depend on local identity, then undermining local attachments will be destructive of the very goals which a post-national agenda aims to attain. If such local affectivity is diminished we would expect to find not only that which characterized the Roman rulers of Acts, namely affective misunderstanding of the task of justice in particular situations but also that which currently characterizes many inhabitants of Western Europe today, an alienated disloyalty to European political authorities, the epistemological-affective form of the democratic deficit mentioned earlier. As O’Donovan says, the ‘danger of dreaming up abstract schemes of political union on paper—a danger never far from the European Union—is that they do not accord with the way the member-peoples actually conceive their practical engagements’.110 Political representatives who operate at the level of the European Union struggle to draw affective attachment from those they represent. However well-intended their activities, they are inevitably distanced from their constituency. Lacking localized affections to supplement, correct, and aid laws, the representatives are driven to make more laws in order to effect the changes they desire. If there is such a misalignment between political authority and social communications, what remains is that which Luke exposed in the books of Acts, namely a massive but ineffective juridical structure which is not adequate to hear and attend to the pleas for justice concerning the affairs over which it legislates. On this pattern of political judgement,

110

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 154.

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local jurisdiction is subordinated to a centralized court, far from the experience and daily activities of citizens’ lives, whether in ancient Rome or contemporary Europe. This separation of law from intelligible daily experience is a recipe for widespread alienation, allied both to oppression and serious social unrest. Again, it must be emphasized that this is not an unqualified equation of the obscene brutality of the Roman Empire with the European Union’s vastly different attempts to bring effective and peaceful government to Europe, following two world wars and, specifically, the Holocaust. The analogy is on a conceptual level and pertains precisely to the inadequate or poorly conceived attention to the springs of human collective agency which are inescapably affective. For in the European Union today we do not see deep affective understanding between representatives and represented. Territorial affiliations and affinities which form people’s sense of being at home in their lands are thought to be outdated or, worse, dangerously ethnocentric, by influential political theorists such as Habermas. However, as the preceding discussion has indicated, it is the limitations on our loyalties which are given with our creatureliness and supported by national boundaries that make possible our freedom affectively to understand one another and to participate by those same affections in the reflective, deliberative, practical communications which we share and enact together for the common good. Only then can we respond both locally and internationally to the immense global challenges we face. Representation, which makes possible the flourishing life of political societies, is the major casualty of undermining such affective understanding. The ill-health of representation today puts in jeopardy not only the collective agency of peoples but also their willingness to defend the communications in which their common life consists, and on which the European Union itself depends. Moreover, if legitimacy itself depends on people’s commitment to the continuation of their own civilization and willingness to participate in and sustain their traditions then the declining birth-rate of Europe illustrates a very basic form of the democratic deficit already arising in the twenty-first century.111 A renewal of localized representation and law combined with a more respectful attitude towards that renewal from continental authorities would seem to be

111

G. Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral (Basic Books, 2006), 21ff.

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the more practically plausible response to the undoubtedly challenging times of global communications which lie ahead for Europe, rather than the development of psychologically incoherent, practically ineffective, and legally overfreighted post-national institutions.

CONCLUSION This enquiry has now considered threats to political institutions of representation and law which arise through poorly conceptualized views of the interrelation of human affection and locality. The rather bleak assessment of the problems facing such institutions should be weighed against the more hopeful perspective that people’s affective participations in their land, culture, tradition, and institutions are more enduring than some have supposed and less amenable to redirection towards far-away authorities and abstract principles than some political theorists have imagined. Thankfully, it has not proved easy to persuade people to give up some known-and-loved ways of participating in their practical communications. Memory, though sometimes a false friend, yet has power to sustain affective understanding. There remain some final questions. Habermas, with admirable honesty, raises the ‘troubling’ question of ‘whether democratic opinion- and will-formation could ever achieve a binding force that extends beyond the level of the nation-state’.112 He fears lest the hold of ethnocentricity is too strong and will in the end defeat the European project. Such a confession forms the last sentence of his essay and leaves behind a pregnant ambiguity: whether failure in this regard would be due to the incorrigibility of a putative European public or the impracticability of the post-national project itself. I have suggested that both may be the case. People do idolize their nations but living peacefully and harmoniously without an ‘us’ differentiated from a ‘them’ seems morally unthinkable. Not even the glorious reconciliation of Jew and Gentile as one people in the Kingdom of God occludes the identifiable plurality of nations whom John saw before the throne, worshipping the One God and the risen Lamb slain for all the earth.

112

Habermas, ‘The European Nation-State’, 127.

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I sympathize with Habermas’s reasonable affections and hear his cries. Our common concern, despite our differing views, is for the peaceful life of nations. But the chief question of this thesis now is not how to achieve allegiance to universal norms but rather how to renew affective wisdom and critical loyalties in diverse localities in order that the common good might be pursued both locally and globally.

5 Renewing Political Affections According to Scruton, the ‘phantom’ political existence of the heights ‘poisons our attachment to the realities through which we might, in our fallen condition, live and find fulfilment’.1 His elegy is no antidote but rather summons us to discover one. The enquiry now comes to its final phase by considering where people should look to find renewal for their political affections and how such renewal might be effected in an enduring, intersubjective, and localized way. If the deficit and alienation common in contemporary democracies involves a substantial affective dimension as I have suggested, then answering these questions will have deep significance for the shape of our politics. In addressing these matters, I shall continue to respond to Habermas’s interest in what religious traditions have to offer towards the common good in ‘post-secular’ society. He is aware of the changing face of religious faith all over the globe and notes especially the ‘Evangelicals and the Muslims with their decentralized networks and globally operating movements’ in Africa, Asia, and across the Middle East. He rightly takes these as political phenomena which are worthy of consideration alongside the mainstream, centralized bodies such as the Roman Catholic Church.2 In accord with these recognitions, I shall now consider how the Holy Spirit’s work in and through the body of Christ as it is expressed in diverse local churches might bring renewal in societies’ political affections. In keeping with the rationale of Chapter 4, I shall do this by showing how the concept of affection weaves together the thought of leading Christian theologians from the 1 R. Scruton, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Carcanet, 1990), 327. 2 J. Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of What is Missing (Polity Press, 2010), 19–20.

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churches local to the United Kingdom, such as Bernd Wannenwetsch, Brian Brock, Oliver O’Donovan, David Ford, and the late Dan Hardy.

I. TRANSMISSION, TRUST, AND TRANSPOSITION Bernd Wannenwetsch observes that in modern society, ‘everything has its place—except for political worship’. Worship of God is political in that God ‘ruleth on high’ and the local congregation which worships such a God is itself a ‘public’.3 Amidst such worship churches’ Christian ethics are formed amidst such worship before the ‘complex and pluriform political life [of churches] spills over, so to speak, into the secular polis’.4 But in many modern societies, there has been a failure to accommodate political worship and so politics itself has become an idolatrous object of worship. This happens when ‘the two secular states [oikonomia and politia] detach themselves from their relationship to worship’ and ‘assume a cultic character’.5 A politics which is not conscious of and receptive to the significance of Christian worship has deeply idolatrous tendencies. As we have seen, the risk of idolatry permeates much modern political discourse, whether as nationalist ethnocentrism or post-nationalist constitutional patriotism. Therefore, a political conception is needed which is less prone to encourage such idolatry and yet might attract support beyond those who are favourable to Christian ‘political worship’ because of personal religious conviction. Wannenwetsch describes how Habermas recognizes ‘the role of religion’s character as a public of its own . . . neither seeing it as an undefined part of “the” public as a whole, nor assigning it to the private sphere, but . . . conceding it a transmitter role’.6 On Habermas’s view, religion, like literature and art, is a place where political problems are first experienced in the form of social trauma. That glimpsed experience may then be transmitted to the wider political public in a way which supports political discourse.7 In the terms of the preceding chapters, the affective beginnings of

3 4 5 6 7

B. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship (OUP, 2004), 7. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 11. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 63. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 270. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (MIT Press, 1996), 441ff.

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understanding which reside in intersubjective experiences of trauma (and celebration!) reside first and foremost in publics which are essentially unrelated to coercive politics. Habermas therefore avoids the lazy characterization of religion as irrational-because-essentially-passionate, the diagnosis criticized by Cavanagh in Chapter 1. Although not essentially different from artistic activities such as painting, Habermas recognizes that the ‘transmitter’ contribution of a distinctively religious public, such as a church, to political society lies in its identity as a formed rather than a manufactured public—the former is given identity while the latter has to create it for itself. The body of Christ’s selfconception is that it does not have to pursue its own identity but rather is given identity by ‘the founder Spirit’.8 As such it is a public but is unlike the manufactured publics of political parties and interest groups. It stands apart from such publics as a transmitter of the communications in which political society consists, able both ‘to stabilize and extend civil society and public, and to assure themselves of their own identity and ability to act’.9 Churches’ renewal of their own common life is therefore logically prior to the stabilizing, enriching service they can perform in society. Churches’ communication of affective understanding within their own communities is the necessary precondition for the transmission or sharing of affective wisdom in order to assist wider political society’s communications in the goods and concerns which all share in common. Taken in this way, Habermas seems to be allowing that certain kinds of pre-political moral unity in the form of religious publics may be politically beneficial to a people or a supranational grouping of peoples. However, Wannenwetsch argues that, in contemporary life, the exclusion of the act of worship from modern societies has materially damaged those societies’ vital processes of arriving at consensus.10 Referring to the biblical image of the diversity of languages following the hubris of Babel, he observes that ‘the need for communicative endeavour and consensual processes can be perceived in a positive sense as humanity’s Babylonian inheritance’.11 These processes— however necessary in a world of plural moral languages and outlooks—

8 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 272. Cf. ‘These identity politics are constituted in worship, where Church becomes Church’ (272). 9 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 454. 10 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 215. 11 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 224.

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are radically threatened by the ever-present hermeneutic of suspicion which has undermined ‘basic trust’, ‘the political basis for which there is no substitute, either through a constitutional guarantee of participatory rights, or through the procedural provision of ideal communicative conditions, such as is demanded in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas’.12 Wannenwetsch is especially concerned about trust in words but sees that such trust ‘must be based on experiences in everyday life’, which, on my interpretation, are the ordinary, localized, embodied, affective experiences which were investigated and celebrated in Chapter 4. Wannenwetsch himself alludes to the passionate quality of social trust inasmuch as trust typically exposes itself to an experience of suffering. Those who trust make themselves vulnerable. Describing trust in light of the affective concerns of this investigation is but one of the necessary routes to understanding its role in human life. Trust is a word with a wide range of conceptual application and moreover requires distinction from other concepts. For example, trust is not simply the same as reliance. We might rely on an unscheduled night-time visitor’s fearful response to our burglar alarm but we obviously do not trust them. Trust can be conceptualized in relation to words, gestures, actions, and other everyday features of human life. It can be investigated philosophically and sociologically, in terms of strategies of cooperation and as an aspect of evolutionary theory. For example, Annette Baier suggests that, where trust is defined strictly positively, the generative conditions for trust might reasonably be summarized as reliance on cooperation by others of goodwill amidst uncertainty, although this claim requires much qualification.13 Trust, then, has many dimensions. But for the sake of this investigation into the affective dimension of political relations, it is enough to observe, with Baier, that attention to trust ‘shows us the inadequacy of attempting to classify mental phenomena into the “cognitive,” the “affective,” and the “conative.” Trust, if it is any of these, is all three.’14 Baier’s refusal to accept easy dualisms is consistent with the discussion’s earlier findings in theory of emotions and neuroscience and the description of affections as cognitive, evaluative, attracted participations which shape the reflection and deliberation

12 13 14

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 312. A. Baier, Moral Prejudices (Harvard University Press, 1994), 98–106. Baier, Moral Prejudices, 132.

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that determines individual and collective action. Trust should be partially understood as a shared common evaluative recognition of some aspect of the moral order refracted through one or more ordines amoris. Trust may be formed, in other words, between members of a single community where there is a shared evaluative framework or between two or more such communities, whether within one nationstate or across national boundaries. With this said, it is important to observe trust’s ambivalent moral quality. Mistrust is characteristic of the negotiation and renegotiation of shared values and is familiar to any society going through a time of change, especially the rapid social change characteristic in the Western experience since the Second World War. In this context, the perceived value of stable social trust will be indexed to an individual or group perspective on whether that trust is operating for good or for ill. Thus Baier observes that ‘a trust-tied community without justice [is] but a group of mutual blackmailers and exploiters’15 and that there ‘are immoral as well as moral trust relationships, and trustbusting can be a morally proper goal’.16 Augustine observes that ‘even robbers, to ensure greater efficiency and security in their assaults on the peace of the rest of mankind, desire to preserve peace with their associates’.17 In a parallel way, trust ‘is not always a good, to be preserved. There must be some worthwhile enterprise in which the trusting and trusted parties are involved.’18 In her analysis of what counts as worthwhile, Baier, like Nussbaum, is particularly attentive to the experience of infants and parents, and maintains, over against the (largely male) belief that the notion of contract should be definitive of our social arrangements, that any account of trust should be adequate to describe that basic familial relationship. This focus on children coheres with our previous analysis, and especially Nigel Biggar’s affirmation of gratitude towards our early carers and critical patriotism with regard to the locality in which we have been raised. A ‘national trust’ depends then to some extent on allegiance to the land which we have inherited from previous generations. Indeed, this is at least partly what the National Trust in England, Wales and Northern Ireland depends upon. Birth in these lands is not a necessary qualification for membership of the National Trust but, as Biggar argued, localized commitments are the basis on 15 17

Baier, Moral Prejudices, 120. Augustine, City of God, 19.12.

16

Baier, Moral Prejudices, 95. Baier, Moral Prejudices, 130.

18

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which affective bonds with those from further afield are formed. Those who hold a land in trust over centuries should not clench their fists tight shut but rather hold the land open for visitors or legitimate permanent newcomers to share.19 Similarly, by way of an earlier illustration, the notion of trust in English land law suggested that affections are themselves constitutive of social trust. Or again, affective trust is seen in the anger shared by a judge and jurors as representatives of the people over against a convicted criminal. That shared affection partially constitutes the cooperation between the people and the judiciary in a situation where common valuations have been questioned by the criminal and need to be publicly restated in the form of a court verdict and sentence. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, national institutional events such as royal weddings and jublee celebrations provide an extraordinary focus for uniting a large proportion of the population in celebration and a small proportion in their republican sympathies. The political leadership of such events coordinates affective understanding in such a way as to promote these diverse forms of trust. In healthcare, the trust relationship between doctors and patients or nurses and patients is partially constituted by the way different parties respond affectively to illness and recovery, birth and death. On another level, community organizing is a mode of social activity whereby the base of evaluative, affective agreement is widened and strengthened with the result that political authorities can be addressed in a coordinated fashion by a group of people who trust one another.20 The transfer of community centres from control by local political authorities to control by charities or local people is another example of the way that affections can be coordinated around a common object in such a way as to extend social trust and solidarity. All these phenomena illustrate the way that social trust arises partially in the shared affective understandings which characterize any institution where people (for example) sorrow, rejoice, or fear together concerning the common objects which concern their common good. Memory held in the tradition of the institution maintains these

19 For readers unfamiliar with the National Trust, it is a membership organization which conserves many of the finest buildings, estates, parks, gardens, and areas of natural beauty in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. 20 Cf. L. Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

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affections in bonds of trust, providing an agreed stable place from which a community may engage into common reflection and deliberation. Without trust, there is no intersubjective, stable starting point for political life but instead the threat of slippage into the hermeneutics of suspicion. The shared enduring affections which constitute trust provide a preliminary consensus concerning how to begin to understand the world. Such trust is ‘neither knowledge nor ignorance, neither certainty nor naivety’,21 but rather the shared beginning of understanding. With this positive and affective interpretation of trust in mind, consider Wannenwetsch’s claim that ‘the irreplaceable political service which the Church can offer to the “body politic” (in the literal sense) is to show how in a political organism joint ways of arriving at convictions can be pursued and carried through to an end’.22 Wannenwetsch defines joint convictions in terms of the ‘homology’ or ‘consensus’ which may occur in and through political worship. The church has the ‘task of arriving at consensus as a gift’.23 The way to such an ordered and graciously given institutional life is ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8: 2) which governs the practices of the institution. He describes how ‘the Spirit that lends assurance gives the openness which is required for a really free discourse. Its ecstatic mode of efficacy breaks down hard and fast positions, and permits new unwonted experiences. Of course this openness has its necessary frontiers too; but their position cannot be discovered in advance.’24 Such openness makes reaching new consensus possible. Its basis is the assurance that the Spirit brings and which rests on the justifying actions and words of God.25 Assurance is experienced subjectively in memory and received by faith as the Spirit brings back in the present what God has said and done in the past, thereby offering an opportunity for a fresh renewal of faith and a renewed affective understanding of value. This source of stability is precisely what is necessary for openness to the future as opposed to knowing ‘in advance’ the nature of the good life. The Spirit brings 21

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 314; cf. 312ff. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 299. 23 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 26. 24 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 301–2. 25 Cf. B. Brock, Singing the Ethos of God (Eerdmans, 2007), 138: ‘the foundation for any true human knowledge is God’s decision to look away from our sins in forgiveness and instead to see us as we were created to be’. Cf. ibid. 186ff. 22

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that openness, breaking down inapposite ideas of what is good and right and facilitating the penitence which can overcome mistrust and initiate new affective agreements. Moreover, Wannenwetsch’s account of political worship is by no means abstract. Rather the ‘whole Church is represented in its Catholic completeness’ in every act of worship by any two or three gathered together.26 The localization of political worship must then be essential to churches’ task of forming a consensus. For the Spirit’s work in churches should enable people to experience cooperation with those close at hand, to form friendships in localities, and to learn to trust others from similar and different ethnic and social backgrounds.27 This discussion’s account of affection enables further clarification of Wannenwetsch’s approach. For it has been said (a) that affections are constitutionally open to discovery of the newness that can yield intersubjective consensus, (b) that intersubjective affectivity which the Spirit achieves in churches is often initially accomplished precisely through moments of breakthrough such as Barnabas’s joy at the faith of the Gentiles, (c) that trust is built during the process whereby differing affections are discussed and verified, (d) that affections are most basically attracted and stabilized within localities, and (e) that those localities are spread across the face of the earth in every nation, tribe, and tongue, wherever ecclesial life is lived. Here then is the way that churches offer ‘a basic clue to political life’28 concerning joint agreements and action. Trust is formed, quite specifically, through intersubjective affectivity as affections are experienced, shared, discussed, and verified in myriad local ecclesial contexts across the face of the earth.29 Christian affections, learnt from the Spirit in churches, contribute to social trust as salt preserving trust from suspicion and as light illumining the epistemological path which trust should take.

26

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 73. This form of Christian social reflection could usefully be placed in sustained conversation with Robert Putnam’s work on bridging and bonding capital. R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000); R. Putnam (ed.), Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (OUP, 2002); R. Putnam and D. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010). 28 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 300. 29 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 226; ‘the values will not, indeed, be simply the same, but they will be capable of concurrence (open to a process in which consensus can be arrived at)’. 27

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However, performing this service is not straightforward for at least three reasons. First, in the contemporary climate, churches are often mistrusted and contrasted to the trustworthiness of secular law. Baier comments that if ‘trust is seen as a variant of the suspect virtue of faith in the competence of the powers that be, then readiness to trust will be seen not just as a virtue of the weak but itself as a moral weakness’.30 She has in mind especially the monkish virtue of obedience, whether to God or to some religious superior. But such ‘authoritative commanders’ are in general not to be trusted in light of the general principle of experience that ‘power corrupts’.31 No doubt it is true that people are corrupt and often they are corrupted by the temptations of power. What is strange is that when it comes to the US Supreme Court, Baier announces that ‘we rely not on procedure of investigations and threat of sanctions but simply on these officeholders’ trustworthiness, their sense of our sense of the central importance of that particular bit of our total network of social and public trust’ and explicitly commends this regard for judges as ‘a tremendously important case of public meta-trust’.32 This move is exactly analogous to Nussbaum’s conceptual dependence on the compassion of judges which was noted in Chapter 1. Similar arguments apply in this setting, namely that such trust in judges is naïve and is likely to be one-sided, especially in the context of the culture wars of the US. Where ‘in God we trust’ has been replaced by ‘in the members of the Supreme Court we trust’, then this simply begs the question as to what happens when the Supreme Court fails to judge justly. Where law becomes increasingly a substitute for relationships of trust and, therefore, becomes what is ultimately trusted, the work of churches to renew social trust becomes all the more demanding. Second, mistrust is not just directed at churches but is endemic, constituted by diverse and seemingly irreconcilable affective evaluations, within and between the plural communities which constitute contemporary Western societies. The pressure on established ordines amoris by many other orders of value has caused extensive renegotiations of valuation by successive generations. Recognizing this reality is not to suggest that there is actually a plurality of value. That would be to deny the existence of a moral order.33 Rather it is a recognition 30

Baier, Moral Prejudices, 108. 32 Baier, Moral Prejudices, 192–3. Baier, Moral Prejudices, 163. 33 O. O’Donovan, ‘Reflections on Pluralism’, Kuyper Centre Review (Eerdmans, 2010), 1–13. 31

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of the brute fact of there being a plurality of valuation formed by rival and incommensurable religious, philosophical, and non-systematic worldviews. We might call the widespread phenomenon of affective disagreement in society the ‘trust deficit’, similar but not reducible to the ‘democratic’ and ‘motivational deficit’ about which Habermas is concerned. The trust deficit is attested by the difficulties people experience in reaching consensus either within churches or in other sectors of society at large. The task of forming trust is, therefore, difficult and long-term. Persuasion about value takes many forms and may require extended periods of time. Intersubjective verification of value, necessary because of differing affective valuations, will not necessarily be resolved in consensus but often issues in disagreement and continuing mistrust. Nonetheless, in this context, churches do have peculiarly rich resources to overcome the ‘trust deficit’ and enable a provisional and partial reestablishment of trust within the world. For inasmuch as a church has established both common objects concerning which affective understanding is attracted and patterns of worship wherein those affections may become intersubjective, it may build and share trust within itself which overflows throughout its neighbourhood. In Wannenwetsch’s terms, the church consists of ‘real people, who live and act in both contexts as those who are equipped with experiences of consensus’.34 The result may be complex as affective evaluations may remain at odds. But the presence of a diverse body of people who have the capacity to share affective agreement may itself be experienced as a sign of hope which invites continued conversation towards consensus in any given locality. Christian or church-led community organizing follows this logic as affective evaluations are shared by an increasing circle of people and focused in such a way as to make consensus about value, reflection, and deliberation most likely. Third, the interrelation of trust and what I have called ‘loyalty’ requires careful consideration. Social trust can become the basis on which we either give or withhold our support for some political attitude or affection. For if a church’s affective evaluations did enable the community beyond the church to achieve consensus, then that new social consensus might conflict with some demand for political 34 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 301. This is a further way of specifying the sanctification which does indeed take place, in fragile and fragmentary ways, in a people’s life, and is achieved as a gift by the founder Spirit.

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loyalty from political representatives who do not share the new prevailing social affective understanding. This returns us to the discussion of representation in Chapters 3 and 4 but now on an even more locally specified level. A church is well-suited to such a context because, as a formed public, it should have the confidence to look beyond political loyalties since its pre-political and post-political allegiance remains ultimately with the Kingdom of God. That confidence equips a church to preserve affective evaluations—perhaps anger against injustice, perhaps joy or hope concerning a good which the community wishes to see preserved or realized—over against the demand for political loyalty to share the affective evaluation of a political representative which might diminish or dismiss such affective understanding. In answer to Baier, therefore, loyalty to a transcendent God may appropriately energize local social affective trust over against corrupt political authority. This is of course not the only way social trust may operate. The alternative is possible and indeed common, namely that the social trust accords with political loyalty and may even be energized by it, as Chapter 3’s discussion of ‘leadership’ indicated.35 And yet a church which believes that there is always the moral order beyond its own ordo amoris, or that of the society in which it lives, will never be satisfied that any representative political authority has fully grasped the good of the community in which the church lives its life. Rather, it will always seek repentance in its own life and allow that experience of godly sorrow to energize political change. In summary, Habermas’s invitation to local churches’ to be involved in transmission has been reconfigured as trust-transmission and redefined as intersubjective affection-transmission. However, Habermas’s notion of transmission is now being stretched in such a way as to suggest it is inadequate to describe the blessing churches can bestow upon the localities where they live. And so the notion of transmission itself needs to be overhauled or even rejected. This can be achieved through the Lutheran concept which Wannenwetsch calls ‘transposition’. This move, arising from within Habermas’s own German tradition, turns the tables on Habermas by denying the equivalence of religion to art or literature and by repositioning religion, especially the Christian faith, as itself a vital source both of

35

O. O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), 72.

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the very conditions for participative democracy and of wisdom about political life, rather than an ‘early-warning’ system for political problems. Nicholas Adams comments that Habermas ‘wants the power and the inspiration [of religion] without the danger’ of its uncritical loyalty and so wishes to ‘prise apart [religion’s] worldview-unifying forces from [its] ethically binding forces’ to get at the motivational power which can overcome the motivational deficit in contemporary politics. The result is that ‘“religion” and “theology” are casual victims’ in Habermas’s thought. In particular, the specificity of religious traditions is underplayed.36 And so, while recognizing that Habermas’s suggestion that Christianity is a kind of transmitter was made in good faith, it is necessary to reassert the particular gifts which Christian faith brings to political discourse. The turn to ‘transposition’ is not to be conceived as a bid for public recognition of a private belief but rather, from the perspective of the participant, as an already public reality which requires recognition if discussion about ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ is to achieve anything useful at all. Transposition centres human life in the work of the Holy Spirit through the body of Christ. In transposition, a Christian ‘lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love’.37 All the good which Christ has is transposed to the Christian by the Holy Spirit. Since an abundance has now been given to the Christian in her salvation through marriage to Christ, the Christian’s life is a surplus which can be given to serve her neighbour. Christian political action is not to be taken as if this abundance was real but in confidence that it is real. What is at stake is nothing less than the way that interaction between citizens is conceived, a kind of social theory. The contrast is with political philosophies which have an inner logic of scarcity or deficiency which ‘makes the other in a threateningly primary way a competitor for restricted goods, and someone who can therefore only in a secondary way become a partner’.38 The scarcity of material goods is a pressing concern for political action and its seriousness is not doubted. But Wannenwetsch observes how the political theories devised to deal with scarcity fail to engage us in the otherness of our fellow citizens. That otherness is threatened both by the tendency of 36

N. Adams, Habermas and Theology (CUP, 2006), 12–13. M. Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, in Luther’s Works, xxxi, ed. J. Pelikan and N. Lehmann (Concordia, 1957), 371. 38 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 332–3. 37

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the Rawlsian original position to overwhelm the other in an imaginative, even empathetic, but nonetheless abstract procedure in which ‘the other’s difference all too easily gets lost’ and by the tendency of discourse ethics to distance the other from the distinctive facticity by which he remains genuinely other than me.39 But transposition works from God’s abundance to the neighbour’s necessity, neither conceiving that necessity as a competitive threat, nor overwhelming the otherness of the neighbour nor being detached from him. Rather the focus is precisely on the neighbour’s need when construed in the context of God’s abundant gift to the Christian who approaches the neighbour as ‘Christ’, that is, in assured possession of all the fullness of Christ and, with Christ, as the trusted inheritor of all the earth.40 Instead of a loss of otherness, it is ‘only through the abundance from which the one transposed can draw, that the relationship remains free—remains political or becomes so’.41 This is a powerful contribution to overcoming the motivational deficit to solidarity for it refuses the disintegration of solidarity which a political marriage to scarcity imposes. Instead, confident of the eschatological inheritance of the earth and providential abundant goodness in the here and now, it is free to respect others’ identity and freedom. Wannenwetsch does not fully develop the affective form of the transposition, though hints at it by referring to the Samaritan’s ‘passion for the neighbour’ and what he suggests is Jesus’ ‘chief emotion’, compassion.42 His main emphasis is that action towards the neighbour will involve emotions consonant with the abundance or ‘fullness of God’.43 He writes that because ‘this transposition into the other is not a matter of a special skill, but is a phenomenon springing from abundance, Paul can also speak quite unreservedly about an emotional indwelling in the other: “If one member suffers, 39

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 328. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 328–9; cf. Augustine, On the First Epistle of John, Homily 7.10: ‘love has eyes which give intelligence of him who is in need’. Eric Gregory comments that to ‘love an eternal and incomprehensible God for Augustine, stretches the soul to allow for a qualitatively different kind of love which can now include all that is not God. God is not an inexhaustible or scarce resource, subject to competing claims.’ Politics and the Order of Love (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 40. 41 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 333. 42 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 334; it is not clear why Wannenwetsch singles out compassion in this way. As indicated below, it seems to me that it is the interrelation of compassion with joy, among other affections, that gives it intelligibility. 43 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 334. 40

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all suffer together with him; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with him” (1 Corinthians 12:26).’44 This participation in the other by emotion is not easy since ‘in the emotional dimension as well, we all too soon come up against the limits of our concern and our capacity for sympathy’.45 Transposition so construed operates as an alternative public doctrine of sociality whereby conceptions of possibility for human interactions in society are challenged and transfigured. For those who doubt the logic of abundance, the persuasive power will lie in the conduct of the people of God and the effects that conduct has on wider society. Two adaptations to Wannenwetsch’s account will explicate this doctrine further. First, transposition does not necessarily involve a neighbour’s need. As in 1 Corinthians 12: 26, there is a transposition which involves honouring and rejoicing, affections not attracted by need and necessity. Thus we may say that an affective transposition into the neighbour’s condition, whether one of need or plenty, is the beginning of understanding concerning what would constitute right action towards the neighbour. Transposition is thus partially constituted by an attracted recognition of the condition of a feature of the moral order, construed through a particular church’s order of value. Second, although politics is often about addressing need or righting wrong and so ‘need’ is what affective transposition will often recognize, need is not the basic category of the moral order vindicated in Christ. Instead, there is a deep ‘logic of overflow’ within the world, a claim consonant with Wannenwetsch’s account of abundance. Ford and Hardy claim that the ‘resurrection of the crucified Jesus Christ is this logic at the heart of Christianity’.46 Following the intense concentration of death upon Jesus at the cross, the abundance of life has been made available through his resurrection. This is now the ‘basic reality’ of all existence.47 For Christ the crucified Lamb is stretched out throughout all the localities of Europe, the USA, and throughout the globe and Christ the cosmic risen Lamb holds all people and places together in himself. A Christian account of need which follows this logic does not revert to Nussbaum’s overly negative account in which emotion is characteristically directed towards the out-of-control 44 45 46 47

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 337. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 342. D. Hardy and D. Ford, Jubilate (Darton Longman and Todd, 1984), 73. Hardy and Ford, Jubilate, 73.

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which is needed by the self and experienced as a knife in a wound. Rather the affective understandings which constitute Christian compassion and sorrow participate in Christ’s wounds but are only intelligible in terms of the joy in abundance which those wounds of the risen Christ made available to all people. Thus contra Nussbaum, we see in the incarnate and ascended Christ that external transcendence is of the essence in drawing people in deep participative affection throughout all parts of the here-and-now world. This ‘logic of overflow’ shows how Christian political affections can serve the public good and assist the establishment of social trust,48 and coincides with Gregory’s encouragement for Augustinians to ‘develop an account of neighbor-love that analogically mediates ecclesial identity to the social role of citizenship without conflating the two’.49 Christian political affection construes the neighbour’s condition in terms of the abundance of creation vindicated by Christ and abundance now available to the Christian wedded to Christ. This occurs within churches’ own internal life but is also mediated into the life of other citizens as churches live out their calling in their locality. The overflow’s protection against conflation is eschatological, reflecting Edwards’s pattern of excellency by association and differentiation. Churches participate affectively in that pattern by engaging in the neighbour’s need or plenty to understand it in terms of the abundant life given in Christ, thereby reassuring themselves of their own guaranteed identity while at the same time committing to close social identity with their neighbours. Affections which understand the world in this way can both bolster and reorient social trust. In the context of cooperation theory, transposition is both similar but distinct from ‘nice strategies’ since those who are adopted into it both take initiatives in the context of low social trust and yet can have confidence that they will not be put to shame even if they are ‘suckered’ by those with whom they interact. So Jesus taught when he sent his church out into the world that they should ‘be wise as serpents but innocent as doves’.50 48 Hardy and Ford, Jubilate, 19. The political application is picked up at Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 339 n. 26, which, interestingly, is just the direction which Hardy and Ford note but do not pursue at Jubilate, 138ff. 49 Gregory, Politics, 55. 50 Matthew 10: 16. Cf. R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1985). It would be an interesting study to explore further how this thinking relates to game theory. For game theory thinking in UK politics, cf. D. Willetts, The Pinch: How

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For Rawls, ‘mistrust remains the fundamental category’51 behind the veil of ignorance. The veiled people’s shared assumption yields only a very minimal form of trust while Habermas’s account encourages an ambivalent distancing from the localized sources of trust. Neither of these seems adequate to describe the reality and possibility of locally fostered social trust. By contrast, affective understandings of the world in terms of the abundance of the crucified Christ’s resurrection promise to undercut the reason for mistrust and instead form trust which energizes and gives epistemological direction to churches and their neighbourhoods. As such, they provide the very conditions in which participative democracy can flourish as intersubjective affective participation constitutes the common trust which facilitates free and open public discourse. To see how this comes about, we need to enquire further into the source and nature of Christian political affections.

II. FAITH IN GOD AS THE SOURCE OF JOYFUL PRAISE Addressing God, Augustine recalled how ‘you remain immutable above all things, and yet deigned to dwell in my memory since the time I learnt about you’.52 While he was yet ‘unlovely’,53 God loved him and set up home in Augustine’s ‘storehouses’. God’s gracious initiative provided an ultimate but strange stability for his memory. Addressing God, he remembers how ‘you touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours’.54 The sweetness of God’s love both brought him a provisional rest and peace and set him on fire for eternal rest and eternal peace. The subjective, creaturely grasp, whereby God’s gracious, stabilizing initiative is welcomed, is what Christian orthodoxy has called faith. Such faith, achieved in a person by the gift of the Holy Spirit, is

the Baby Boomers Took their Children’s Future—And Why they Should Give it Back (Atlantic Books, 2010). 51 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 331. 52 Augustine, Confessiones 10.xxv.36; ‘tu . . . inconmutabilis manes super omnia et dignatus es habitare in memoria mea, ex quo te didici’. 53 54 Confessiones 10.xxvii.38. Confessiones 10.xxvii.38.

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an awakened clinging to the God who has already taken the initiative to know us and dwell with us. Ford and Hardy suggest that the ‘first cognitive content of faith is the knowledge that we are known and that this knowledge of us by God is not abstract . . . but passionately concerned to the point of identification with us’.55 God’s passionate knowledge of us is primarily located in the ‘crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . the wisdom of God in its greatest concentration’.56 God has wisely and mercifully taken the initiative by participating in our creaturely life in order to save us. The inner, gracious logic of this initiative indicates that it can only be known by God’s gift of faith. To recognize that we are already intimately known-and-loved by God suggests that our knowledge of his knowing-and-loving comes from God in the form of an awakening to himself. It is by the gift of faith that we awaken to recognize the passionate, participatory knowledge which God already has of us through his Son. Such an awakening to God in faith involves at least some articulable knowledge of who God is and what he has done. For example, we come to know by faith that he is One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that he is our Maker and Redeemer. Such knowing I call here ‘dogmatic’ knowledge. By ‘dogmatic’, I mean no less than the sense of the normal, theological usage. Faith is dogmatic in that it involves knowing to some extent the nature of the object of faith: that God is, for example, sovereign, good, just, and merciful and that God’s Son became incarnate. But I do mean more than that obvious usage. For ‘dogmatic’ faith entails a certain valuation of the object of faith. In Oliver O’Donovan’s words, dogma should be understood as partially constituted by ‘doxa, an act of praise, in which the being and work of God is the first and last thing on our lips’.57 To which insight I add that the act of praise, whereby, for example, we sing or declare the wonders of the death and resurrection of the Son of God, is partially constituted by an affective recognition by which I mean an attracted, evaluative, affective understanding. Political worship, in Wannenwetsch’s sense, is centrally (though not solely) constituted

55

56 Hardy and Ford, Jubilate, 108. Hardy and Ford, Jubilate, 108. O. O’Donovan, ‘What Can Ethics Know about God?’, in M. Banner and A. Torrance (eds.), The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics (T. & T. Clark, 2006), 34. 57

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by the practice of praise58 and thus we can say that affective understanding is central to political worship within the body of Christ, the church in its diverse local expressions. So dogmatic faith involves the worshipful practice of praise and this praise expresses affective understandings. A core affective understanding to which praise gives expression is joy. In praise, we celebrate the abundant goodness of God and his works. Joy is an affection which characteristically recognizes what it sees as good. It may be deceived of course. As Augustine says, ‘that is the authentic happy life, to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you . . . The happy life is joy based on the truth.’ But Augustine knows this is not the only joy available. Indeed, ‘those who think that the happy life is found elsewhere, pursue another joy and not the true one. Nevertheless their will remains drawn towards some image of the true joy.’59 Praise of God is the practice which directs joy aright. For praise’s logic is eschatological—it lauds and magnifies a God who is returning to renew the face of the earth. And so joy is not alone in praise but accompanied by hope which also recognizes the good, especially the future of the good. The apostle Paul encourages the Roman local church to live their lives ‘rejoicing in hope’ (Romans 12: 12). Hope is itself an object of joy, suggesting that joy’s work in praise is to construe the local church in light of the hoped-for future. Moreover, when hope is realized in the new heaven and the earth, joy will not disappear from praise but rather come to full fruition: hoping will be over but joy will continue. Through joy, the churches are continually drawn in an interested admiration into participation in God and the world for joy recognizes in attracted admiration the abundant goodness of God and his works. Joy is attracted by the graciousness of God’s initiative towards sinners in need of grace. That grace is joyfully recognized as good for humanity because of humanity’s need for the goodness of God, his world, and his redeeming work. The revelation of God’s grace ‘enables our knowing to be always praising’60 since a faith-based knowing of goodness will always involve praising that goodness, a praising which is inextricable from a joyful understanding of the object of praise, a joy which is directed towards the eschatological hope. Faith clings to the God who has 58 59 60

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 6–7. Augustine, Confessiones 10.xxii.32–xxiii.33. Hardy and Ford, Jubilate, 108.

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already grasped us and knit himself into the world in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus for the sake of our salvation. Christ is spread out across the face of earth as the Lamb who was slain now available to faith as the risen and glorious King and in whom suffering, death, and life are now intelligible. That affections spring from such a faith accounts for the strange stability of Augustine’s experience. For the affections of such faith would be attracted to Jesus Christ with respect to both his salvific, incarnate sufferings and his resurrection. Thus, inasmuch as they are attached to Christ, such affections would be conditioned by his experience of both the fallenness of creation in his body on the tree and the first fruits of the vindication of creation at his resurrection. He was both at peace and yet still longing for the peace to come.

III. JOYFUL PRAISE AS THE BEGINNING OF POLITICAL ETHICS This analysis of faith, praise, joy, and hope sheds light on our political concerns, especially trust. Wannenwetsch observes that Hannah Arendt’s account of political initium may be fruitfully reinterpreted with respect to political worship in terms of God’s gracious initiative that in turn creates a people who make beginnings in their worshipful activities.61 We receive the initiative by faith and recognize it by joyful hope expressed through praise. This seems to be the meaning of Oliver O’Donovan’s claim that the practice of praise is ‘a kind of proving or demonstration of the fact of God’s kingly rule’.62 A congregation’s intersubjective, joyful, hopeful praise recognizes that God’s government is good for the congregation. Such praise welcomes as good the merciful, kingly rule of YHWH over his people in the crucified and risen Christ. This correlation between God in his kingly rule and the hopeful joy of his people is a deep form of representation. For praise of God welcomes the One who is alone worthy of praise both in himself and, as Lord and Saviour, as the One 61 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 10; cf. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175ff. 62 O. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (CUP, 1996), 48; cf. his claim that God’s kingly rule ‘takes effect in the praises of his people’ (48).

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who promises the hope of a future for his people. The one who achieves representation for us is Jesus Christ. Recognition of him in hopeful joy, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, proves the identity of the people of God, as Luke and Acts attest. This representative correlation is achieved by the same Holy Spirit ‘by whom we cry “Abba Father”’ and who ‘himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Romans 8: 15–16). Joyful, hopeful praise proves the identity of the people as the people of God but their identity is not construed in a worldly political fashion since they praise not as craven slaves but as free and joyful sons and daughters, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8: 17). The joyful, hopeful praise of free children announces to the world the kind of life which is possible for humans under political authority (i.e. the authority of God). A church is thus conceived ‘not as a safe haven from the world but as the focal point of a praising people caught up in Christ’s service to the world’.63 Her praises are joyful, hopeful utterances which enable the children of God to be the city on a hill, as they awaken in faith to praise that which is abundantly good, thereby overflowing with the epistemological light of hopeful joy both to one another and to the peoples of the world who walk in darkness. Transposing this intersubjective hopeful joy in public is a service which churches may render to meet the deficit in trust which characterizes political society. As we saw, trust consists partially in shared affective understandings. And yet suspicion today threatens the hope that cooperation and trust are possible. The world is encountered by many as a place of fearful uncertainty. But churches rejoice in a certain hope free from fear. This frees them to contribute to political society by recognizing what is good and committing in hope as a cooperative community to the realization of the good, thereby serving to rebuild trust. Society at large is substantially constituted by its ability to enjoy the goods it shares in common. This common joy in common goods is the essential constituent of a political community for it establishes the bond of trust which enables people to proceed into reflection and deliberation confident that there is a provisional consensus concerning the nature of the good. Wider society does not rejoice as churches do in the saving work of Jesus Christ. Yet, if persuaded, people may join in the churches’ hopeful joy as that joy is transposed into common

63

Brock, Singing, 163.

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goods of society’s life, such as harvest, marriage, children, voluntary social care, state welfare provision, and peaceful neighbourhoods. The churches’ hopeful joy in these objects depends ultimately on the Spirit who can preserve joy when it is threatened with suspicion and fear. As a fruit of the Spirit, this Christian joy also has distinctive wisdom about the significance of the objects in which it rejoices. The transposition of the churches’ affections into such goods may, therefore, suggest to wider society distinctively Christian reasons for rejoicing, thus opening up an apologetic opportunity. By way of illustrations, one thinks of the bolstering of the Women’s Institute by a Christian joy in children as God’s gifts, thereby warding off the onset of a culture of fear directed towards children as impositions on autonomous lives. Or again, one thinks of the way that churches’ joy in community and their facility for achieving discursive consensus enables shared community spaces and the organization of local life. Christian joy has the capacity to create and preserve consensus about common goods, thereby building social trust. But as well as acting as a preservative, Christian affections may also disturb, renew, or correct patterns of social trust, renewing and challenging political loyalty and representation. By way of an explicitly political example, consider the transformation of the tone and leadership of the United Kingdom Conservative Party since 2005 with regard to poverty. The originally American phenomenon of ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ received a painstaking evidence-based makeover in the creation of the non-partisan Centre for Social Justice.64 A turn in understanding from fear to compassion through the Roman Catholic Iain Duncan Smith revealed the deep ambivalence within the modern Conservative Party concerning a growing underclass in UK society. His Antiochene experience occurred in Easterhouse, Glasgow, where he was awakened, partly through the witness of Christians, to the complex social needs of Britain today. It was Antiochene for he recognized, as Barnabas did, the deep significance of being one nation and one people, construing the condition of Easterhouse in terms of the rest of the land. Such experiences transform and renew social trust and political loyalties upon which peoples depend. This analysis highlights the importance of distinguishing between social trust and Christian faith. Wannenwetsch comments that ‘in the

64

http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk.

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experience of the communion of worship a political identity for Christian citizens can be developed which is socially hard to domesticate’.65 As Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells pointedly observe, the goal of ecclesiological reflection should not be ‘to secure a valued place for Christianity in a liberal-democratic consensus bounded by sin and compromise’.66 The reason for the untamed quality of Christian political identity, under Christ’s rule in the midst of earthly cities, is that faith is a divine bestowal by the Holy Spirit and oriented towards the word of God. However, it is locally expressed and often domestically mediated in the upbringing of children and families. As the local faith of a worshipping community, it may preserve or create social trust and overcome suspicion.67 This capacity of Christian faith is founded in its ability to resist deception because it has learnt to hold fast to the truthful word of God disclosed definitively in the good news of great joy concerning Jesus Christ.68 What follows from such faith is the affective understanding which achieves the work of renewing social trust. Thus social trust may be partially constituted by Christian affections. Christian faith’s special public service is to hold fast to the centre of all publics, namely Jesus Christ in whom all things hold together. From such faith springs a joy which resources social trust with the understanding it needs for its preservation and flourishing. It is in this way that joyful, hopeful praise is the beginning of political ethics. The Holy Spirit, in setting our joy upon Christ, the creation held together in Christ, and the new creation to come, enables evaluative recognition of the pluriform good in the most expansive framework possible for moral investigation.69 This joy is well-suited to initiate political ethics’ moral reflection and deliberation, whereby the good is known more deeply, the right is pursued more decisively, and the reasonable response for Christians is a return to joyful, hopeful praise. O’Donovan comments that ethics ‘belongs in between this first and last word of praise; its significance derives from its mediating position. Its task is to inform, out of praise and for 65

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 208. S. Hauerwas and S. Wells, ‘The Gift of the Church’, in Hauerwas and Wells (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell, 2006), 14. 67 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 279–97. 68 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 306. 69 Cf. Brock, Singing, 171, where Brock claims that only ‘in praise are we given an identity and thus a framework for moral judgments’. 66

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the sake of praise, the deliberative reasoning which determines practical human undertakings.’70 Recall that Lacoste observed that affective understanding has the first word in ethics but was reticent to speak about the last word. His eschatological modesty was appropriate to his philosophical task. But an exercise in Christian moral theology can speak with more confidence about joyful, hopeful praise at the beginning and the end. Such praise is indeed penurious in its initiation of our understanding concerning the goodness of the Lord and his works. But what follows from hopeful joy is reflection and deliberation whereby the good and the right are specified in more detail. Ethics thus offers a dogma-dependent way of returning to dogmatics with better reasons for praise. This is the form of moral learning which can only arise in the midst of Christian joy expressed in the praise that springs from faith in Christ. Praise can, of course, express joy in many things apart from God and his works, especially in the context of political ethics. Augustine recounts the range of apparently praiseworthy deities which filled the Roman imagination. He shows how these many ‘gods’ attended the various functions and aspects of human and earthly life: one god for the emission of seed, one god for its implantation, another to bring sensibility to the foetus, and so on. Augustine’s relentless examination of these gods and their roles demonstrates the incoherence of their mutual interrelation and indeed the incoherence of the idea that one god in particular, Jupiter, is able to be all the gods in himself. The moral judgement is that because the objects of their praise were incoherent, their ethical life was fragmentary at best.71 But Christian joy expressed in praise which is transposed into political society’s common life is very different than this. Its object, as we have seen, is the most comprehensive available, namely the One God of the universe and his works in creation and salvation. On account of this expansive and ultimate quality, it has both a pervasive effect on other affections and a wider field of attraction than other affections. The hopeful joy by which Christians begin to understand the common goods of political society values those objects in a way that makes compassion, grief, hatred, fear, and shame concerning those objects intelligible. Evaluations of goods are necessary if evaluations of ills are to have any meaningful content. It follows that the ills 70 71

O’Donovan, ‘What Can Ethics Know about God?’, 34. Augustine, City of God, e.g. 4.9–11, 7.2.

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which grief, hatred, fear, and shame recognize may also be construed by joy in terms of abundance. Joy thus frames the way that other affections make their beginnings. Joy, by initiating our understanding of the objectively good God and his works, recognizes the widest pluriform range of the good within which other affections may intelligibly participate. For this reason, I hold that compassion, though vital for political life, is not the paradigm political emotion as Martha Nussbaum maintained nor even, as Wannenwetsch suggested, Christ’s chief emotion. Rather, joy is the overarching affection which frames the way that compassion recognizes need. That compassion needs careful consideration and Augustine’s warnings against cosmopolitanism overwhelming loving compassion seem ever up-to-date.72 Moreover, lest we give up on compassion, compassionate transposition into need must be accompanied by joyful transposition which construes need in terms of abundance, looking hopefully towards the end while at the beginning. Joy makes no pact with scarcity, death, and need but rather celebrates the truth of the logic of overflow promised in Christ to the whole church. When Markell complained that modern political theory had struggled to understand the multiplicity of affections towards a single object, he was unwittingly describing the failure of such theory to make hopeful joy the overarching political affection. Christian joy’s ability to understand goods and ills in terms of abundance in Christ makes it the suitable accompaniment to all other affective understanding, thereby explaining the multiplicity of affections towards a single object. The loss of joy in political theory may be traced to such theory’s exclusion and diminution of political worship. The exclusion of transcendence from political life, as Nussbaum desires, seems an increasingly unwise strategy for building interdependent trust. If this is what joy is and what joy does, then its endurance is a matter of great importance. Wannenwetsch focuses our minds on the practice of praise in communities which are clearly ‘temporal, not a-temporal’.73 He resists a super-theory which would make it possible to know the essence of worship, since this ‘would actually make the constitutive character of the Church’s worship superfluous, this constitutive character being the fact that men and women have to attend and participate in it again and again’.74 This leads on to the 72 73 74

Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.28.29; cf. Gregory, Politics, 292–4. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 18. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 3.

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important claim that ‘Christian ethics always has to take its start, over and over again, from the event where human beings are grasped by the self-communication of God’,75 that is, from grace. I echo this by saying that beginning in joyful praise requires renewal ‘again and again’ because of the very nature both of the expansive object of joy (God and his works) and the stubborn subjects of joy (those who have faith in God). The Spirit of God leads this renewal of participation, knitting those who praise afresh into God and his works, detaching them from false forms of participation. The Spirit does this by overcoming our suspicious stubbornness with the assurance that God is good and that we are the free and forgiven children of the King. Our joy is not only penurious in understanding but weak in its intensity and short-lived in duration. Joyful, hopeful praise as the beginning of political ethics needs constant renewal by the Spirit lest the light fade and darkness return. Addressing the experience of worship which nourishes the proving and testing of God’s will, Wannenwetsch comments that the ‘capacity for judgement pales as this very experience recedes’.76 He has in mind especially the service of baptism as the root of renewal. The capacity for judgement can be renewed in the ongoing joyful praises of those who remember in faith the dying and rising of Christ into which they have been knit by water and the Spirit. Infant baptism is particularly powerful in this regard as, in part, a recognition of the significance of upbringing to the affective understanding of adults. As a child grows amidst the regular memorial of Christ’s passion celebrated at the Lord’s table, he or she learns the power of memory and the Christian affections of sorrow, shame, compassion, and joy. When Baier diminishes Christian faith as a source of trust by observing ‘the child soon learns that the parent is not, like God, invulnerable, nor even, like some versions of God, subject to offense or insult but not injury’,77 the place to point her is the eucharistic celebration where God demonstrated both trustworthiness and vulnerability, placarded before all the world. Through the gracious word and sacraments, the life of moral judgement which has begun through joyful praise of God is continually renewed in joyful praise which makes intelligible a wide range of affective understanding. By the Holy Spirit, joy expressed in praise opens people afresh for wise participation in the narrative of Christ 75 76

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 18. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 38.

77

Baier, Moral Prejudices, 107.

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which baptism and the Lord’s table symbolize. Joy stands at the beginning of affective renewal as the understanding is opened up afresh to the goodness of the moral order, the God who created it, and the works of that same God. As creatures—even as new creatures— there is a tendency for understanding to become dull over time. The refreshment which joy brings is absolutely necessary to those who are feeble in their affections and unable to sustain that proper affective understanding which can in turn preserve, illumine, or establish social trust. Just as dogmatics should precede and govern ethics, so should joy precede and govern other affections which are themselves the beginnings of ethics. As we saw in Chapter 2 the epistemological priority of affection for ethics in the world in general, so we see here the epistemological priority of joy for the ethics of the church in particular. Joy at the beginning of ethics is an attraction into what is already going on in creation and redemption.78 In just this sense it both initiates our reflective awareness and valuation of reality, a first taste of the goodness of God and his creation as we begin on the road towards right action, and completes understanding in God, our ultimate object of joy, our beginning and end.

IV. SHARING IN JOYFUL PRAISE OF THE CRUCIFIED AND RISEN CHRIST Having established the outline pattern whereby Christian affections renew social trust, I turn to the heart of Christian political affectivity by exploring the subjective experience correlated to God’s passionate identification with us in the cross and resurrection, the work of salvation which makes faith possible. Such a description will further clarify the way that Christian political affections contribute to the maintenance and development of trust in political society. Cf. Brock, Singing, 217: ‘It is not the task of human praise to look around creation to find good things to praise, which would put us in the role of having to make value judgments and bestow validity on creation in the way a parent praises a child to encourage good behavior, for example. Praise is the human way of participating in the great doxology that creation already is. The implication is that human praise is not something we produce but is something we must learn: doxology begins not in the decision to pull up our bootstraps but in abandoning our refusal to join the chorus already underway.’ 78

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The apostle Paul informs the Philippians that he wishes to know Christ ‘and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’ (Philippians 3: 10).79 We understand from this that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus disclose to us God’s intention for human existence. The knowledge Paul seeks must be discovered through the thick particularity of sufferings and Spiritinspired, powerful living. Knowing the sufferings and resurrection of Jesus defines the nature of the ecclesial life into which followers of Christ are knit. The beginning of knowing, as we have seen, is joyful, hopeful praise. As the risen Christ attracts such praise, we enter into a mysterious yet revealed reality defined by the contours of his eternal yet incarnate existence. We may grasp the gestalt of the contours in a moment but to understand the inner workings requires an active, thoughtful lifetime of penetrative investigation. Since such dogmatic knowing is the beginning of ethics, the crucified and vindicated Christ is where Christian ethics must begin. Since the resurrection vindicates creation, it is also through such knowledge that the true moral order is discovered and the shape of the new heaven and new earth is disclosed. Thus to praise the crucified and risen Christ is to begin to understand in joy the ethics which are appropriate to the whole world under his rule. To see this more clearly, let us make a brief study of a particular local church by considering how affections are correlated to Christ’s death and resurrection in Paul’s second canonical letter to the Corinthians, a body gathered from amidst a rival, uncomprehending political society.80 In 2 Corinthians 1: 3–11, Paul describes the shared 79 ‘ŒÆd c  ÆØ B IÆ 

ø ÆPF ŒÆd ŒØøÆ ÆŁÅ ø ÆPF’. The repeated ŒÆd seems to be epexegetic, exploring the meaning of knowing Christ through the grammatically parallel accusatives ( ÆØ, ŒØøÆ). Thus the NIV renders the phrase: ‘to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’. The ESV’s ‘that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings’ underplays the phrase’s epexegetic force. 80 For the purposes of this discussion, very little hangs on whether 2 Corinthians was written as a single unit or is a composite piece of writing made up of a number of Paul’s letters or even written by multiple authors and editors including or, at times, excluding Paul. What is important is that 1: 3–11 and the other texts discussed were written by Paul. This is a view held by Barrett who believes 2 Corinthians 1–9 to be Paul’s fourth letter to the Corinthians which was closely followed by his fifth in the more or less finished form of 2 Corinthians 10–13 (C. K. Barrett, Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Adam & Charles Black, 1974), 5ff.). Even those, like Margaret Thrall, who believe there to be more editorial complexity to the composition of the letter than Barrett allows do not doubt the Pauline authenticity

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life of Christian believers who begin in joyful praise. The opening words of praise or blessing (v. 3) initiate a meditation upon the way that the church’s common life participates in Christ’s death and resurrection. Paul envisages God comforting the afflicted church (v. 4a); God’s comfort results in a communicative sharing in comfort amongst those who are afflicted and in need of comfort (vv. 4b, 6b, 7b); that common sharing in comfort is paralleled with a common sharing in suffering (v. 7; cf. Philippians 3: 10), both of which are rooted in Christ himself through his sufferings (v. 5) and his resurrection from among the dead (v. 9); finally, Paul and Timothy’s affliction is said to bring about the Corinthians’ comfort (v. 6a). So much for how the terms of this passage fit together. To begin to understand their meaning and relevance, consider Paul’s use of ‘comfort’ elsewhere in the letter, specifically the biblically unique combination of paraklesis ( Ææ ŒºÅ Ø) with the verb parakalein ( ÆæƌƺE; ‘to comfort with comfort’), normally found amidst richly affective passages. The combination occurs in 7: 4–16 where Paul describes the inner workings of the shared comfort and affliction which was schematized in 1: 3–11.81 God’s comfort of Paul is a comfort that reorders the affections of the downcast.82 Titus was

of 1: 3–11. Thrall moreover believes that 2 Corinthians 1–8, even including the much debated passage 6: 14–7: 1, was originally composed by Paul as a unit. (M. Thrall, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, i (T. & T. Clark, 1994)). Much of the difficulty for historical examination of the canonical 2 Corinthians stems from the fact that evidence is largely lacking in Acts and so internal evidence within the Corinthian correspondence is, on a number of issues, the best we can hope for. However, although historical precision is not unimportant in this present discussion, the focus is primarily on the moral theology which arises from writings which can, with a very high degree of confidence, be attributed entirely to Paul. For the sake of brevity, I will normally refer only to Paul as the writer of the letter. On occasion, when relevant, I will refer to Timothy also. This will be especially important in terms of the shared sufferings and comfort which Timothy and Paul have experienced. 81 Paul’s reference to ‘our affliction’ (ŁºEłØ, 7: 4) signals a return to the theme of the letter’s first chapter. This affliction should be interpreted through 2 Corinthians 2: 4 which indicates that the affliction which preceded and surrounded the letter—which is the central subject of 7: 4–16—involved an anguish of the heart ( ıåB ŒÆæÆ) with tears. This is not to suggest that the letter of 2: 4 and 7: 8 was necessarily written from Macedonia nor that Paul’s afflictions in Macedonia were limited to his concern for the Corinthians. Rather, it is only to say that the affliction which Paul experienced in Macedonia (7: 4–5) seems to be a continuation of that affliction which attended the writing of the letter which grieved the Corinthians (2: 4). 82 Æ Ø, although it can mean simply ‘humble’ (as in 10: 1), is more likely to be affectively toned in this context because of the presence of the fear which Paul was

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comforted with comfort and intersubjectively drawn into joy by the affections of the Corinthians, especially their mourning (7: 7). Paul and Timothy’s shared comfort (7: 13) is thus their reordered condition whereby they recognize in joy the affections and the concomitant repentance of the Corinthians, especially their godly grief (7: 8–12). The complex intersubjective affectivity sketched here results in a renewed communion. It seems that when Paul speaks in this context of being ‘comforted with comfort’, he is describing how the affections and actions of one part of the church are intersubjectively reordered through the affections and actions of others in the church. The comfort in which all the believers share reorders the affections through affliction to comfort. That comfort should be read through 2 Corinthians 1: 9 as the comfort which God brings through Christ’s resurrection. In summary, affliction and comfort define the pattern within which affections are ordered in the body of Christ, the church as she participates in Christ’s death and resurrection. The church is afflicted and comforted as Christ was. As she walks through the world, the church’s affections follow this pattern as forms of understanding which participate in Christ. It is possible now to say more about how the knowing of Christ, the power of his resurrection, and fellowship in his sufferings are affective. The affections of the body of Christ are affections in the midst of a fallen world. The people of God participate in the intersubjective affections of the body as it passes, in its diverse localized expressions, on its pilgrimage through the world, experiencing the sufferings and power which Christ experienced. Consider first the fellowship of sharing in Christ’s sufferings. The body of Christ is called to participate in the world as Christ did, without conformity to its sinful fallenness, without withdrawal from its needy brokenness, and without denial of its continuing goodness. This wise openness to the world will, as Wannenwetsch observed, involve sufferings, which are both similar to and distinct from Christ’s sufferings. According to Paul, grief is central to these sufferings. Paul was afflicted with grief because of the Corinthians’ sin (2: 4), mirroring Christ’s grief over the sin of Jerusalem (Luke 19: 41). In his grief, he wisely participated in affliction ‘for your comfort and salvation’ (2 Corinthians 1: 6). For with respect to one’s own sin, Paul taught that grief may take two experiencing and the joy which the comfort, mediated through Titus, brought about, alleviating his downcast condition.

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forms: a godly grief producing repentance which leads to salvation without regret and a worldly grief which produces death (7: 10). In their godly grief, the Corinthian church understood their sin as sin in light of Paul’s grieving, tearful rebuke which attracted their own grief towards their sin. Instead of hardening their hearts, the Corinthians mournfully participated in their own sinfulness, construing it in terms of God’s grace in Christ and proceeding thence to the reflection, deliberation, and action in which repentance consists. Paul’s grief was verified by the Corinthians’ affective, intersubjective recognition of the wrong which they had done. Thus the goal of the whole movement was not the beginning in grief but the conclusion of the enterprise in earnest repentance (7: 12). This is how Paul’s affliction was for the sake of their comfort. Both Paul’s and the Corinthians’ differing forms of grief genuinely shared in the sufferings of Christ since they were understandings of sin which were in accord with the salvific death of Christ vindicated in the resurrection.83 Worldly grief is not of this sort. It is not attracted to and does not understand the meaning of the cross and so ends only in the death of the sinner not the death of Christ for the sinner. That is the path of despair and, presumably, this is what Paul fears may happen to the severely chastened sinner (2: 7b). In contrast, Paul and the Corinthians were knit more deeply into Christ’s death and resurrection through their shared but differentiated grief and so experienced the comfort which follows such affliction. Their fellowship consists in a common affective understanding of Christ’s death that leads to repentant sanctification through Christ’s Spirit and ends by sharing in comfort through Christ’s resurrection. This claim points towards how Paul and the Corinthians share in the power of Christ’s resurrection. The comfort which their affections are patterned after has a deeply existential quality. When Paul was experiencing an affliction in Asia which threatened his very life, he relied on the God who raises the dead (1: 9). The deliverance God wrought at that time was a foretaste of further deliverances and, implicitly, the final comfort of their own promised resurrection 83 Thus flow the tears of Augustine’s Confessions. Cf. P. Griffiths, ‘Tears and Weeping’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (Jan. 2011), 28; reflecting on Augustine’s confused experience of the death of his friend and his mother, Griffiths comments that ‘we will often cry, and bitterly, in confessing what is lamentable about ourselves and the damaged world’.

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(1: 10). We have seen the significance of the resurrection with respect to the grief of repentance. The resurrection as existential promise conditions godly grief concerning suffering, persecution, or the death of fellow believers. Such grief is not without hope (1 Thessalonians 4: 13). It specifically construes a death in terms of the resurrection to come, understanding it as the gateway into life rather than its permanent conclusion. Thus, when Paul claims that in ‘all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy’ (7: 4), he is reflecting the pattern observed earlier, namely that joy defines the meaning of other affective experiences, interpreting even grief over the sufferings, deaths, and sins of other members of the body. Those who, like Augustine, experience the death of a loved one, such as a mother, can share in this hopeful joy amidst grief. Moreover, not only is Paul joyful but he overflows with joy, inviting and attracting others to share intersubjectively in a renewed understanding of the world. What makes the intersubjective affectivity which accords with the suffering and power of Christ possible is the work of the Holy Spirit, who not only knits people into Christ but stabilizes them within Christ and so within the moral order. This Spirit has, as Paul repeatedly affirms, been given by God into the hearts of believers as a ‘guarantee’ (arrabon; IææÆH; 1: 22, 5: 5; cf. Ephesians 1: 14). As a guarantee, the Holy Spirit achieves many things in the lives of believers, fitting them for the life to come. But the description of the Holy Spirit as first instalment is especially congruent with the claim that affections are the beginnings of understanding. A guarantee in normal market relations points forward to a promised fulfilment of what has already begun. It brings a measure of stability to what are otherwise unstable situations, such as contracts of exchange. If the Holy Spirit himself is the guarantee, then the God who has promised has also given himself as a pledge of what he has promised. The self-donation of God himself brings stability to the affections of those knit into Christ. Spirit-led affections in the fallen world are the enduring first light of the knowledge of the glory of God, the dawning of wisdom. The stability which the Holy Spirit now brings to affections which follow from faith is a stability of memory. Both the presence and content of a deposit remind the parties involved of what has happened as well as pointing forward to what is yet to come. The Spirit’s work, as we learn from John, is to achieve this by reminding believers of what Jesus had said concerning his life, teaching, death, resurrection,

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glorification, and the coming age (John 14). In this way, the Holy Spirit offers to the church the same stability of affection that Christ knew, the strange stability of participating in the crucifixion and resurrection that Augustine experienced and recounted. Stability for Christians is thus not a quietude which withdraws from deep engagement with fallen reality and redemption. Rather Christian stability emerges through being knit into the fallen but vindicated creation by the Spirit within the broken, resurrected body of Christ. The presence of the one Spirit throughout the body provides the possibility of enduring intersubjective, affective understanding. However, as Wannenwetsch observes, a simple homology does not always follow from the givenness of the unity of the church by the Spirit. He comments that as the practice of a shared language, worship makes possible the political formation of conviction in the direction of consensus. It does so in a way which is barely conceivable in the present confusion of incommensurable moral languages. But here there is a surprising point. The univocity which worship makes possible does not make the discourse harmonious; it actually furthers the dispute.84

Worship makes possible the furthering of dispute towards consensus. Similarly, our argument has not claimed that diverse individuals’ affections will necessarily agree concerning value. As Lacoste said, ‘is not the most self-evident thing about our feelings precisely the fact that we need to discuss them?’85 So affective understandings emerge within common praise but consensus will be won out of conflicting intersubjective affection only in the reflection and deliberation which follow affection. How does this account of the affections of the body of Christ concern social trust? Simply put, social trust is given wise content by the affections of the body of Christ, inasmuch as local churches are transposed by the Holy Spirit into the crucified and risen Christ and similarly transposed into the world. In this way, the pledge of God in the body of Christ sustains trust between people in society. Such an account forms the affective interior of Wannenwetsch’s claim that as ‘a public established and restored in worship, the Church represents the truth of a “constituted” public, on which the public of civil society must draw if it is not to be swallowed up in utilitarian modes of 84 85

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 304. J.-Y. Lacoste, ‘From Value to Norm’ (unpubl. tr.), 117.

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relationship’.86 Social trust, both in accord with and against Christ and the moral order, does exist without such a dynamic between civil society and churches. As Baier said, trust is not always a good to be preserved. Malign forms of trust are the tools of every tyrant. But churches’ particular service is to express and explain valuations about the world which are conducive to the social trust which makes for human flourishing. So when Wannenwetsch says that the world has a double becoming—first, as a world hostile to God and second as turned from hostility towards a reflection of the Creator’s will87—it is the second form of becoming which Christians’ affections should enable. Christian political affections may of course provoke hostility from the world. Yet the world may also be drawn into the way of seeing what the church offers and so be knit more truly into the world as it is and into Christ in whom the world holds together. To this end, local churches experience an ‘empowerment for political life’88 in their affections by the Spirit, sharing in the intersubjective affections which accord with the wisdom of God. As Brock puts it, ‘the renewal of humanity through the Spirit generates ripples of moral renewal throughout the social fabric’.89 Wise affections spring like fruit from faith by the power of the Spirit. This ‘fruitfulness is . . . the restoration of connectivity to a creation suffering from its lack’.90 The affections of churches, patterned by the affliction and comfort of Christ’s death and resurrection, offer the beginnings of reconnections between the people walking in darkness and the wisdom of God for life in this world and the world to come. In Lutheran terms, ‘the blessed [are] as mobile conduits of the divine springs in a world dried out by sin’s refusal of reciprocity’.91 Such springs of affection well up from faith, making the dark stubbornness of the world visible and offering to it the beginnings of a new life begun now in half-light. The intersubjective union of these mobile conduits in a local institution is what I am calling the local church. It is through these localized centres of affective wisdom that social trust may be rebuilt and reordered and representation, law, and nationhood critically renewed.

86 87 88 90

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 275. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 249. 89 Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 11. Brock, Singing, 210. 91 Brock, Singing, 190. Brock, Singing, 189.

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This renewal is already happening to a greater or lesser extent wherever there are faithful local churches, faithful Christian institutions such as schools and hospices, or Christians living lives worthy of the gospel in every area of any society. Affections are ordered in institutions and institutions consist in practices. The body of Christ is the institutional, international community, spread out in local churches, whose affections participate through faith in the crucified Lamb who by the power of the Spirit has now risen, ascended, and sat down at the right hand of God the Father. The strange stability of these affections is embodied in a localized life of joyful, praising, intersubjective, reconciled communion amidst the world’s politics which witnesses to the Christ who will one day descend to bring ultimate peace, reconciliation, and justice to the world. This renewal is real and yet remains fragile and patchy. Churches are often not communities of joyful hope centred in the cross and resurrection of the incarnate Christ. Indeed, churches often get affective valuation wrong, failing to show proper compassion, rejoice wisely, or exhibit godly sorrow. This is itself a cause for sorrow. What then will renew faith and Christian affections and so preserve the affective dimension of social trust in a way which accords with the moral order? One option is to appeal to a kind of virtue theory whereby the stability of affections is preserved by their active habituation into virtues through common institutional practices and activities. Affective trust would, on this account, be preserved as a form of virtue. Robert Roberts, for example, claims that ‘Christian virtues are, in large part, a matter of being disposed to a properly Christian joy, contrition, gratitude, hope, compassion and peace.’ According to Roberts, these ‘emotion-virtues’ are the ‘fruits of the Holy Spirit’ which only arise either through intentional habituation or through the direct action of God for which humans must passively wait.92 He favours the former option on the grounds that the self-knowledge we have concerning the nature of emotions can be put to good use to promote their habituated occurrence as virtues. However, it seems that the range of modes whereby the fruits of the Spirit arise are wider and more complex than the two which Roberts observes. For 92 R. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007), 8–10.

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example, Stanley Hauerwas denies ‘that such self-awareness is a necessary correlative to having character’ in the positive sense of having a good character. He is keen to avoid character being seen as a ‘heroic conception of the moral life that presupposes just [that] kind of explicit self-awareness’.93 There are many who are virtuous, on Hauerwas’s view, who are not self-aware that they are intentionally habituating virtues in themselves. Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre have become familiar intellectual mustering-points for Christians who wish to construe emotions and human behaviour in general in terms of virtue.94 Hauerwas is particularly important here because of his explicit focus on the life of churches. The contours of his thought are in some ways consonant with this discussion’s description of ecclesial life. In and through the life of churches, ‘God makes his people new by the power of his Holy Spirit’. By the Spirit ‘the continuing deliberation of common goods and purposes that is called politics . . . begin with praise . . . a continual blend of the joyful telling of God’s wondrous deeds and the humble joining of the angels’ constant celebration’.95 Hauerwas believes that the roots of such joyful praise have to do especially with being trained in virtue through the life of the church. In A Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas explains that ‘Christian ethics must serve and be formed by the Christian community, a community whose interest lies in the formation of character and whose perduring history provides the continuity we need to act in conformity with that character.’96 Virtues of character, he says, are achieved through the common practices of churches. Universal moral theories, on the other hand, have failed ‘to train our desires and direct our attention’97 according to virtue. His constructive claim is that we ‘can only act within the world we can envision, and we can envision the world rightly only as we are trained to see’ and that ‘we cannot see the world rightly unless

93 S. Hauerwas, ‘A Retrospective Assessment of an Ethics of Character: The Development of Hauerwas’ Theological Project’, The Hauerwas Reader (Duke University Press, 2001), 81. 94 Cf. P. Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 307–24; J. Barton, Ethics and the Old Testament (SCM, 1998); G. Wenham, Story as Torah (T. & T. Clark, 2000). 95 Hauerwas and Wells, ‘The Gift of the Church’, 16, 18–19. 96 S. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (SCM Press, 2003), 33. 97 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 11.

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we are changed, for as sinners we do not desire to see truthfully’.98 Training involves initiation into skills of faithful living whereby one can envision ‘the world as it is, namely God’s creation’ and learn that ‘at the center of creation is a cross and resurrection’.99 At the heart of what it is to be trained is to participate in the body of Christ as the body of Christ, most especially in the eucharistic celebration.100 This account of discipleship again resonates to some extent with the participative experience of churches described above. But Hauerwas has himself raised concerns about his earlier thought on character formation. In a postscript to A Peaceable Kingdom he notes that, on occasion, his grammar betrays him to leave behind a different meaning than he would wish. He graciously invites those who read his work to ‘find their own sentences to rewrite’. For example, he confesses that, earlier in his career, he mistakenly gave the impression that the agency whereby the story of Jesus becomes the church’s story and brings about character formation is ours rather than God’s.101 Taking up his invitation, I suggest that this error reflects a wider pattern in Hauerwas’s early work whereby, in The Peaceable Kingdom, for example, the peculiar agency of the Holy Spirit is almost unheard of, featuring on only two occasions in the text, neither of which are significant to his argument.102 What is important is not the lack of explicit recognition of the Spirit but rather the conceptual ambiguity concerning character formation and the fruit of the Spirit which is left behind by the omissions. Oliver O’Donovan observes that the tendency is for Hauerwas to sound as though he is not offering so much ‘a repudiation of man’s self-creation as a refinement of it’ although, as O’Donovan notes, ‘the strong claims made for the self-determination of character . . . may not be . . . entirely characteristic of Hauerwas’ total view’.103 Yet there is more going on here theologically than grammatical slips. O’Donovan observes that, while Hauerwas has helpfully highlighted

98

Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 29–30. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 30. 100 Hauerwas and Wells, ‘The Gift of the Church’, 19–20. 101 S. Hauerwas, ‘Postscript’, to Peaceable Kingdom, 157. 102 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 151, 106; nowhere in the book does Hauerwas claim that the Holy Spirit is the One who convicts people of their sin. 103 O. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (Apollos, 1994), 217; cf. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 94, where Hauerwas denounces ‘the self-deceptive story that we are in control—that we are our own creators’. 99

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‘the fact that the church’s authority does not reside in verbal proclamation alone, but in its form of life as a community of the Holy Spirit . . . “practices” is a problematic term, which has been used too heterogeneously, conflating the Aristotelian theory of the virtues with such distinctly ecclesiastical ceremonies as the celebration of the sacraments’.104 I venture to suggest that the reason why the sacraments, by which we must mean at least baptism and eucharist, should not be construed as Aristotelian practices is precisely because that would disguise from us the sacraments’ Christocentric meaning by obtruding into them a more or less conscious project for the formation of our characters. Such a project seems to mistake the character of the sacraments themselves and stymie the Christocentric joyful praise which initiates the deliberation that both Hauerwas and I agree is constitutive of churches’ political life. The reason for concern lies in Hauerwas’s interpretation of justification and sanctification,105 themes which relate directly to the participation in Christ’s cross and resurrection that has been the theme of this chapter. He claims that ‘justification is only another way of talking about sanctification’, that ‘the language of “sanctification” and “justification” is not meant to be descriptive of a status’, and that justification ‘is but a reminder of the character of that story [of Jesus]—namely what God has done for us by providing us with a path to follow’. On this reckoning, ‘faith is not so much a combination of belief and trust, as simply fidelity to Jesus’.106 Romans 5: 1, quoted immediately afterwards, should be translated as ‘Therefore, since we are justified by fidelity, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Moreover, ‘fidelity’, according to Hauerwas’s rationale, is a virtue formed as a habit within the practices of the church such as the sacraments. To illustrate why this is problematic, consider how the idea that the sacraments should be seen as opportunities for character formation is challenged by Brian Brock. He comments that ‘the conduits of God’s grace are kept open when believers have a clear view of their sinful divergence from Christ and thus are conscientious in confessing these divergences; yet when they observe their merits, they see only Christ’s. God’s way into the world is blocked by the human tendency to focus on the “formation of the self”’.107 For 104 105 106

O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 266. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 91–5. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 93.

107

Brock, Singing, 226–7.

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Brock, the Hauerwasian tendency to focus on the formation of the self blocks up the conduits of grace whereby sinners are justified and called into political worship characterized by joyful praise. Stability is not in the self ’s formation but solely in Christ and in the Holy Spirit who gives the simultaneous vision of Christ’s merit and the self ’s sin (simul iustus et peccator). In a retrospective corrective of his approach to character, Hauerwas’s response to this distinctively Lutheran line of thought has been to discount the description of discipleship as a ‘back-and-forth’ between law and gospel in preference for a notion of journey.108 His concern in The Peaceable Kingdom was that what Protestants tended to mean by justification by faith in Romans 1–11 had little to do with the exhortations of Romans 12 such as ‘rejoice in your hope . . . rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep’.109 The back-and-forth of Protestants between the condemnation of law and the good news of Jesus was simply inadequate to resource the moral journey in which churches must be engaged. But I suggest that the account of transposition offered here both meets that challenge perfectly adequately and arises very directly from precisely the Lutheran account of law and gospel that Hauerwas rejects. In the words of Melanchthon, ‘the beginning of repentance consists of that work of the law by which the Spirit of God terrifies and confounds consciences’.110 This ‘knowledge of sin and the fear of divine judgment constitute the beginning of justification’.111 Such a condition would bring despair were it not for the consoling gospel and the ‘joy and gladness that consolation brings’.112 Justification comes as the happy exchange whereby Christ’s merits clothe the sinner’s naked sinfulness and free the church, without fear of condemnation, to be transposed in joy and godly sorrow into the world. The back-and-forth therefore energizes the active life of churches—the movement between law and gospel strengthens the awareness of marriage to Christ and so sends churches outwards in joy to the world. In this sense, it is only through churches having no need to regard their own righteousness that they are freed to live a 108 S. Hauerwas, ‘A Retrospective Assessment of an Ethics of Character’, The Hauerwas Reader (Duke University Press, 2001), 84–9. 109 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 92. 110 P. Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes’, in Melanchthon and Bucer (SCM Press, 1969), 83. 111 Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes’, 138. 112 Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes’, 85.

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righteous social life. This may be explained from another direction in terms of the unprecedented joy of Jesus’ incarnation which was celebrated in Chapter 3. For that joy in the incarnation of God in a virgin’s womb is the fulfilment of the many conceptions and births amidst apparent barrenness which unite the one narrative of Old and New Testaments. Joy in birth out of barrenness is explicitly compared to God’s act of justification in Romans 4 where Paul explains that the God who justifies is the God who ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (4: 17). Just as Sarah’s womb was barren so Abraham was without righteousness. By faith Abraham and Sarah received a child, Isaac, and by faith Abraham received the righteousness graciously given through the descendant of Isaac, Jesus Christ. As Isaac came forth by faith from Abraham and Sarah so Abraham and Sarah looked forward in faith and were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. The same story of birth from barrenness is repeated in Elkanah and Hannah (1 Samuel 1), in Zechariah and Elizabeth (Luke 1), and, albeit differently, in Joseph and Mary. And this story is Hauerwas’s story for he is the man who calls himself ‘Hannah’s Child’, the son of a mother who had longed for a child and had received a son as a gift from God.113 Justification is not about the path we are to follow but about what God has already done and will do in bringing us to birth from barrenness and calling us righteous when there was no righteousness and all this solely through the death and resurrection of Christ. This is the way that we participate in the unprecedented joy of the incarnate Christ and live the life of Romans 12. This is the way political ethics follows the joyful praise which preserves social trust inasmuch as it springs from dependent, clinging faith in God’s gracious initiative. To deny this inevitably runs the risk of reversion to an ‘argument of impenitence’ whereby virtue and tradition become the arbiters of moral goodness and rightness. By contrast, the claim here is that the Holy Spirit calls people out of corrupted visions of goodness and virtue and into the repentant life that begins in joyful praise of the One who is Good and whose works are good. Where the Spirit is, there is the freedom to be the joyful children of God who have faith in the justifying word and work of God. The unprecedented joy which is the beginning of true ethics is the way to preserve trust. It is a joy

113

S. Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (SCM, 2010).

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which arises from those who have experienced the justifying righteousness of God and who therefore do not turn inwards to their character as the source of moral wisdom but are free to turn outwards by transposition into Christ by faith and the world in affective wisdom. Perversely, in attempting to emphasize the importance of a lived life of fidelity, Hauerwas’s reinterpretation of justification endangers the roots of Christian good works and threatens the fruit which the Holy Spirit brings as a gift. This does not seem to be a grammatical slip but a firm commitment.114 Hauerwas recognizes the dangers of ‘self-righteousness’115 but, by reinterpreting justification as he has done, does not help churches avoid it. Therefore, contra Wynn and Lauritzen, Hauerwas does not help churches understand the emotions more clearly.116 The turn away from justification as transposition is accompanied by an epistemology dependent on habituated virtue for humanity’s moral vision.117 He claims that if it is true that I can act only in the world I see and that my seeing is a matter of my learning to say, it is equally the case that my ‘saying’ requires sustained habits that form my emotions and passions, teaching me to feel one way rather than another. We are therefore quite right to think that questions of feeling are central for determining what I ought to do since they are signals that help remind us what kind of people we are.118

On this view, the reason why feelings are important is not because they are attracted to and understand the world beyond ourselves or even Christ but because they inform us about our own character, which in turn helps us determine how we ought to act. Objections to this form of moral reasoning have already been considered and found compelling in Chapter 2. Approaches which bind moral deliberation into reflection on the affections of habitual virtue were found wanting in light of the essentially open-textured nature of moral reasoning, the sheer fragility of human moral commitment, the epistemological priority of act over character and the epistemological priority of affection over character. It 114 Cf. Hauerwas, ‘Retrospective Assessment’, 86; there he reaffirms his earlier reinterpretation of sanctification and justification. 115 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 94. 116 Lauritzen, ‘Emotions and Religious Ethics’; M. Wynn, ‘Emotions and Christian Ethics: A Reassessment’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 17 (2004), 35–55. 117 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, pp. xxiii, 29; cf. index. 118 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 117.

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is the case that ‘out of the overflow of the heart’ affections and actions come. But we should be cautious against turning to our own character and habitual virtue in our deliberative search for right action lest the moral field be obscured. This argument against Hauerwas shows the worth of a detailed discussion concerning the affections which characterize the free children of God in their common life of affliction and comfort participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Emotion has been important to much virtue theory ever since Aristotle. Christian virtue theory, such as Hauerwas’s, has been a response to the lack of modern Christian interest in the intersubjective life of the community and the inner life of each believer. But the account of affection given here undercuts the need to be yoked with Aristotle by showing the true pattern of personal and communal moral psychology. I have shown that there is a way of taking affections’ epistemology very seriously without having to depend, for affections’ epistemological worth, on the habituation of character. Thus Chapter 2’s criticism of Aristotle was not an arbitrary starting point but rather a recognition that neo-Aristotelianism is no sure guide to the nature and role of affections in the church or in political society at large. By contrast, if justification concerns transposition into Christ, then the place of affections in local churches will be illumined by thinking of Christ himself as the evangelical institution whereby intersubjective affective recognition is properly ordered. Just as Israel participated within the festive institutions, so local churches today participate in Christ who has been instituted as Lord and Saviour by being lifted up on a cross, raised up from the grave, and seated at God’s right hand on high. Christ crucified, raised, and installed as King on God’s holy hill (Psalm 2) is the common good in whom local church communities participate in a structured way. That structure is provided by Christ’s afflicted and restored body by which people have fellowship in his sufferings and know the power of the resurrection. The liturgy of a church can reflect this structure, most decisively in the preaching of God’s word and the ministry of the sacraments in conformity with that word.119 Other features of churches’ lives—their wide and subtle range of good deeds in all spheres of civic life, the institutions which they found in 119 Cf. T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions (CUP, 2003), 72–6, for a brief description of the way that some preachers of the 18th cent. such as Isaac Watts and Jonathan Edwards argued against a cold rationalism or vague Romanticism and in favour of awakening reasonable affections through preaching.

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education, healthcare, and civil society, their sung worship, their formal and informal patterns of prayer (to name but a few)—are authorized and governed by these two essentials. In the preaching of the word, churches’ affective understanding is quickened as they are attracted to the Christ of all the scriptures. The eucharist, as Hauerwas tells us, ‘locates the Church in relation to the whole of creation, as a body that, like other bodies, needs food, but being a special body with a special purpose on behalf of all other bodies, needs special food’.120 As Christ’s body and blood are shared and as people are buried in Christ through baptism under the authority of the word, so the affections of churches are given order and direction. The bread now is construed in hopeful joy as the symbol of the bodily presence to come when Christ descends. The ordinary wisdom of eating together with friends is given eschatological resonance. Truly Christian affections are structured and directed towards understanding within this evangelical institution, consisting of the head and the body, a single harmoniously differentiated organism inhabited and intersubjectively united by Christ’s Spirit. Just as Israel was united as a differentiated harmony at the feast, understanding the land in joy, so the whole world may now be united in diverse unity, understanding Christ in joyful praise. Thus the beginning of ethics is the praise of Christ, the institution in whom churches live. The ongoing beginnings of ecclesial ethics are in the affections which are called for by the word of God with respect to the body of Christ in accordance with the leading of the Holy Spirit. The overflow of local churches’ affections renews the affective understanding of the localities and political societies where they dwell as pilgrims. The hopeful joy of Christian faith, rooted in the good news of Christ, preserves not only social trust but awakens others to faith in Christ, the source of joy and the hope kept in heaven until he comes again.

CONCLUSION: THE RETURN TO PRAISE This chapter has described a movement from faith in God to joyful, hopeful praise of God and his works as the beginning of ethics. That praise recognizes the outline of ethics, within which affections

120

Hauerwas and Wells, ‘The Gift of the Church’, 20.

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participate in the pattern of the object of praise, namely the crucified and resurrected Jesus. The beginnings of ethics in such affections gain their ultimate stability through the presence of God in the current experience and memory of God’s people through the word and sacraments experienced in local churches. This God comes in gracious initiative, supplying them with a knowledge of himself which is first grasped in clinging faith. Thus there is a movement from grace to faith to joyful praise to the ordering of all affections as the beginnings of ethics. These affections are able to strengthen and redirect social trust in political societies wherever churches are found, thereby ensuring that strictly political loyalties are not final words on political ethics. A democratic deficit in representation should therefore be reconfigured in terms of the interplay of social trust and political loyalties addressed through fostering affective, social trust between people around what is good. The argument of this chapter has been that local churches should be at the heart of building a trust which is subtle enough to support and to critique governmental authority amidst the scepticism and alienation of the twenty-first-century West. Churches’ fragile and patchy attempts to live a life worthy of this calling is no argument against the reality of the calling itself. Rather, the good news of Christ is a gracious summons to bear witness to the passing away of multiple political loyalties, occluded finally by the descent of the new Jerusalem, the city where God dwells in everlasting light as both King and temple. Democratic renewal is not the churches’ ultimate goal and Christ’s body must resist being recruited into the political programme of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Nonetheless, confidence in the coming of the new Jerusalem, contra Nussbaum, energizes the hopeful, joyful, overflowing commitment to the lands where churches dwell. God’s promise of an eschatological life of restored affections guarantees that praise is the last word as well as the first. For just as the transition from dogmatics to ethics was accomplished by the act of joyful praise so too the transition back from ethics to dogmatics comes through praise. This last movement neither leaves dogmatics dependent on ethics as if humanity takes the initiative in praise—the reverse has been the argument of this chapter—nor allows a separation of dogmatics from ethics. Ethics finds its place within dogmatics—within the passage from praise of God and his works in the beginning to praise of God and his works at the end. Ethics explores the depths of God’s goodness, the wisdom of his law, the wonder of his works of creation and salvation. Ethics does so to clarify the nature of the object of praise

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and so engender a richer praise in the end. Ethics begun in praise is at the service of praise. Accordingly, politics—as a dimension of ethics— also has a place within dogmatics. Churches’ political worship is attested by its affections of faith which shine as shafts of half-light throughout political societies. Such lights draw attention to themselves as publics, aspects of the catholic public of the Spirit spread out with open arms to all the world. In so doing, the world is invited to observe how the ‘model for the political process is still the council of the apostles in Jerusalem’ described in the book of Acts.121 Chapter 3 focused not so much on the council itself but on the work of the Spirit in preparing people affectively for the council through the joy and gladness of affective recognition. The reality of the body of Christ—now Jew and Gentile— was discovered affectively. This discovery obliged the church to reflect and deliberate ethically in order to reach consensus and action. The Spirit is given that the light of Christ may be seen today in the affections of the church and then in their reflections, deliberations, and actions. The responsibility of the world is to be attentively drawn to this light and to enter into the faith from which the light proceeds. Churches constantly return to dogmatics amidst the experience of ethics and politics. Their praises have been clarified through this experience so as to become deepened, more articulate understandings of God and his works. Ethics has been told that ‘God is good and God acts’. Ethics, begun in affections, ‘can fill [this dogma] with content’.122 This happens as the understanding which has begun in joy, sorrow, compassion, or fear leads into a knowledge of the moral order in Christ and action which accords with that order. But just as affections are not monarchical in their epistemological power so too all ethical enquiry does not offer the absolute clarity of logical necessity. Rather, ethics offers a ‘sufficient certainty’ about the good and the right which enables a return by approximating analogy to a deeper understanding and praise of God and his works.123 This second joyful praise, constantly repeated and renewed in this life, is the foretaste of the permanent joyful praise which characterizes the understanding of those whose hope has been realized and whose faith in God receives its reward in the new heaven and the earth, around the throne of the risen Lamb. 121 122 123

Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 298. O’Donovan, ‘What Can Ethics Know about God?’, 35. O’Donovan, ‘What Can Ethics Know about God?’, 36.

Epilogue The Joy of All the Earth

You have filled my heart with greater joy than when the grain and new wine abound. I will lie down and sleep in peace for you alone, O LORD make me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4: 7–8; NIV) Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. How awesome is the Lord Most High, the great King over all the earth. God has ascended amid shouts of joy The Lord amid the sounding of trumpets. Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. (Psalm 47: 1–2, 5–6; NIV) Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. (Psalm 48: 1–2; ESV)

I have now conducted my inquiry into the nature of human affections, their role in morality, and their place in politics. To conclude, I turn to the permanent joyful praise which will permeate the life of the only permanent political community, the city of God. The fourth Psalm

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upon which Augustine meditated at Ostia articulates the Deuteronomic festive joy of the abundant harvest celebrated at Jerusalem and throughout the land. The city towards which the forty-seventh and forty-eighth psalm look forward is filled with the presence of God seated on his throne. Just as the ark of the covenant was brought up by David, he has gone up into the city with shouts of joy. Now all the nations are summoned to rejoice in the awesome King who has founded the political community into which all peoples are to be gathered as one. They are called with joyful claps, shouts, and songs to the holy mountain of the far north, the city of the great King. This place, where God is present, is where the joy of all the earth is found. True, stable, right understanding consists of joy in the God of this mountain-city. For Christian churches, the psalmist’s expectation is fulfilled in the ascension of Jesus Christ into the far north, accompanied at the conclusion of Luke’s gospel with shouts of joy. The joy of all the earth is now centred upon the God and the Lamb to whom the throne belongs and who will return to renew the face of the earth. This one joy for all the earth is far from our contemporary international experience. The nations’ affections follow diverse orders of value, rejoicing, sorrowing, hating, fearing, shaming, and being ashamed. Yet these orders of value are intelligible in relation to the created moral order and, through it, to one another. For the goods of the created order are stable in their generic and teleological relations and it is these goods which the nations value. Amidst diverse orders of value, local churches among the nations may guide the affections of each particular community into common goods, thereby sustaining the social trust on which political society depends, prefiguring the united affectivity to come, offering a pale reflection of the affectivity which will accompany the arrival of the city of God. Such a vision locates local churches in their proper eschatological context. The joy of local churches within their locality is the first light of the joy of the whole earth, however frail and errant that joy may be. By the power of the Spirit, the life of God’s holy mountain is even now glimpsed in the valleys of this present age in the body of Christ and amidst the nations of the earth. But the holy mountain is not like the freezing Kantian heights. Instead it is the destiny of our thick, creaturely existence, when the resurrected Christ brings in the new heaven and the new earth. And so the valleys of this life must not be the valleys of land mysticism but the preliminary reflections of the land to come, always pointing forward to the mountain-city. To speak of a post-secular life

Epilogue: The Joy of All the Earth

297

between facts and norms was to speak with the anguished insight of humanity in tension, struggling in a world where the post-national dream is scattered and smashed again and again into a thousand tribalisms. How different with the city of God, where God dwells! In that one peaceful community the people will gather with representatives from every tribe, tongue, and nation, recognizing in joyful praise the awesome and loving Lord of all. Sing praises to the King of this mountain-city, sing praises! Rejoice in the King of all the earth!

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Index Adams, Nicholas 23n., 262 Adams, Robert Merrihew 90n., 101–8, 116, 144–5 affections as beginnings of understanding 22–5, 62–4, 65–93, 98–9, 111–12, 119–20, 128–30, 141–4, 147–52, 158–60, 168–72, 176–9, 200–1, 230–5, 237–40, 252–3, 254–7, 264–6, 273–6, 279–82, 292–4 as half-light 77–81, 88–9, 92–3, 117–19, 162, 283, 294 virtue and 107–10, 154, 284–91 memory and 110–19, 151–6 eschatological 125–8, 161–2, 263–5, 266–7, 279–82, 291–4 local 230–40, 246–7, 254–8 allegiance 208–10, 230–5 anger 17–18, 26–7, 32–3, 64, 126–7, 176–8, 180–3, 186–7, 199–200, 219, 256 apathy 55, 190 appetite 12n., 68n., 87–8 Aquinas, Thomas 39, 65, 68–70, 74n., 88, 97, 109 Arab spring 18, 64 Arendt, Hannah 62, 159n., 269 Aristotle 65–70, 88, 93n., 95, 96, 103, 133n., 149n. neo-Aristotelianism 100–1, 106, 115, 286–7 Augustine of Hippo, St 12, 13–4, 26, 38–9, 51–2, 59n., 74–5, 78–9, 84n., 87–8, 90n., 91–2, 98, 104, 110–13, 117–19, 129, 156, 163, 168, 191–7, 215, 235n., 245, 255, 263n., 266–9, 273, 274, 280–2, 296 Augustinianism 36, 104–5 authority 16–18, 58–9, 83–5, 141–3, 163–72, 176–7, 183, 215, 218–22, 235–9, 242–3, 245–9, 293 awe 147, 167n., 170–2, 198–201, 237, 295–7

Baier, Annette 31, 54n., 254–5, 259, 275, 283 Baldwin, James 29 Barrett, Charles 277n. Baxter, Richard 169 beauty 83, 121–6, 166–7, 179–81, 195–6 Biggar, Nigel 223–8, 233, 239–41, 245–6 Black Watch 18, 171 Blackburn, Simon 32n. Bock, Darrell 157n. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 107–10, 196, 234 Bostock, David 65–8, 70n., 95 Broadie, Sarah 65–6 Brock, Brian 100, 257n., 270n., 272n., 276n., 283, 287–8 Brown, Gordon, 20 Brown, Thomas 11, 34, 39 Burke, Edmund 21, 131–2, 141, 163–6, 175, 178, 243 Cameron, Ivan 20 cancer 40, 42, 186 Cavadini, John 11n., 39n., 196 Cavanagh, William 17n., 253 Centre For Social Justice 271n. Chadwick, Henry 112–13n. churches 100, 120–1, 161–4, 168–70, 218–22, 241–2, 251–3, 257–62, 263–6, 268–9, 269–94 Citizens UK 20n. civic participation see participation Clore, Gerald 34–5, 142n. Coakley, Sarah 39–40 cognition 24–8, 28–41, 48, 68–70, 71–3, 77–81, 87–93, 94–5, 98–100, 117–19, 126–8, 142–3, 148–9, 164–5, 212, 215–17, 231–2, 238–41, 246–7, 254–5, 266–8 compassion 19, 45–50, 55–60, 132–3, 136–40, 167–8, 192–3, 259, 263–5 joy and 49–50, 150–3, 183–91, 200–1, 273–5 conscience 179–81, 236–7

308

Index

consensus 59, 77–8, 253, 257–61, 270, 271, 272, 282, 294 conservatism 21, 203, 212–13 see also Scruton, Burke Constantine I 195n. constitutional patriotism 21, 202–11, 213–17, 227–36, 242–9 Conzelmann, Hans 157n. Corinthians, second letter to 277–80 cosmopolitanism 22–4, 205–8, 222–7, 233–5, 243–6 Cottingham, John 30–1, 80n. cries 14, 144–5, 174–7, 199–200 Cyrus II of Persia 199, 227 Damasio, Antonio 35 Davison, Richard 36 death 14–15, 20, 42–3, 49–51, 133–4, 137–40, 183–91, 194–5, 269, 277–81 Deigh, John 27–33, 142n. deliberation 16, 21–3, 64, 65–7, 71–4, 77, 96–7, 101–2, 124, 128–9, 143, 162–3, 178, 208, 228–32, 273, 285, 290–1 democracy 16–22, 52–3, 58, 75, 83, 99, 139, 170, 208–11, 228–35, 266 democratic deficit 1, 3, 20–4, 61, 120–1, 131, 202–5, 216–17, 230–1, 238–41, 246–9, 259–64, 270–1, 293 depression 28, 106n. Descartes, René 30–1, 80n. Deuteronomy 137, 144–61, 163–4, 179, 184, 198–201, 221, 226, 237–40, 291–2, 296 Diana, Princess of Wales 20 disgust 16–17, 19, 45, 133–40, 181–2 Dixon, Thomas 11–12, 25, 27n., 29–31, 34, 38–9, 87n., 291n. dogmatics 267–8, 273, 276–7, 293–4 Dowler, Millie 18 Duncan Smith, Iain 271 Easterhouse estate 271 ecology 85–6 Edwards, Jonathan on affections 12, 120–5, 180, 291n. doctrine of excellency 121–8, 132, 156, 159, 162, 166, 179, 180, 265 elections 16–18, 22–3, 134–5, 173–4, 203–4 Elliott, Matthew 28n., 148–9, 154

emotions 10–11, 16–20, 24–41, 68–9, 90, 96n., 100, 107–8, 142n., 149, 211–12, 216–17, 229–30, 263–5, 274, 284–5, 290–1 Nussbaum’s theory of see Nussbaum, Martha emotivism 73, 93n. endurance see stability equality 45, 136, 165–7, 192, 207 eschatology 76, 91–3, 117–19, 125–30, 132–40, 143–6, 156–64, 175, 182–3, 183–201, 215, 226–7, 241–3, 263–5, 268–9, 283–4, 292–7 ethnocentrism 205–6, 227, 235, 240–3, 248–9 Europe 22–4, 79, 97, 131–2, 202–8, 223, 230, 233–4, 244–9, 264 Evagrius 39n. faith 24, 204–5, 251–2, 259, 266–9, 271–2, 275, 284 justification by 226, 257–8, 287–92 family 20, 53–4, 62, 78–9, 168–70, 214–5, 223–6, 244–5, 275 mothers 14–15, 42–4, 49–52, 186–7, 289 fathers 103, 126, 181 children 65, 76, 169, 170, 239, 255, 270–2 unborn and infants 44–5, 62–3, 134, 157–9, 197–8, 255, 275, 289 fear 16–17, 19–20, 27–8, 42, 137, 167n., 171, 183–5, 195n., 200–1, 219–22, 236–8, 270–1, 288 feelings 28–33, 42 festivals 145–58, 160, 175, 199–200, 237, 246, 256, 291–2, 295–7 Ford, David 14, 89, 144–5, 174, 264–9 Gaddafi, Muammar 18 Gage, Phineas 35, 63 gender 53–5, 65, 78–9, 170, 255 Germany 210, 233–4 God 59–60, 84, 89, 109–10, 117–19, 121, 137–8, 147–63, 175, 184–90, 192–201, 218, 224–7, 266–9, 275–6, 287–9, 293–7 Goldie, Peter 106 government 17–20, 56–9, 168–70, 174–6, 187–8, 198, 245–6 grace 84, 118–19, 151, 158, 161–3, 192, 226–7, 266–9, 275, 287–9, 293

Index Gregory, Eric 39n., 74–6, 78–9, 84n., 90, 104–5, 108, 110, 168, 170n., 194–6, 235n., 245, 263n., 265 grief see sorrow Griffiths, Paul 51, 280n. Habermas, Jürgen 2–3, 23–4, 61, 204–11, 213–17, 227–33, 236–9, 242–50, 251–4, 260–2, 266 Hardy, Daniel 89, 264–9 Hare, John 55, 178–9 hatred 18, 33, 127, 233–4 Hauerwas, Stanley 100–2, 272, 285–92 healthcare 19, 186–91, 256 heart 88, 101, 117, 121–4, 129, 131, 149, 153–4, 173, 278n., 291, 295 Heidegger, Martin 76–7, 82, 88 Henry, Paul 14 Hindley, Myra 17, 143 Hobbes, Thomas 135, 236–7n. holocaust 3, 202, 234, 248 Holy Spirit 69, 119, 120–4, 161–4, 166n., 187, 218, 225–7, 251–3, 257–8, 262, 270–2, 275, 281–97 Homer 133n., 184, 188n. hope 127, 185–91, 268–77, 292–4 Hordern, Joshua 169n., 186–7 Hume, David 30–3, 41, 48n., 83n humiliation 134–5, 155, 179, 182, 198 humility 82, 99, 110, 179, 190 Husserl, Edmund 77 identity 159–61, 166, 203, 224–7, 243, 245–7, 253, 265, 270–2 institutions 17–20, 57–8, 83, 97, 131–2, 135–7, 140–6, 168–70, 187–91, 209–10, 214–15, 222–4, 256–7 of Israel 147–56, 199–202 fulfilled in Christ 157–63, 283–4, 291–2 see also representation, law, churches intentionality 26–8, 32–3, 48–9, 68, 71–8, 107–8 attracted intentionality 87–9, 98, 119, 125, 200 interdependence 45–57, 62–3, 78–81, 132–6, 139–40, 183–5, 190–2, 195–6 intersubjectivity 3–4, 23–4, 73, 78–81, 111–18, 148–51, 160–3, 208, 212–13, 215–17, 230–5, 239–40, 260–5, 277–83, 291–2

309

intersubjective verification 78–81, 92–3, 97, 116, 126, 142–4, 165–71, 177–8, 186–8 intuition see Scheler James, William 28–30, 51, 61 Jesus Christ 14–15, 83–8, 159–63, 183–4, 262–70, 274, 286–92, 294–7 incarnation of 84, 129, 138–9, 157–9, 185–6, 225–7, 235–6, 289 suffering and death of 89, 138, 185–9, 191, 218–22, 269, 275–81, 291 resurrection of 86–9, 91–2, 112–13, 125–8, 161–2, 184–91, 200–1, 240–1, 264–9, 274–84, 295–7 ascension of 191–2, 198, 295–7 body of see churches second advent of 198, 215, 284 Jong-Il, Kim 20 joy 18–20, 49–53, 86, 91–2, 98, 117–18, 126–30, 146–64, 167–8, 175–7, 184–91, 195–6, 198–201, 218–22, 234, 237, 263–5, 268–81, 288–90, 292–7 joylessness 149, 198 Jubilee celebration 256 justification see faith Kahan, Dan 38, 134, 181 Kant, Immanuel 55, 83n., 172–3, 178–9, 208–9, 243 Kavka, Martin 133, 138–40 Kenny, Anthony 28n. Laborde, Cécile 22–3, 208, 210, 217, 228, 242n. Labour party 213 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 71–81, 91–3, 96–7, 119, 129, 151, 212, 273, 282 world and cosmos 76–7, 82–91 Lacroix, Justine 22–3, 208n., 229–30, 243 Lauritzen, Paul 26, 32, 96n., 100n., 285n., 290 law 37–8, 57–8, 97, 131–2, 141–2, 151–2, 163–4, 175–83, 197–8, 206–7, 209–10, 236–43, 247–9, 259 judgement 176–8, 180n., 181–2, 192, 197, 199–201, 218–22, 237–8, 247–8 judiciary, courts 16–17, 56–9, 64, 141, 175–8, 190, 206–7, 256, 259

310

Index

law (cont.) obedience to 151–5, 209–10, 236–9, 242–3 Lazarus 15, 187 leadership 159–67 LeDoux, Joseph 34–5, 37–8, 61 legitimacy 23–4, 173–5, 206–7, 210–11, 231, 246–8 locality 17–19, 22–3, 150–2, 178–9, 200, 206–8, 211–12, 214, 218–27, 229–43, 244–50, 251–6, 258, 261, 270–1, 282–4, 291–7 Locke, John 30 Lombardo, Nicholas 25n., 65, 68–70, 74n., 88n. love 12, 52–3, 74–5, 88n., 90n., 104–5, 114, 148n., 151n., 154, 192–7, 223–5, 233–5, 262–6, loyalty 19, 167–75, 187–8, 200, 208–9, 212–16, 224–5, 227–9, 235, 238, 248, 260–2, 293 Luke-Acts 157–63, 173, 175, 182–4, 186, 218–22 Luther, Martin 169, 261–2, 283, 288 MacIntyre, Alasdair 65, 93n., 100, 285 Markell, Patchen 21–2, 208, 209, 217, 236, 274 McConville, Gordon 150 McDowell, John 99–101 Melanchthon, Philip 88, 154, 288 memory 18–19, 34, 57, 74, 92, 110–19, 127–8, 141–4, 154–6, 173–6, 186–7, 199–200, 210–11, 214–15, 230–5, 275, 293 Mertens, Thomas 208–9 metric martyrs, 22, 223, 246 Milbank, John 30n., 158n. Miller, Richard 223–5, 233, 235, 246 Mill, John Stuart 52, 164 moral order 50–2, 59, 78–9, 82–93, 96–9, 102–3, 111–12, 118–19, 121, 125–8, 160–1, 172–3, 190, 233, 240–2, 264, 276n., 292, 296 Moses 153, 175 Muller, Jan 14, 203, 208–10, 216–17, 232 Mumford, James 76n., 103n. National Trust 255–6 nationalism 16, 23, 202–6, 216, 229–30, 242 nation-states 203–15, 229–32, 243–9

natural law 223 nazism 53, 210, 233 neuroscience 34–40, 62–3, 108, 142 Nussbaum, Martha 2–3, 14, 49, 186–7 basic theory of emotion 41–4, 50–3, 59–60, 68, 83, 85, 111 on infancy and education 44–6, 62, 78–9 on compassion 45–8, 56–9, 86, 133, 136–40, 188–90 on shame 45, 133–7, 139–40, 181–2, 191–8 on disgust 45, 133–4, 137–40 on joy 49–50, 273–4 and the knife 51–2, 85, 264–5 on social contract 53–6, 135–6 on capabilities 56–8, 190 on law, judiciary, punishment 57–9, 134–5, 181–2, 197–8, 259 on patriotism 225 on interdependence and vulnerability see interdependence and Christianity 89, 98–9, 137–40, 183–8, 192–8 and eschatology 132–40, 143–4, 190–1, 193–6 and Judaism 138–40, 144–5, 152–4, 175, 188, 192 O’Donovan, Oliver 19, 36, 72n., 75, 79, 83–6, 90–3, 95–6, 100–2, 109, 141, 144, 151n., 158, 164–6, 170–5, 176–80, 190, 192, 195n., 200, 218, 235n., 237–8, 245–7, 267, 269, 272–3, 286–7, 294 Okin, Susan Moller 53–6, 65n., 70, 95n., 136n., 170, 239n. Olsen, Dennis 146 order of value (ordo amoris) 74–6, 82–4, 97, 148, 242 palliative care 188–9 parliament 17–18, 176 participation 62–3, 88n., 89–93, 97, 107–12, 125–6, 158–63, 198, 263–6, 274–83, 291–2 civic participation 22–5, 93–4, 96–7, 102–3, 141–4, 148–52, 165–8, 170–5, 199–201, 204–5, 218–22, 230–3, 239–42, 246–9 passions 11–12, 17, 21–2, 24–6, 30–4, 37, 39, 55, 68–9, 87–8, 132

Index patriotism 19, 203–4, 211–13, 224–7, 239–43 Paul 162, 218–22, 237, 263–4, 277–81 Penelhum, Terence 31–3 Pentecost 225–7, 234–5 Perry, John 168n. philosophy 25–6, 36–42, 91, 129, 131–2, 154n., 204–5 physician-assisted suicide 188–90 Piper, John 148n. Pitcher, George 28n. Plato 37–8 pluralism 79–80, 82, 114–15, 142, 207 political liberalism 21, 90, 99, 104–5, 136, 139–40, 189–90, 195–6, 203–5, 211–13 post-nationalism 207–11, 228–31, 244–9, 296–7 practices 100, 141–2, 145–51, 284–7 praise 157–9, 266–97 pre-political membership 168–70, 207–8, 211–15, 242–3, 252–3, 260–1 providence 59–60, 107, 167, 169, 171–2, 190, 226, 235, 241, 245 psychology 29, 34–9, 44–5, 74, 142, 284 punishment 134–5, 180–1, 197–8, 236–8 Putnam, Hilary 34 Putnam, Robert 258n. Ramsey, Paul 88n., 194n. rationalism 30–1, 229–30 Rawls, John 53–6, 136n., 139, 239n, 263, 266 recognition see cognitivism reflection 71–81, 86–7, 96–7, 107–10, 117–19, 124, 149–52, 171, 178, 230–3, 272–3 religion 17, 39, 195n., 204–5, 211–12, 252–3, 261–2 repentance 100–3, 107–8, 115, 196, 257–8, 261, 279–81, 288–9 representation 17–19, 22–3, 131–2, 135–7, 157–60, 163–78, 182–3, 189–91, 195n., 203, 207, 219–24, 235–6, 238, 241–2, 246–9, 260–1, 269–71, 293 resentment 22–3 rhetoric 16, 40, 74, 147, 153–4, 165 rights 56, 95–6, 136, 207–10, 231, 233, 239, 254 Roberts, Robert 29, 284

311

Rome 79, 197, 218–22, 227, 235–8, 247–8, 273 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47, 135, 137n. Rowe, Kavin 218–21 sacraments 275–6, 287, 291–3 sanctification 86–9, 100n., 104, 108–10, 260, 280, 287–91 Scheler, Max 71–7, 81, 86, 93n., 94, 206, 240 Scruton, Roger 21, 211–16, 239–42, 251 sentiments 25, 30–2, 71–3 sex 134–5, 193–7 shame 18–20, 45, 133–7, 140, 181–2, 191–201 sin 51–2, 84n., 88–9, 91–3, 98–9, 101, 103–6, 109–10, 125–6, 153–4, 169–70, 182, 192–8, 234, 251, 279–82, 285–9 social contract 53–6, 135–6, 164–5, 211, 213n., 245–6, 255 Sorabji, Robert 39n., 196n. sorrow 18–20, 42–3, 49–52, 117, 126–7, 175n., 177–8, 186–7, 265, 279–81, 284, 288 Spaemann, Robert 19n. Spezio, Michael 35–8, 108 stability 50–3, 89, 94–9, 209–11, 214, 230–5, 236n., 240–1, 246–7 and virtue 99–110, 284–8 and memory 110–19, 141–2, 151–6, 199–200, 233–4, 256–7, 293 and eschatology 127–30, 163, 173–5, 179, 266–9, 281–4 Stevenson, Charles 73 Stoicism 12–13, 42, 53, 55, 196, 222n., 225 stubbornness 95, 98–9, 102–3, 153–4, 161, 164, 173, 280, 289 Stump, Eleanore 69, 109n. suffering 19, 40, 45–7, 155–6, 185–9, 191–6, 263–4, 277–81 sympathy 17–20, 31, 177, 181 see also intersubjectivity Taylor, Charles 32n., 80n., 87n., 108–9, 185 tears 15, 29, 51–2, 186–7, 192, 278n., 280n. tradition 46, 82, 141–3, 167, 171–4, 209–11, 235–6, 240–3, 261–2

312

Index

tragedy 46, 56–8, 192 transcendence 75–6, 95–9, 117–19, 132–40, 143–5, 152–4, 183–98, 200, 223–7, 241–2, 261, 265, 274 transmission 252–3, 261–2 transposition 261–5, 270–1, 274, 288, 290, 291 Tronto, Joan 170 trust 239–43, 254–61, 265–6, 269–76, 282–93 United Kingdom 18, 94, 143, 232, 271 England 211–13, 239–42 value 33–5, 40, 42–4, 71–9, 85–7, 90n., 125–8, 142–3, 260–1, 272–4 Virgil 38 virtue 66–70, 73–4, 83, 95–7, 99–110, 113–16, 133, 143, 147, 153–4, 166, 179–80, 227–8, 241–2, 284–91

Walzer, Michael 2, 17, 21–2, 53–4, 63 Wannenwetsch, Bernd 162, 234, 252–4, 257–69, 271–2, 274–5, 282–3, 294 Waters, Brent 169 Webster, John 100n. Weigel, George 248n. Wells, Sam 272 Wenham, Gordon 146–7, 153–4, 285n. Whybray, Norman 146n widow in Israel 151 of Nain 15, 186–7 Willetts, David 265n wisdom 83, 89, 144–7, 171, 174–5, 199–201, 283 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 95–6 Wooton Bassett 19, 171n. worship 147–50, 252–3, 257–8, 267–9, 274–5, 282–3 Wright, Christopher 145, 148n., 151–2 Wynn, Mark 100n., 290