Unity and the Holy Spirit 0192890840, 9780192890849

Table of contents :
Cover
Unity and the Holy Spirit
Copyright
Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
1.1 The Four Main Influences
1.2 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy
1.3 Three Descriptions of the Good Life
1.4 The Beautiful and the Sublime
1.5 Gender
1.6 Love of Country
1.7 Contemplation
1.8 Unity
1.9 Conclusion
2. The Beautiful and the Sublime
Introduction
2.1 Beauty as a Symbol of Morality
2.2 The Sublime
2.3 Beethoven and the Sublime
2.4 The Slow Movement of Op. 2, No. 2
2.5 The First Movement of the Third Symphony
2.6 Christian Autonomy
2.7 The Holy Spirit
3. Gender
Introduction
3.1 Social Construction
3.2 What Is the ‘Something Inside’?
3.3 Centrality
3.4 Three Objections to Life-Narratives
3.5 Centrality and Gender
3.6 The Holy Spirit
3.7 Is There Only One Normative Trajectory?
3.8 Can We Change the Trajectory?
3.9 Is Gender Eschatological?
4. Love of Country
Introduction
4.1 Kant’s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity
4.2 Love of One’s Country
4.3 Cosmopolitanism and Realism
4.4 Two Empirical Objections to Strong Cosmopolitanism
4.5 Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History
4.6 Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans
4.7 Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity
4.8 The Holy Spirit
5. Contemplation
Introduction
5.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I and X
5.2 Three Questions
5.3 What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation? Augustine, Bonaventure, and Scotus
5.4 Belief, Desire, and Justification
5.5 Who Is Doing the Contemplating? Ibn Tufayl, Maimonides, and Eckhart
5.6 God and Creature
5.7 How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life? Scotus and Kierkegaard
5.8 Contemplation and Haecceity
6. Unity
Introduction
6.1 Unity
6.2 Unity with the World
6.3 Unity within a Person
6.4 Unity between People
6.5 Unity with God
6.6 Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity?
References
Index of Biblical Passages
Index of Names and Topics

Citation preview

Unity and the Holy Spirit

Unity and the Holy Spirit J O H N  E .  HA R E

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 © John E. Hare 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 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 Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943507 ISBN 978–0–19–289084–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY 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.

Contents Preface

vii

1. Introduction 1.1 The Four Main Influences 1.2 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy 1.3 Three Descriptions of the Good Life 1.4 The Beautiful and the Sublime 1.5 Gender 1.6 Love of Country 1.7 Contemplation 1.8 Unity 1.9 Conclusion

1 3 5 9 11 14 16 19 22 24

2. The Beautiful and the Sublime 26 Introduction26 2.1 Beauty as a Symbol of Morality 27 2.2 The Sublime 35 2.3 Beethoven and the Sublime 37 2.4 The Slow Movement of Op. 2, No. 2 40 2.5 The First Movement of the Third Symphony 41 2.6 Christian Autonomy 47 2.7 The Holy Spirit 49 3. Gender 55 Introduction55 3.1 Social Construction 57 3.2 What Is the ‘Something Inside’? 63 3.3 Centrality 65 3.4 Three Objections to Life-Narratives 71 3.5 Centrality and Gender 74 3.6 The Holy Spirit 79 3.7 Is There Only One Normative Trajectory? 83 3.8 Can We Change the Trajectory? 85 3.9 Is Gender Eschatological? 89 4. Love of Country 96 Introduction96 4.1 Kant’s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity 97 4.2 Love of One’s Country 100 4.3 Cosmopolitanism and Realism 105

vi Contents 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

Two Empirical Objections to Strong Cosmopolitanism Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity The Holy Spirit

108 111 117 122 129

5. Contemplation 135 Introduction135 5.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I and X 135 5.2 Three Questions 142 5.3 What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation? Augustine, Bonaventure, and Scotus 147 5.4 Belief, Desire, and Justification 152 5.5 Who Is Doing the Contemplating? Ibn Tufayl, Maimonides, and Eckhart159 5.6 God and Creature 166 5.7 How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life? Scotus and Kierkegaard 169 5.8 Contemplation and Haecceity 175 6. Unity 180 Introduction180 6.1 Unity 180 6.2 Unity with the World 182 6.3 Unity within a Person 191 6.4 Unity between People 200 6.5 Unity with God 208 6.6 Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity? 214 References Index of Biblical Passages Index of Names and Topics

221 233 235

Preface This Preface is not going to try to introduce the book in terms of its content or method. That is the function of the first chapter. The Preface will serve to thank the many people who have been involved in the book’s coming to be. The group I am most grateful to consists of Neil Arner, David Baggett, Chet Duke, James Dunn, Karin Fransen, Janna Gonwa, Layne Hancock, Justin Hawkins, Ross McCullough, Kaylie Page, Kyler Schubkegel, Matthew Vermaire, and Sarah Zager. We went through the material chapter by chapter, and I received many suggestions which ended up in the book. It was a privilege to discuss these ideas with such talented and knowledgeable people. The first four chapters were, in their original form, the Stanton Lectures at Cambridge, just as the first chapters of the second volume of this trilogy (God’s Command) were originally the Wilde Lectures at Oxford. At Cambridge I was helped especially by the work of David Ford, Simeon Zahl, and Catherine Pickstock. In addition, I have given the material to various audiences, and I would like to thank the following people: Robert Audi, Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Chua, C. Stephen Evans, Tony Ferraiolo, Bridget George, Philip Gorski, Thomas Hare, Julian Johnson, David Kelsey, Charles Lockwood, Sarah Coakley, Markus Rathey, Stephen Rumph, Chris Tilling, Linn Tonstad, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, and Norman Wirzba. I am very grateful to William Rowley, who has been my research assistant in the revising stages and who has pointed out all sorts of errors as well as giving me many suggestions for improvement. My anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press gave me much good advice. The person who has been most influential in the substance of the book has been my wife Terry. She died in July 2021, as I was starting to revise, and she was sick with cancer for the three years before that. The four areas where I claim in this book to see the influence of the Holy Spirit are all areas where Terry flourished. She was a fine musician, specializing recently in the viola da gamba; she and I lived through our son’s gender transition and she was a leader in our putting our love for him first; she taught me what it is to be an American who loved her country, even while being open-eyed about its faults; she was a person of deep Christian faith and had a daily practice of prayer and reading Scripture. I miss her terribly. I am not sad for her, since I think she is now in heaven, but I am sad for all the rest of us who have to live without her. I have found that God still has good things, however, even for those who mourn.

1 Introduction This first chapter is going to try to give a sense of the project of the book as a whole. This is the third book in a trilogy, of which the volumes already published are The Moral Gap and God’s Command. The overall project is trinitarian in the following way. All three volumes concern the connection between moral theory and the doctrine of the Trinity. The Moral Gap is about the work of the second person, especially about atonement and justification. God’s Command is about the work of the first person, especially about creation. This last volume is about the work of the Holy Spirit, and especially about the Spirit’s work in the world. When I described this project to my colleague at Yale, David Kelsey, he said that I needed to write a fourth volume, explaining why I have split up the works of the persons of the Trinity in this way. To be sure, we can properly talk about all three persons doing all of these works. But I am not going to write this fourth volume, and the trilogy is not in that sense about the doctrine of the Trinity at all. It simply appro­ priates a traditional reading of the assignment of different works to different per­ sons, and does not try to parse out in each case what part in these works each person of the Trinity is playing in relation to the other persons. The book is also not aiming at a complete doctrine of the Spirit. In particular, it has more to say about the general work of the Spirit in the world than about the special work of the Spirit in the church. The general work of the Spirit is very broadly God’s activity within creation, from the time when ‘The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’ at Genesis 1: 2. But the project of this book is a cumulative look at human engagement with the Spirit. The hope is that as we look at various examples—­at the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, at gender transition, at the relation between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and at the practice of contemplation—­we will see that in each case an appeal to the work of the Spirit helps us understand something that is otherwise mysterious. This gen­ eral work of the Spirit has been neglected in favour of treatments of the Spirit’s work in the church, and this book is a corrective. We will connect the general work of the Spirit with the doctrine of common grace in Chapter 4, section 4.8. And we will discuss what kind of access we have to this work in Chapter  3, section 3.8. This project is a work of philosophical theology. This is the attempt to do the­ ology using the concepts and techniques of philosophy. Most of the great theo­lo­ gians in the Abrahamic faiths have in fact used philosophy, but philosophical theologians make this use central and explicit, and are equipped by their training Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0001

2 Introduction to do so. The contrast, when the term starts getting used in the eighteenth ­century, is with biblical theology. Thus Immanuel Kant writes in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: Over against biblical theology, however, there stands on the side of the sciences a philosophical theology which is a property held in trust by another faculty. This theology must have complete freedom to expand as far as its science reaches, provided that it stays within the boundaries of mere reason and makes indeed use of history, languages, the books of all peoples, even the Bible, in order to confirm and explain its propositions, but only for itself, without carry­ ing these propositions over into biblical theology or wishing to modify its public doctrines, which is a privilege of divines.1

By using the phrase ‘boundaries of mere reason’ Kant indicates that his own ­project in this book is the kind of philosophical theology he is talking about. The context is that the theology faculty, made up of divines, has tried to restrict what Kant is licensed to write and teach, and in this preface he defends his freedom and the freedom of all those in the philosophy faculty (where this is construed broadly to include all the academic disciplines except theology, law, and ­medicine). How exactly one sees the relation between theology and philosophy is going to depend on one’s conceptions of the two disciplines. Just to take two examples, already in the New Testament there are warnings against philosophy (Colossians 2: 8) and Calvin in the Institutes inveighs against the Scholastic philosophers.2 But in neither case is the attack on philosophy as such, but on certain uses of it. Kant suggested that we see the relation between philosophical theology and biblical theology as that between two concentric circles, with the 1 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni (henceforth Rel), in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6: 9. I will make reference to Kant’s texts by the volume and page number of the Berlin Academy Edition (Berlin: George Reiner, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900‒), and I will use abbreviations of the German names for the works, as given in that edition. I will quote from the English translations mentioned in this footnote, unless otherwise specified. The other texts are these: The Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth MdS), in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Conflict of the Faculties (hence­ forth SF), trans. Mary  J.  Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology; On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy (henceforth M), trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology; Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth KrV), ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen  W.  Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Critique of Practical Reason (henceforth KpV) in Practical Philosophy; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth Gl), in Practical Philosophy; Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987) (henceforth KU); End of All Things, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, 221–31; On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but it is of no Use in Practice, trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy; Lectures on Ethics (Collins), in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Toward Perpetual Peace (henceforth PP), in Practical Philosophy. 2  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John  T.  McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.2.2, 544.

The Four Main Influences  3 historical revelation (for example in the Bible) in the outer area of revelation and the revelation to reason as the narrower circle within it. He does not here put philosophy as such within these limits, but the religion of reason, though philo­ sophers as such (including the philosophical theologian) on Kant’s conception have to abstract from everything historical. He explicitly states that he is not going to try to intervene in the outer area (biblical theology). He uses the Bible frequently, but as a ‘vehicle’ to help him understand what is within the inside cir­ cle. The project of the present book is different in this respect from Kant’s. As with Kant’s stated purpose, it is going to try to keep within the constraints of what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit, as far as we can determine what this is, and it is going to use the resources of philosophy to help us understand this. But unlike Kant’s project in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, it does not treat the Bible as merely a vehicle towards understanding something that is in principle intelligible on its own. One way this book is different from its two predecessors is that its subject mat­ ter is more personal. All four of the central examples that constitute the discus­ sion of Chapters 2‒5 come out of the author’s own experience. The book is more personal because it is about the Holy Spirit, whose work is often inside us in our hearts. This subject matter calls for a more personal treatment. Having said that, the book is not merely about personal experience. It tries to locate its themes within the long history of their discussion. Sometimes philosophers think they can conduct their inquiries from scratch, but the ideas they use always in fact have a history. Knowing that history helps because we can then see the original association of the ideas we like with other ideas we do not like, and that can give us a salubrious humility.

1.1  The Four Main Influences The four main philosophical influences that have informed this work are Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, and my father R.  M.  Hare. I wrote my Ph. D.  dissertation at Princeton about Aristotle’s account in Metaphysics of substance and essence, and the effects of this account on his theory of the human good, or eudaimonia. His treatment of contemplation and of unity will be our starting points in Chapters 5 and 6. When I was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, I lived for a year in the room that Gerard Manley Hopkins had lived in, looking out of the same window at the garden quad. I read all of his poetry, and because he was deeply influenced by John Duns Scotus, I started reading Scotus. This is the second great influence. From him I have taken themes of the individual essence that each one of us has, and the priority in our relation to God of the activity of the will to that of the intellect. The third great influence is Immanuel Kant. The philosophy and classics degree at Oxford in the 1960s contained nothing on the syllabus between

4 Introduction Aristotle and Frege. When I went to Princeton to study in their classical philosophy program, I again read nothing for my courses between the Stoics and Bradley, and only Bradley because Richard Rorty taught a course called ‘Idealism from Bradley to Quine’. But it seemed to me that if I wanted to understand why we think now the way we do in the West, I needed to understand Kant. So I read the whole of Kant’s critical corpus on my own, without the benefit of any instruction or any secondary sources. And because I read him that way, I was able to see in him themes that the usual twentieth-­century secondary sources would have screened out. I saw the centrality to Kant’s system of his moral theology. There has been a sea change over the last thirty years or so in the study of Kant, and it is now more common to spend time on his thoughts about God. This change has affected not just the study of Kant, but of all the great founders of modernity in philosophy: Descartes, for example, and Leibniz. When Bertrand Russell wrote his account of Leibniz, he tried to formalize the whole system in five axioms and derivative the­ orems. God appeared in none of the five axioms.3 And Russell thought he was doing Leibniz a favour; because Russell himself thought a system was better with­ out God in it, and because he deeply admired Leibniz, he min­im­ized Leibniz’s own pervasive recurrence to the theme of the divine. So Kant appears a good deal in this book, but it is not the Kant who is familiar from the prevailing scholarship of most of the twentieth century. The last of the four great influences is my father R. M. Hare, whose voice I con­ tinually hear in my head. His relation to Christian theology is complicated. His first book was An Essay on Monism, which he wrote as a prisoner of the Japanese, working on the Burma-­Siam railroad. It is strongly influenced by Plato and Whitehead, whose Process and Reality was one of the few works of philosophy in the library at Singapore where my father was stationed before he was captured. I am his literary executor, and he gave me strict instructions not to publish the book, even though it is full of the seeds of his later work. In this book he describes himself as a Christian and the book is full of God. I have put the manuscript together with the rest of his papers in an archive at Balliol, and I have written a long chapter of God and Morality about my father, in which I quote lengthy excerpts from the book that I thought would not embarrass him.4 When he came back to Oxford after the war to complete his undergraduate education, there had been what he called ‘a revolution in philosophy’. This was a revolution under the banner of the logical positivists, and at Oxford the leading figure in the revolution was Gilbert Ryle. In the new way of doing philosophy which my father embraced there were two criteria for a statement to be meaningfully assertable: it had to be verifiable (or falsifiable) empirically or a tautology. Sentences like ‘God created 3 Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Cosimo Classics, 2008). 4 John E. Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 156–62.

The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy  5 the heavens and the earth’ failed both of these tests for meaningful assertability. On the other hand my father attended church regularly, and at Ewelme (where my mother was director of the choir) he sang tenor, and he knew many of the psalms by heart. He would say the Apostle’s Creed with the rest of the congrega­ tion, but always a little ahead, as though to express that he did not believe it in quite the way they did. He published a famous contribution to what was called ‘The University Discussion’, responding to Anthony Flew and Basil Mitchell, in which he called religious belief a ‘blik’, and adopted a position rather close to that of Richard Braithwaite at Cambridge, that when I say something like ‘God created the world’, I am expressing an attitude of confidence that in this world the good is more fundamental than the evil. In God and Morality I have tried to give a sustained account of the moral the­ ology of all four of these figures—­Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, and R. M. Hare—­and I have suggested ways we might think about contrasting them and retrieving what is useful from each of them.

1.2  The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy There are some themes from the first two volumes of the trilogy, The Moral Gap and God’s Command, that this third volume will need to use.5 The theme of the first book, referred to in the title, is that we need to see morality as having a gap-­ structure. There are three parts to this picture. The first part is the moral demand, which the book claimed, following Kant, to be very high. The second part is our natural capacities which are inadequate to the demand. The third part is as­sist­ ance from outside us to meet the demand. Kant gives us various formulations of the supreme principle of morality, which he calls ‘the categorical imperative’. The two most important are that we have to be able to will the maxims of our actions as universal laws and we have to treat each other as ends in themselves and never merely as means.6 Kant immediately refor­ mulates the first of these formulas: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.’7 He is talking about the actions of free agents, and so he does not mean that the maxim (the prescription of the action together with the reasons for it) will become a law of physical nature, which would imply on his view that humans lose their freedom. But nature has one fea­ ture that makes the analogy useful: nature is a system in which the same kind of cause produces the same kind of effect in a lawful way wherever and whenever it occurs. The law states not that this stone breaks this window, but that any stone of 5 John  E.  Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 6  Gl 4: 421, and 4: 429. 7  Gl 4: 421.

6 Introduction a certain mass thrown with a certain velocity breaks any surface of a certain ­fragility. A law is expressed entirely in universal terms, where a universal term (such as ‘mass’, ‘velocity’, ‘fragility’) is one that makes no reference to a particular place or a particular time or a particular thing; a singular term is one that does make such reference (such as ‘this stone’, ‘this window’). Kant is asking us to imagine a similar system, but a system of moral permissions, in which our maxim is included. Willing the maxim as a law requires that singular reference be elim­in­ able, just as in the statement of a law of nature, and this means that it requires eliminating reference to me, the agent. As R. M. Hare puts it, It follows from universalizability that if I now say that I ought to do a certain thing to a certain person, I am committed to the view that the very same thing ought to be done to me, were I in exactly his situation, including having the same personal characteristics and in particular the same motivational states.8

The second formula, the formula of the end in itself or the formula of human­ ity, requires me, on Kant’s account, to share the morally permitted ends of those affected by my actions; this is what treating another person as an end in herself involves. The word ‘merely’ is important in this formula. Kant is not forbidding using people, but we must never merely use. As he explains, to treat humanity as an end in itself requires that ‘everyone tries, as far as he can, to further the ends of others. For, the ends of a subject who is an end in itself must as far as possible be also my ends, if that representation is to have its full effect in me.’9 Cases of decep­ tion and coercion are usually ruled out by this test because they are cases where one party prevents the sharing of ends either by disguising her own end, or by imposing it by force on another. I am not required however to share the immoral ends of those affected by my action; that is the limitation Kant intends by saying ‘as far as possible’, and this means that the formula ends up defining what is mor­ ally permitted in a circular way.10 Both of these formulas of the categorical imperative R. M. Hare endorsed. He learnt his Kant from H.  J.  Paton, and his own moral theory is best seen as a restatement of a rational ethics in the Kantian mould, acknowledging the recent developments in the philosophy of language associated with J. L. Austin and the ‘ordinary language’ school. My father had become a regular member of Austin’s Saturday morning group, and he took from Austin the account of a ‘descriptive fallacy’, the fallacy of supposing that the function of moral language is to describe,

8 R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 108. 9  Gl 4. 430. 10  MdS 6. 388: ‘whose permitted end I thus make my own end as well’, and 450: ‘The duty of love for one’s neighbor can, accordingly, also be expressed as the duty to make others’ ends my own (provided only that these are not immoral).’

The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy  7 rather than, as Austin put it, ‘to evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways. Here too KANT was among the pioneers.’11 The moral demand is the first part of the ‘moral gap’ picture, and the second is our natural capacities which are inadequate to the demand. Here too Kant is a source. He believed in radical evil, which ‘corrupts the ground of all maxims’, and which ‘cannot be extirpated by human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—­ something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.’12 The term ‘natural’ here is tricky, and Kant uses it in different ways. In this passage he means the capacities we are born with. In his view of radical evil Kant is following Luther in The Bondage of the Will, who says ‘It is true that we stand where two roads meet, . . . and the law shows us how impossible is the one, that leading to good, unless God bestows His Spirit.’13 This takes us to the third part of the ‘moral gap’ picture which is the assistance from outside us given so that we can live according to the demand. The Moral Gap claims that the Christian picture is that God is the source of the demand and God offers the assistance, and it discusses in particular the assistance given in Christ’s atonement and our justification. The picture of the moral gap allows us to see the central moral problem, which is that we seem to be under a demand that we cannot meet, in Kant’s terms that there is an ‘ought’ which does not imply a ‘can’. Actually, in Kant’s picture ‘ought’ still implies ‘can’, but it does not imply ‘can by our own devices’. Here again he is following Luther, who is following Augustine who says, ‘God commands some things which we cannot do, in order that we may know what we ought to ask of Him.’14 So we see the Christian picture here which solves the problem by invok­ ing divine assistance. We also see three non-­Christian strategies for dealing with the problem: I call them ‘reducing the demand’, ‘puffing up the capacity’, and ‘finding a substitute for God’s assistance’. Kant discusses all three of these strat­ egies and rejects them all. The second volume of the trilogy, God’s Command, works out further what it means to say that God is the source of the moral demand, the first part of the moral gap picture. But here the book goes back not to Kant, but to Duns Scotus. To understand this, we need to start with Aristotle’s account of substance. He says in Metaphysics, ‘The complete result, such a kind of form in this flesh and bones, is Callias or Socrates. What makes them different is their matter, which is

11 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3. The cap­­ ital­iza­tion of KANT is in the original, and Austin here makes Kant a hero of anti-­descriptivism. 12  Rel 6: 37. 13  Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1957), 158. 14 Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 32, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. I, ed. and trans. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 759.

8 Introduction different; but they are the same in form, since their form is indivisible.’15 Aristotle’s account of substance here is that two individual substances, Callias and Socrates, are made different by their matter, and they are the same in form or essence, which is for both of them ‘humanity’.16 He says that what distinguishes a sub­ stance from a mere heap is that there is a cause of its unity.17 With a mere heap of sand there is no good answer to the question: ‘Is this the same heap when five grains of sand have been blown away?’. There will still be a cause of some grains sticking and some not, but the cause is not internal to the nature of ‘heap’. With natural substances, however, there is a nature given in a definition: ‘A definition is a unitary formula, not by being bound together (as the Iliad is) but because it is the formula of a unity.’ The nature ‘human’ determines when change is of such a kind as to destroy the substance. Scotus, by contrast, thinks there is an individual essence (e.g. ‘Socrateity’), the philosophical term is a ‘haecceity’, which is something positive conferring a greater and more perfect kind of unity on an individual substance, in the same way that ‘human’ confers a greater and more perfect kind of unity than ‘animal’, and ‘animal’ than ‘living thing’.18 A haecceity is in principle intelligible, and is in fact intelligible to God. It is not intelligible to us, because of the limits of our knowledge, so that our ability to refer to an individual essence outruns our ability to understand it. It is, however, possible to love what one does not understand. This is how we can love the individual essence of God even though we do not understand it. The same is true about our love of our neighbours and even our love of ourselves. We can love the individual essence of our neighbour, or of our­ selves, without understanding it. Scotus is in this way different from Aristotle, but the emphasis on unity remains. There is a unity which all humans have in com­ mon and it comes from the being they have in common, and so too does any unity follow by virtue of itself on some being or other.19 Scotus says here that just as ‘human’ has the kind of unity that cannot be divided up into sub-­species, so ‘Socrateity’ has the kind of unity that cannot be divided up into littler substances. In this way being human and being Socrates are different from being animal, which can be split up into being human and being hedgehog.

15 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 8, 1034a5‒8, in Metaphysics Books Z and H, trans. with a commentary by David Bostock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 14. I will cite the translation of Metaphysics by Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973) unless I specify otherwise (as here). 16  Not all scholars agree with me about this. See T.  H.  Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 218. 17 Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII, 6, 1045a8ff, 39. 18  See Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 3, q. 5 and 6, in Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham, trans. and ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 93–113. 19  See Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 3, q. 6, 101.

Three Descriptions of the Good Life  9 There is a biblical passage that contains a related idea.20 We are told in Revelation that God has for each of us a new name written on a white stone, which God will give us in the next life but which we do not yet know. Names in Scripture can express character, as when Jesus gave Simon the name ‘Peter’, literally ‘rock’, and said ‘On this rock I will build my church’.21 So we can think of God as already calling us by a name that expresses what God is calling us to become, even though we do not yet know this name. Scotus says that the natural will ‘is directed towards a perfection in which the will is really perfected; but real perfection is not something general or universal, but something singular.’22 He goes on to describe our beatitude as consisting in the enjoyment of the divine essence shared by the three [divine] persons, so that we become co-­ lovers (condiligentes). God’s Command suggests that we should see our destination as a particular way of lov­ ing God, and God’s command and (differently) God’s call to us as God’s way of prescribing a route for us to this destination, which is not just our individually loving God, but our doing this together with all other individual and unique co-­ lovers. The book also suggests that this destination is what gives us our dignity, and so it is the foundation of the moral law that respects the dignity of each human being. This proposal has the merit of not requiring that we now be mani­ festing our unique love of God to any observable degree, and so not ruling out many human beings from having dignity. And it is consistent also with allowing that we have the freedom to reject this destination.

1.3  Three Descriptions of the Good Life We can now go on to the present project, the third volume of the trilogy. We will look at the intersection of the doctrine of the work of the Spirit with moral theory, paying attention to some ingredients of the good human life. There have been many accounts over the last few decades of what the good human life contains. Here are three such accounts. One version is given in the ‘objective list’ version of utilitarianism found in Jim Griffin’s Well-­Being.23 He sets up a list of prudential values, which he calls ‘the common profile’ because it provides a picture of nor­ mal human desires. ‘Virtually all persons, when informed, want to live autono­ mously, to have deep personal relations, to accomplish something with their lives, to enjoy themselves.’ He then adds understanding, which is knowing about one­ self and one’s world. But this list of five has some important omissions. Here are two. The list contains no communal values and no religious values. For Socrates, 20  Revelation 2: 17. 21  Matthew 16: 18. 22 Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl. dist. 49, q. 9, trans. Allan  B.  Wolter, ed. William  A.  Frank (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 157. 23  James Griffin, Well-­Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 114. I have discussed this list in more detail in The Moral Gap, 128–33.

10 Introduction it was a central value not merely to have a flourishing personal life but to be part of a flourishing polis. Indeed, this puts the point too weakly. The institutions (nomoi) of his polis were like his parents in that they formed his identity. His full name included reference to his city: ‘Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, the Athenian.’ And religious values are central to most people in the world. On one account, on current rates of growth, by 2050 80% of the world’s population will belong to one of the major religions.24 Suppose my deepest value is disengage­ ment from the world, or a life of union with God, would I be abnormal? Griffin’s response to this point is to say that religious values are not in the ordinary sense prudential values at all. But they do not belong in his account of moral values either, and they are thus not given any place in his account of how we should make decisions. What matters is not whether we call them ‘prudential’ values, but whether we allow that they can be the central values in the desire profile of a normal human being. Griffin’s list is symptomatic. To put this harshly, the list is characteristic of an individualist, achievement-­directed, secular Westerner. A second list that accommodates these two additions is John Finnis’s list of basic values in Natural Law and Natural Rights.25 His list is not (like Griffin’s) presented as comprehensive, but he thinks anything not included can probably be explained in terms of what is. He lists life (and also health and procreation); knowledge (making true judgements about the propositions we affirm or deny); play; aesthetic experience (the appreciation of beautiful form); sociability (espe­ cially friendship, but also political and other forms of community); practical rea­ sonableness (including an intelligent ordering of emotion); and religion. It is worth mentioning two omissions here as well. The first is that the good human life is not here said to contain any particular relation to non-­human species of life. We are now much more conscious than we were in 1980 of the importance to our lives, not just instrumentally but intrinsically, of our relations to the whole array of life forms around us. The second omission is the importance for human life of the imagination, but this can probably be accommodated under ‘play’. A third list that accommodates the two additions just made, as well as some others, is the capability approach of Martha Nussbaum.26 She lists life; bodily health (and so food and shelter); bodily integrity (and so security against vio­ lence, but also opportunities for sexual satisfaction); senses, imagination, and thought (and so education, freedom of expression, and freedom of religious 24  John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (London: Penguin Books, 2009), vii. Both the term ‘belong’ and the term ‘religion’ are problematic here, but what matters is not the specific figure, but the point that excluding religious values cuts out what very large numbers of people in the world care about deeply. 25  John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 85–90. 26  Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19. There are different ways to interpret her project, but I am assum­ ing her list is supposed to be more or less complete, and that the omission of gender identity is there­ fore a defect.

The Beautiful and the Sublime  11 exercise); emotions (and so attachments to others, allowing love, grief, longing, gratitude, and justified anger); practical reason (and so being able to plan one’s life, and liberty of conscience); affiliation (and so freedom of assembly and pol­it­ ical speech, and not being discriminated against); a relation to other species of living things; play; and control over one’s environment (and so political participa­ tion and property rights). Nussbaum has added to this list at various times. But there is still a striking omission, which will be the main topic of Chapter 3, namely a healthy relation to one’s own gender. To try to discuss how all of these constituents of a good human life relate to the Spirit’s work inside us would be truly an enormous undertaking. We are going to look at just four: aesthetic pleasure, the relation to one’s gender, love of one’s country, and contemplation. The principle of selection here is that these four are examples of the four main different kinds of unity involved in a good human life: unity between ourselves and the world (as in aesthetic pleasure), unity within a life (as in gender transition), unity between human beings (as in love of one’s country), and unity between us and God (as in contemplation).27 The project is to learn about the character of the Spirit by learning about these different kinds of unity that the Spirit leads us towards.

1.4  The Beautiful and the Sublime Chapter 2 is about aesthetic experience. It will start with Kant’s argument that we need to appeal to divine agency in order to explain how our experience of beauty generates legitimate claims of universal validity. The chapter will continue with an account of Kant’s treatment of our experience of the sublime, and it will illustrate his meaning by an analysis of one of the movements of one of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas and one of the movements of his symphonies. The account of aes­ thetic pleasure is important to Kant for its own sake, but also because he thinks beauty is a symbol of morality, and because of this it can increase our respect for the moral law when this is waning.28 Kant distinguishes between what he calls a ‘revolution’ of the will, which is outside of space and time and enabled by an ‘effect of grace’, and what he calls ‘reform’, which is a process within space and time.29 He then associates the second with the work of the Holy Spirit.30 When he argues for the place of God in explaining the extraordinary pleasure we get from beauty and explaining why we ‘quarrel’ about it, it is again the Holy Spirit he has 27  There is a traditional idea of a fourfold alienation caused by sin, between us and the cosmos, ourselves, other people, and God. See Anthony Akinwale, ‘Reconciliation’, in Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 545–57. The Spirit can be understood as working against this alienation. I owe this reference to Neil Arner. 28  KU 5: 351. 29  Rel 6: 47. 30  Rel 6: 68–71.

12 Introduction in mind, though he does not make this explicit in the Third Critique. Chapter 2 will go through the argument in detail, because it is obscure and not widely known. It is significant here that Kant grounds aesthetic pleasure in the ‘free play’ of our two faculties of imagination and understanding, and the sense of life when both faculties are in full, unimpeded activity and in unity with each other. This is significant because it suggests that our experience of beauty lies in movement, and Chapter  6 is going to suggest (using the work of John Dewey) that the unity between us and the world which is manifested in our experience of beauty is dynamic. We can see movement from the life or breath of the Spirit as moving us towards beauty, both in its creation and in its enjoyment. When we see beauty as a symbol of morality, it is because it gives us a perceptible reminder or image of the way God fits what is outside us and our inner soul activity together into a coher­ ent whole. The union of our happiness and our virtue is our final end, our highest good, and Kant is here translating within the boundaries of mere reason the idea of the Psalmist that under providence justice and peace will kiss each other.31 Again, this fitting of the two together is a dynamic process, and again the Christian will readily attribute it to the work of the Spirit. The sublime has for Kant the same function as the beautiful in this respect, but the structure is different. The sublime attaches, for example, to our experience of power in nature: the hurricane and the stormy sea. As with the feeling of moral respect there are two moments in this experience; first there is the moment of humiliation in which we recognize our powerlessness, and then there is the moment of recovery when we see our worth, and in particular our freedom which transcends nature. Chapter  2 will try to illustrate this structure of the two moments by referring to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 2, written in 1796, just six years after Kant’s Third Critique, and the first movement of the Eroica Symphony. Beethoven knew of Kant. He exclaims, ‘The moral law within us and the starry heavens above us—­Kant’, quoting (the wrong way round) Kant’s conclusion at the end of the Second Critique about what filled his mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence.32 These are the words that appear on Kant’s tombstone in Königsberg. Beethoven also uses the term ‘sublime’ (in German erhaben), but this does not tell us much, because the term has various senses, not all of them consistent with Kant’s usage, and Chapter  2 will try to ­distinguish them. The association of beauty with the Holy Spirit is present in both Scripture and tradition. We learn from Exodus 31: 2‒5, for example, that the Lord filled Bezalel with the spirit of God, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of

31  Psalm 85: 10. 32 A. W. Thayer, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, vol. II, revised and ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 167. Beethoven is actually quoting from the astronomer Littrow’s misquotation. The passage from Kant is KpV 5: 161.

The Beautiful and the Sublime  13 craft. In the Christian tradition, the association is made by Irenaeus and Clement, and by the Cappadocians.33 In Western theology, a conspicuous proponent has been Jonathan Edwards, who says that the Holy Spirit, ‘being the harmony, excel­ lence, and beauty of the Deity, has the particular function of communicating beauty and harmony to the world.’34 It is one of his great themes that the Spirit has the special work of the production of beauty in us and the world, and though Edwards does not use the term ‘sublime’ in this context, he has the same structure as Kant of the two moments and he attributes to the Spirit the work of moving us through them. Kant is probably wrong in his single-­minded focus on moral goodness as our end. He thinks of the next life as centrally an infinite progress towards this. He thinks our moral goodness is the purpose of the whole creation. He thinks our relationship with God is centrally a relation to the commander of our moral duties. All of this is wrong. I suspect that even if the next life contains something analogous to morality, it will look quite different and not present itself as con­ straint. But Kant is right that in the experience of the beautiful and the sublime we come into contact with what holds the whole universe together. And on the account in this book this access is the work of the Holy Spirit. One picture of this, inspired by Plato, is Iris Murdoch’s picture in The Sovereignty of Good of the mag­ netic centre towards which everything else is drawn, and we will look at this in Chapter 5, section 5.4.35 If we allow personality in the divinity (as she does not), we can see this power of the good and the beautiful over us as not just ‘the con­ stant overflow of the life of God into creation’ in a Neoplatonist way like the sun which ‘through no choice or deliberation, but by the very fact of its existence gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its illumination.’36 Instead, we can see this activity of God as God’s loving us and manifesting this love in the person of the Spirit. The suggestion of this book is that our experience of the beautiful and the sublime is one way the Spirit reaches us to draw us to our destination. This idea implies that our experience is one of movement, and Chapter  6 will use the aesthetic theory of John Dewey to look at  how dynamic form allows us through the work of art to reach the ‘unity of experience’ which makes us ‘fully alive’.37

33  See Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2002); and ‘The Beauty of God the Holy Spirit’, Theology Today, 64 (2007), 5–13. 34 Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 293, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 384. 35  Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970). 36  Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24. Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt, in The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (London: SPCK, 1940), 86–7. 37  John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin, 1934).

14 Introduction

1.5 Gender Chapter 3 is about gender. I am starting from my knowledge of our eldest child, born Catherine, who is now Thomas. He has given me permission to talk about him. The strength of my starting point is that there is a real person involved, though it would be better if he were writing this himself, and I cannot claim to see inside his mind. The weakness is that my point of departure is anecdotal. I started my reading with what he gave me to read, and I have met the friends that he has wanted me to meet. It is quite possible that my sample is not properly representa­ tive. For example, it is possible that being trans male in a way like him differs sig­ nificantly in respects relevant to this chapter from the way many people are trans female, and it is possible that what I write fits the first and not the second. Chapter  3 will raise two presumptuous questions: What is gender identity? And how essential is it to a human life? It will try to think about these questions theologically, and transgender identity will be the lens through which we look at them. The discussion is not about sexual preference or sexuality, which is separate though not independent. The trans male whose life is the starting point of the chapter has in fact lived with a cisgender male. But he went through a time before transition when he identified as lesbian, and at transition he was then rejected painfully by that community. All the various combinations of gender and sexual­ ity are possible here, and it is a different topic to discuss this. We will look at the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and in particular the claim that ‘sex’ is a biological term and ‘gender’ a term of culture or social con­ struction. Thomas has been insistent that his gender identity as a man is some­ thing he discovered, not something he made, though he has made his presentation of this identity; in that sense he is a self-­made man. Again, this may just be him and his friends. But this idea is a rich one. Chapter 3 will think of gender identity as a three-­term relation, metaphysically speaking, though this is my phrase, not his. He found something inside and he matched it at least roughly with some­ thing outside, with a social picture of what a man is like, and he himself, the third term in the relation, his heart or his will, endorsed this match. Even if the social picture is a construction, it does not follow that what he found inside himself and matched at least roughly with this outside picture is itself a construction. The fact that it is something found does not, however, mean either that it is something immutable or that it is something about which the finder is infallible. In respect of immutability, Thomas had an initial stage just before reconstructive top surgery (at the age of 30) and just after it in which he was rigidly ‘man’, down to the colour of his socks, but he has now become looser and more fluid. He would now describe himself as gender-­fluid and non-­binary, though still not-­woman. And in respect to infallibility, he would say that he was, for much of his life, not fully conscious of his gender identity, trying to fit into a mould that was never, in fact, comfortable for him.

Gender  15 Thomas went through a period of severe depression before transition, and my wife Terry and I had been worried that he might kill himself. He has given up the Christian faith of his youth, and I think part of the reason for this is what he per­ ceived as the normativity about gender inherent in Christianity and in the church. He is now much happier, and he has been involved with an organization ‘Transmission’, which runs retreats for trans males, who often find themselves in isolated and vulnerable circumstances. He has been freed to care for others and to pay attention to the beauty of the world around him in ways that are, to our observation, new to him. The project of Chapter  3 is, however, theological, even though Thomas does not construe his life theologically. The part of theology in question is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and this in two ways. First, there is a good route, so to speak, from where we are now, taking into account where we have been, to where we are headed, and the Spirit guides us along this route. Speaking theologically, our des­ tin­ation is to become, as Scotus puts it, co-­lovers (condiligentes), entering together into the love that is between the persons of the Trinity. But, second, the Spirit has the role of convicting us of sin. The three-­term relation mentioned in the previous paragraph involves reference in its second term to a ‘social picture of what a man is like’. Speaking theologically, we should be deeply suspicious of these social pic­ tures, because they have been corrupted by sin. The prevailing social categories entrench power relations. This does not mean that they are solely sinful; they may contain good. The point is that they are a mixture. The three-­term relation mentioned previously contains in its first term some­ thing found inside. Chapter 3 will try to give a positive account of this in terms of a set of preferences, for example for having hair on the face and other places on the body, a preference for having a voice in the lower register (so as to sing tenor or bass, and not alto or soprano), a preference for having a flat chest and a certain musculature. These are all what are often called ‘secondary’ sexual characteristics. They are amazingly manipulable with hormones and surgery, and they are sep­ar­ able from reproductive capacity. But the preferences extend further, and here it gets tricky. There is a whole set of practices conventionally associated with these characteristics, and the trans male may accept some of these practices, and have a preference to play a certain role in them, and reject others. The central con­struct­ ive suggestion of the chapter will be that the set of preferences he discovers can be described under a normative life-­narrative that relates where he is now, how this has developed over time, to where his life is headed. The narrative is normative in the sense that it is a story about where we should be ending up, not merely a pre­ diction about where we will in fact end up. The narrative gives a sense of unity of meaning and purpose to a life. But it is perfectly possible to have the sense that one is not at the moment in the place the narrative says one is supposed to be. We can then ask whether gender is central to the narrative. For Thomas for a while gender transition was the most important thing in his life. The chapter will

16 Introduction accordingly distinguish between centrality to the path and centrality to the ­des­tin­ation. For many people, including him, gender is central to the path. But the chapter will remain agnostic about the destination. This will bring us finally to the theology, and we will look at a poem by Richard Crashaw about Teresa of Avila that describes her in transgendered language. The chapter will raise four theological questions about gender, taking gender transi­ tion as the starting point. The first question is whether gender is a proper part of our eschatological destination, and the chapter will answer that we just do not know. The second is whether God has for each of us only one trajectory, or whether God has alternatives. The third is whether we can change the proper tra­ jectory by our own choices, or whether it is all God’s choice. The fourth question is whether we should think that gender transition might be an answer to a prompting by the Holy Spirit. There is a weighty objection to this from the first few chapters of Genesis, which we will look at. But the chapter will say yes, partly because we can sometimes see in such a transition the fruit of the Spirit, though this is not usually sufficient to establish this. The chapter will describe some changes in the trans male we have been thinking about that seem to fit this claim. The chapter will say yes also because we can see in the trajectory that includes transition the kind of unity that is characteristic of the work of the Spirit. What kind of unity is this? In the case of the third chapter the unity is teleological; the path makes sense because of the destination. This is also true in the middle of the path which can make at least provisional sense of the earlier stages. Looking back after the transition, we can see that what earlier seemed like anomalies now become intelligible. Looking forward, we get glimpses of what is to come. We get now in this life, through the Spirit, something that points forward to and is an earnest of our life in the world to come. Chapter  6 will discuss Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing as a source of the idea that there is a kind of unity in a life that is transparent to vocation.38 The narratives that people can tell about their lives including transition makes sense of those lives as responding to a call. Even though parts of those narratives include significant suffering, the shape of the life allows even that suffering to be used for the benefit not only of them­ selves but of others who are going through the same sort of trauma.

1.6  Love of Country Chapter 4 is about our political lives. It reflects on the situation as the chapter was being written under the presidency of Donald Trump. The chapter reflects on my experience of leaving one country that I loved and becoming a citizen of another. 38 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1956).

Love of Country  17 It is thus about a kind of transition, in a similar way to Chapter 3. I was also for one period of my life back in the early 1980s working for the U.S.  House of Representatives, on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, and what I say will be informed by that experience. Lee Hamilton, who was head of the committee, used to say that he was afraid that more and more of American political life was becoming like abortion, an area of policy where Congress was long paralysed because opinion in the country was so polarized that any position taken by a member of Congress would fire up equal and powerful opposition. Hamilton’s fear about polarization has turned out to be justified. The chapter will start with a tension in current political life in the United States, and maybe it is the same in other countries, between two ideals: cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Cosmopolitanism is the idea that we are citizens (politai) of the cosmos. This is Kant’s home territory and he has been very influential in the development and the spread of the idea. Patriotism is love of one’s own country, and Kant, though he manifests it, says less about it explicitly. Chapter 4 suggests that there are resources in his moral theology for holding these ideals together, and that when this moral theology is rejected the tension between them becomes acute. Kant says that we have to be able to will our action together with our rea­ son for it as a universal law. His formulation makes it morally impermissible to make ineliminable reference to individuals. R.  M.  Hare, following H.  J.  Paton, repeats Kant’s exclusion in affirming the necessary universalizability of moral judgement. This strongly affects the question of the moral status of patriotism. I can, to be sure, love my country for universal properties that it has that other countries could also have, for example the property of having lofty mountains and fertile plains. But I can also love it because of its unique history or because it  is my country. It would seem that on the Kantian formula, this cannot be a morally permitted love, because it contains ineliminable reference to an individual region of space and time or to me. Chapter 4 will challenge this claim. Cosmopolitanism comes in different forms. We can define cosmopolitanism, as Robert Audi does, as giving ‘some degree of priority to the interests of human­ ity over those of nations’, and we can say that the stronger this priority is, the stronger the cosmopolitanism.39 But there has been a long tradition in US foreign policy of denying the claims of strong cosmopolitanism. The so-­called ‘political realists’ such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau held that while it may be reasonable to hope for altruism or self-­sacrifice at least in a tainted form from individuals in some contexts, it is never reasonable to hope for it from groups, and especially not from nation states. It is striking, however, that the political realists, no less than the cosmopolitans, relied on Kant. It is a different part of 39  See Robert Audi, ‘Religion, Politics, and Citizenship’, in Reasons, Rights, and Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 286.

18 Introduction Kant they relied on, the doctrine of radical evil and the doctrine that it is by social association that this evil is activated. Since both the political realists and the cosmo­pol­itans trace their ancestry to Kant, we should ask whether he has a con­ sistent view about these questions. The important point for our present purposes is that his moral theology here, the possibility of divine assistance, makes it ­consistent for Kant to say both that, as individuals and groups, we are subject to rad­ical evil and that we are under the obligation to seek for a greater union. When this moral theology drops out, the tension between cosmopolitanism and patriotism becomes acute. Two examples of this are the work of Seyla Benhabib and the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah.40 Benhabib has a teleology. She is committed to a ‘cosmopolitanism to come’ and she expects it to come, but she has explicitly rejected the Kantian ground for such a hope, namely the op­er­ ation of providence. What, then, grounds the hope? Appiah has a different view of the meaning of ‘cosmopolitanism’. But he too is left, since he has abjured any theo­logic­al resources, with an unmediated conflict between local and univer­ sal values. Chapter 4 will discuss what loving one’s country is like, and the various ways it can go wrong. There is a ‘practical contradiction’ when one violates, in the name of love of country, some value for the sake of which one loved one’s country in the first place. Examples are not hard to find. How does moral theology help with avoiding these practical contradictions? The central point is that God both binds us into local community and then sends us out beyond it. In the story of the Good Samaritan, neighbouring the wounded Jew does not require abandoning the Samaritan community. The neighbour is a good Samaritan by neighbouring if he is following the commands of his God. Surely the point of the story is that if Samaritans can do this, Jews should be able to do it too? It is our very commit­ ment to the God worshipped in our community that then sends us out beyond it. There is a principle of providential proximity, that God puts us next to the people God wants us to help. Whereas for the Good Samaritan this was geographical proximity, it is not always this. The Holy Spirit helps us discern whom we are being put next to. This work of providence solves what Kant sees as a co­ord­in­ ation problem. ‘This duty will need the presupposition of another idea, namely of a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.’41 Talking about God including us within a community and then sending us out beyond it makes it sound as though the community has only instrumental value, and this is not right. In fact, achieving love of country is an accomplishment in  itself, and the love perseveres when we go beyond it. Again writing 40 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 41  Rel 6: 98.

Contemplation  19 autobiographically, when I was working for the U.S.  Congress in Washington, I met regularly with a group that was started by John Bernbaum. He was working with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and had been working before that for the State Department. The group was composed of staff members from all over Congress, working for Members of the House and for Senators who came from all over the political spectrum. What we had in com­ mon was that we were Christians. I do not know if such a group exists now. What was remarkable is that we were able to pray together for the country. This was not bipartisan, in the sense of somehow accommodating the interests of left and right (though some of what I did for the Committee on Foreign Affairs was, in that sense, bipartisan). Rather, what we did together went beyond partisan loyalty to a love of the country that was better than this. This was difficult then, and is even more difficult now, but I think it was our common Christian faith that made it possible for us. We sometimes experienced together the Spirit drawing us towards unity. Chapter 6 will use the work of Philip Gorski, American Covenant, to illus­ trate the idea of a covenant between God and a country, which is different from religious nationalism, and holds that country accountable to standards that it often in fact violates.42 The unity involved here is unity around a set of values or aspirations embodied in a history even if that history does not live up to those values.

1.7 Contemplation Chapter 5 of this book is about contemplation. It starts with Aristotle and a ten­ sion in his account. Aristotle is important not only because of the merit of his ideas in themselves, but because all the major Abrahamic faiths have reached their theologies in dialogue with him. Both Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics end with the teaching that the best human life is one focused on contemplation. But both works also begin with an emphasis on the active life. In the middle ages this distinction gets abbreviated into the dispute between the active life and the contemplative life. The chapter will go through various exegetical ways of trying to resolve this tension, none of which succeed. Still, the tension is fruitful. Both Aristotle’s teaching in praise of the active life and his teaching in praise of the contemplative life have merit, and we need to find a way to think through whether we can combine these merits into a single account. The chapter will proceed by deriving three questions from this tension in Aristotle. The first is about what place Aristotle gives to desire in contemplation. He says different things about this, and the central difficulty is whether to think of 42  Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

20 Introduction contemplation as an activity, in his technical sense, or as a process. The focus in this chapter is not on whether we can make Aristotle consistent, but on what we should ourselves say about the place of desire or love in contemplation. We will start with Augustine On Free Choice, and his account of wisdom (as opposed to knowledge) as discerning the highest good and then acquiring it by loving it in an activity of the will or heart. We then go on to Bonaventure and Scotus. Bonaventure sees himself as following Augustine here, and says that our loving God transcends our understanding, so that the heart has to leave the intellect behind.43 The question of how the intellect relates to the will raises a prior ques­ tion of how belief relates to desire. Contemporary philosophy has coined the term ‘besire’ to indicate something that is both a belief and a desire, when we think a  thing is good.44 We can avoid the neologism by appealing to the doctrine of ‘prescriptive realism’, which was the topic of chapter four of God’s Command. Prescriptive realism combines prescriptivism about the evaluative judgement with realism about the evaluative property. We contemplate the goodness or bad­ ness that is really there, and in that contemplation we are moved towards it or away from it. In this way we can admit the loving and the activity of the heart into the contemplation. The chapter will discuss the implications of this view for accounts of justification by faith. In this life the loving may sometimes be a longing, as the Psalmist says: ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.’45 In the next life we do not know, but we can speculate that there too there may be a sense of God’s greatness as greater than ours and then a sense of God’s sweetness as accepting us, and perhaps this is an analogous transition of moments within the next life to the Kantian sublime in this life. This assumes that our next lives are in something analogous to motion, and in this way differ from God’s life. This does not mean there is no rest for us there, but perhaps the rest is best seen as part of the path rather than its destination. In the Abrahamic faiths the more usual word for our attending to God is ‘prayer’ rather than ‘contemplation’. And the prayer, and the longing it expresses, will not only be for personal union with God but for a world in which justice and peace embrace. The second question from Aristotle is whether the person doing the contem­ plating is in fact the human being or, rather, some divine entity occupying the human soul. Aristotle’s notorious treatment of the active intellect in De Anima III, 5 raises this same question. But again the goal is not to determine what Aristotle himself meant, and the text here is so terse that determining this may not be pos­ sible. Rather, the goal is to look at the resonance of this question within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I will talk about three figures: Ibn Tufayl (Hayy Ibn 43 Bonaventure, Collations II. 30, in The Works of Bonaventure V: Collations on the Six Days, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970). 44  Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 45  Psalm 42: 1.

Contemplation  21 Yaqzan), Moses Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed), and Meister Eckhart ­(especially his account in his Sermons of the story of Martha and Mary). While there is ambivalence in all three, there is also in all three the following argument: First, our chief good is centrally an activity of the intellect; second, our intellects are identical with their contents and in the case of contemplation this content is God; third (in conclusion), our chief good is to become identical with the divine. This is how the second question from Aristotle relates to the first. If we admit the loving or longing into the contemplation, there is less inclination to say that we disappear into God. The third question from Aristotle is about the place of contemplation in the rest of life. Suppose we say that the goal of our lives is ‘to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength’, and (like Scotus) we say that loving the neighbour is included, because we love the neighbour’s potential or actual love of God. Still, following Scotus, it might seem that we would have to be thinking about God all the time and with perfect intensity and ‘a recollection of all our faculties’ in order to love in this way, and that this is beyond our capacity in this life. Perhaps the closest we could get would be to enter a monastery. But here Kierkegaard gives us a good corrective. There are spiritual dangers in the monastery no less than in the public square. The chapter will end by distinguishing the kind of prayer that is being open to God in the way our lungs are open to the air and the kind that requires different degrees of separation. In regard to the second kind, it will pro­ pose that there is no ranking across lives of a ‘contemplative’ life over an ‘active’ life. Everything depends on a person’s particular ‘haecceity’ or thisness, seen as a particular way of entering into the love that is between the persons of the Trinity. In that sense we participate in the divine loving. But the destination is that our different ways of loving God are completed by each other and so are ‘perfected into unity’.46 This account of contemplation tells us something about what we are contem­ plating. God moves us by loving us from outside us, and the divine love generates a human love in response. But this love of ours is inadequate to its object. We need and call for help, and God supplies it. This is the origin of the term ‘Paraclete’, which is from the Greek for someone who is called (kalein) alongside (para). But we get not just divine assistance but a particular answer to the three questions from Aristotle. The Spirit is the source of our love for God, which the Spirit pours into our hearts.47 The Spirit is also the presence of God in us.48 And finally the Spirit, by being present in us, guides us into how to live the rest of our lives.49

46  John 17: 23. 47  Romans 5: 5. 48  Galatians 3: 2–5. I am influenced here, and elsewhere in this book, by Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 124f. 49  John 14: 25–6.

22 Introduction Chapter 6 will use some ideas from Pascal’s Pensées to make the point that the unity we can have with God is centrally a unity of love and so a unity of the heart.50

1.8 Unity All four of the preceding chapters have been about examples of different kinds of unity: unity between ourselves and the world, unity within ourselves, unity with each other, and unity with God. The book has not yet asked explicitly: What is unity? This is the topic of the sixth and final chapter, and we start again with Aristotle. In Metaphysics Aristotle gives us a list of the senses in which something can be said to be ‘one’.51 Something can be one by ‘continuity’, as when pieces of wood are glued together to form a platform, or one by ‘genus’, which can mean one in matter or one in logical genus. But the most important kind of unity is where there is a whole constituted by a form. Aristotle’s example is a shoe. If I take the shoe parts and glue them together randomly, I may have the unity of continuity. And if they are all made of leather, and are all shoe parts, I may have the unity of genus. But I do not have the unity of form until the parts are assembled in such a way as to give protection to the feet when I walk. Artefacts are not, however, the best examples of what Aristotle means by ‘form’; his paradigm is the life of an organism. Two individual humans, Socrates and Callias, are the same in form because they both have human life, and the form ‘human’ is indivisible into other units that give form or essence. Scotus here disagrees, but that does not matter for present purposes. The rest of the chapter looks at different ways we can think of the Spirit bringing unity as a kind of life. In terms of aesthetic pleasure, the Holy Spirit acts, on the account in Chapter 2, like an artist bringing about what is beautiful and sublime, which is in both cases a kind of wholeness. In the case of beauty we have what Kant calls ‘purposiveness without a purpose’, where the form is not one for which we can give the rule, but it still gives us the vitality of ‘free play’ between the imagination and the under­ standing. In the case of the sublime the unity is that of two ‘moments’ making something together that neither could make on its own. We can see how the Spirit, being an artist, would inspire human artists to do the same. Chapter  6 looks at some places in Scripture where the Spirit is said to do this. But though Kant’s analysis of what is beautiful and sublime is the focus of Chapter  2, we should allow, as Kant does not, that the final value of beauty goes beyond its value as a symbol of the highest moral good. It may be that there is something analo­ gous to what is beautiful and sublime in our eventual state, and what is beautiful and sublime in the present life can be a foretaste of this. Bonaventure is better 50  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995). 51 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6.

Unity  23 than Kant here, and has a rich account of the spiritual senses that are analogous to our physical ones. Kant gives morality too high a place in his overall scheme. We will return to Jonathan Edwards’s account of the beautiful and to the functional equivalent of the sublime. We will also look at Dewey’s account of the unity of a work of art as enabling us by its dynamic form to be ‘fully alive’.52 The Spirit also guides us towards unity within a life. The biblical focus of this section of the chapter will be on the book of Acts, and the extraordinary spe­ci­fi­ city of the guidance that the Spirit gives. In the case of Paul’s life, the narrative is one that makes sense of his life despite its radical transitions, and so gives it an intelligible unity. There are two areas where we can suggest a connection with gender. The first is that the three-­term relation that makes up gender identity, on the account in Chapter 3, contains a social construct in its second term. We can see in Acts that all three of the relations ‘Jew/Greek’, ‘Slave/Free’, and ‘Male/Female’ are in the process of reconstruction through the Spirit’s work. This is why in Galatians 3: 28, all three in their old form are eliminated ‘in Christ’. The second suggestion is tentative and is not drawn from Scripture. There might be some­ thing about the first term of the three-­term relation that resembles God even though God does not have a body. But in any case the social constructs of gender need critique, and we will look at Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing as a source for ideas about our responsibility to make decisions about our own lives guided by the Spirit. Kierkegaard is persuasive about the danger of ‘the crowd’ usurping this function. The Spirit guides us, third, towards unity within political units. We will start with a passage in Revelation where the nations are said to bring their glories into the heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21: 26). We can see the aspirations of ‘nations’ (though the term is now problematic) as their glories, even though they are not facts on the ground and are not always consistent with each other. We will look at Philip Gorski’s American Covenant for a way to think about a special relation between God and a country that is not religious nationalism. We can think of the Spirit as not only organizing (or coordinating) the movement inside a country’s life towards justice and peace, but as also organizing (or coordinating) the distinct aspirations of different countries in order to bring about a unity ­ between them. The Spirit moves us, finally, towards unity with God. We need a different dis­ tinction from any of Aristotle’s senses of ‘one’ used so far. This is because we and God do not make a whole with a form that contains no separable essence. God may appear in our definition, if we have individual essences that are unique ways of loving God. But we do not appear in God’s definition, even though we appear in God’s thought. God would still be completely God even if there were no actual

52 Dewey, Art as Experience, 592.

24 Introduction human beings, though God chooses the limitation of being ‘with’ us. Aristotle has another distinction, however, which we can use for this purpose; one thing can belong to another ‘in itself ’ even when the two terms are not mutually co-­defined. The suggestion of Chapter 6 is that unity with the Holy Spirit is what Scripture describes as being ‘filled’ with the Spirit. This is not like a bottle being filled with water, when before there was nothing but air. It is more like a life being filled with love, where what is already there is used for loving purposes. The Spirit is working with our faculties and our desires so that they move towards God. We will look at Pascal’s Pensées for the idea that in our hearts’ contemplation of our own para­ doxical greatness and baseness, God reveals Godself in a way that transcends our understanding but calls out our love. The final section of the chapter will be about the question of why the Spirit aims at unity. The answer will be that the Holy Spirit is love, and we will look at some treatments of this topic in Augustine and Scotus.

1.9 Conclusion Our experience with the Spirit in all four of these examples points beyond itself. In the case of aesthetic pleasure the Spirit takes us into union with something beautiful or sublime, and this pleasure can take us beyond the beautiful or sub­ lime thing into a sense of the fittingness of the whole of the physical with the spiritual; our relation to that particular thing is then a symbol or a manifestation of that greater fittingness (as Scotus would say, that consonantia or symphony). In the case of gender the Spirit gives us and enables us to see (by giving us a story) a trajectory that takes us from where we were to where we are now and to where it will be good for us to be. It may involve us in difficult transitions, but it is a good path. It takes us to a destination where we do not now know whether we are gen­ dered or not, but the path we have taken will be reflected in the result, though not necessarily in the same form. The path points to a destination where the impedi­ ments of our current social constructions of gender are removed. In the case of love of country the Spirit puts us into political communities which we are to love. This love can be difficult, and because it can also easily in a debased form become idolatrous, the Holy Spirit also gives us a corrective. We are to love the neighbour as the self, and the neighbour may not belong to our community at all, or may in fact be an enemy. But none of this means that the love of the country is discarded. The destination is one where all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, will stand before the Lamb.53 In the case of contemplation, our experience of par­ tial unity with God as individuals points towards the unity of the communion of

53  Revelation 7: 9–10.

Conclusion  25 saints. This was sometimes illustrated in the interior decoration of churches, as at Ravenna, where the saints and martyrs are shown worshipping with the congre­ gation. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and our hope is to join them.54 This reference to the ‘beyond’ is reminiscent of the ladder of ascent to the Form of the Beautiful in Plato’s Symposium, but it is better than this. Gregory Vlastos has written that finally Plato’s failure was a failure in love.55 The trouble with the image of the ladder is that as we go higher up we seem to leave the lower stages behind. Socrates gets to the Form of the Beautiful, but he leaves Alcibiades behind. If the object of our love is the universal heavenly Form, even though the individual reminds us of it we do not need him any longer when we see the Form, as it were, face to face. On the picture of the work of the Holy Spirit in this book, this does not happen. In the case of physical beauty, which can stand for all four unities, the book is siding here with Bonaventure against what Augustine says about it in De Musica, ‘We must treat it as we would a plank amid the waves of the sea, not casting it away as a burden, but not embracing it and clinging to it as if we imagined it firmly fixed.’56 He is saying here that we need the plank when we are drowning, but when we get to dry land, we do not need it anymore and we may then cast it away. Bonaventure, by contrast, thinks of physical beauty as some­ thing in and through which we experience the presence of God: ‘With respect to the mirror of sensible things, it is possible that God might be contemplated not only through them but also in them as far as God is present in them by essence, power, and presence.’57 In the same way the preference for being male or female or some other gender, and the love of one’s own country, can be loves in which we experience the presence of God if they are fostered in the right non-­idolatrous way. The Holy Spirit who guides us through these loves is still active in the new heaven and the new earth. We can take the manifestations of the Spirit’s work here as an earnest of what the Spirit will be doing there, and the Spirit’s work there is continuous with the Spirit’s work here.

54  Hebrews 12: 1. 55  Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Individual as Object of Love in Plato’, in Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 56 Augustine, De Musica xiv. 46, trans. William Knight (London: The Orthological Institute, 1949). 57 Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, trans. Zachary Hayes, ed. Philotheus Boehner and Zachary Hayes (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2002), 63.

2 The Beautiful and the Sublime Introduction In this chapter, we are going to look at a component of the good human life that is present in all three of the lists of such components mentioned in Chapter  1, namely aesthetic pleasure.1 The chapter gives a reading of the relation between aesthetic theory and theology, as this relation is described in Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgement, and then relates this to Beethoven. What is important for this chapter is not the historical connection between Beethoven and Kant, but the way Beethoven gives sensory content to the notion of the sublime that Kant proposes. We will discover in the course of discussing Kant’s theory of the beautiful and the sublime an aesthetic argument for the existence of God with a parallel structure to his much better-­known moral argument. We will also discover a general work of the Holy Spirit. By ‘general work’ I mean a work that the Spirit accomplishes not only within the church but within the world. As Jonathan Edwards puts it, the Spirit has the particular function of communicating beauty and harmony to the world.2 Students very often start from the position that aesthetic judgement is purely subjective, and exegetes of Kant have often thought of him as an ally in the dismantling of claims to objectivity in this area of human experience. In contrast, this chapter will stress, first, that he makes God the source of the harmony between the aesthetic object and our faculties that gives us such extraordinary pleasure, and, second, that the universal validity claimed in judgements of beauty derives from beauty being a symbol of our highest good, which God also makes possible and which also is a harmony between what is inside us and outside us. Something parallel will be true, though Kant does not say this, about our ex­peri­ence of ugliness. We have made in Western culture asphalt and concrete wastelands, where we are starved of beauty. The lack of fit between these spaces and our faculties is also something that needs explanation. The experience of ugliness is not merely a personal distaste (like hating horseradish). It is a symbol of what is wrong with our world more deeply, a lack of meaning and congruence between what ought to be and what is. 1  Some of the content of this chapter has already been published in my ‘Kant, Aesthetic Judgement, and Beethoven’, in Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, ed. Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 2 Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 29, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 384.

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0002

Beauty as a Symbol of Morality  27 Kant’s project in the Third Critique is to build a bridge between the domains of nature and freedom. Our faculty of understanding tries to work out laws for our dealings with nature (the topic of the First Critique), and our faculty of reason tries to work out laws of freedom (the topic of the Second Critique). The Third Critique concerns a third faculty, our faculty of judgement, which thinks particular things under universal concepts. The present chapter is about aesthetic judgements, when we think of objects under the concepts ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’, and it is about the relation of the beautiful and the sublime to God. The chapter expresses the view of the author and does not claim to represent the consensus of Kant scholarship. There is no such consensus, but recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the centrality to Kant’s work of his moral theology. The chapter proceeds from Kant on the beautiful to Kant on the sublime, and then to Beethoven. It presents an analysis of the slow movement of his early piano sonata in A, Op. 2, No. 2, dedicated to Joseph Haydn, and then goes on to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony. The chapter contains a brief remark about the ­relation between Kantian freedom and Christian faith, and then ends with a ­discussion of Jonathan Edwards’s account of the relation between our sense of the beautiful and the sublime and the work of the Holy Spirit. The thesis of the chapter is that the Spirit takes us towards what is beautiful and sublime as way-­markers in our movement towards God. They are like cairns (as on the cover of this book) which are striking in themselves and made of stones from the place they stand, but which give a meaning beyond that place: we are on the way or at the top.

2.1  Beauty as a Symbol of Morality In the preface to the second edition of the First Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says ‘I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’.3 Kant’s moral argument for faith in the existence of God can be summarized briefly as follows: We have to postulate that God exists, even though this goes beyond our knowledge, in order to believe with rational stability in the real possibility of the highest good, the union of virtue and happiness, which is the end that morality itself gives to us and which is made possible by the will of the supersensible author of nature. Kant accepts that we desire happiness in every­thing else we desire, and he does not think there is anything wrong with this. He does not think, as is sometimes charged, that we have to sacrifice the sentient self that aims at happiness.4 The key question, however, is how we rank 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen  W.  Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (henceforth KrV) B xxx. 4 This is a charge made, for example, by Herder, as described in Stephen Rumph ‘Herder’s Alternative Path to Musical Transcendence’, in Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, ed. Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

28  The Beautiful and the Sublime these two incentives, duty and happiness. Kant thinks we are born with a ranking of happiness first and duty second, so that we will only do our duty to the extent we think it will make us happy. But morality requires the opposite ranking; duty first and happiness second, so that we will only do what we think will make us happy to the extent we think that it is consistent with our duty. Even after we have adopted this opposite ranking, however, we still have both incentives, and therefore we still need some way to believe rationally that they do not in the end conflict. This is why, in the third paragraph of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant says ‘Morality inevitably leads to religion.’5 We are free and autonomous beings, but this does not mean for him that we create the moral law; it means that we make it a law for us.6 The law is, for Kant, necessary (like a triangle having three angles), and so we could not create it.7 As he repeatedly says, we have to recognize our duties as God’s commands, and this is because only if they are God’s commands can we reasonably believe in the real possibility of the highest good.8 Chapter 1 suggested that Kant’s notion of the highest good, where what is right and what is good come together, is a philosophical translation of the idea in Psalm 85 that under God’s ordinance righteousness and peace kiss each other.9 Kant sees that one of the central problems for moral philosophy is how we can sustain the moral life.10 A preliminary answer comes in the Second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason: The feeling of respect (in German, Achtung) keeps creatures of physical sense and of need obedient to the moral law.11 This feeling is part of experience, in the domain of things ‘as they appear to us’. Our freedom, on the other hand, is outside experience in this sense, in the domain of ‘things in

For Kant, beauty is a symbol of morality’s end, our highest good, which is a union of our happiness and our duty. From Kant’s point of view Herder’s mistake is to think that this union is available to us by nature. Kant’s view of happiness here is different from Aristotle’s, as is his view of nature. I have discussed this in John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68–72. 5  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (henceforth Rel), 6: 6. 6 See Patrick Kain, ‘Self-­ Legislation in Kant’s Moral Philosophy’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 86/3 (2004), 257–306. 7  See John E. Hare, God’s Call (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 92–7. 8  Rel 6: 154. 9  Kant holds that we do not see the highest good manifest in the workings of nature. The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, and so do the evils of deprivation, disease, and untimely death. Kant considers the case of Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner  S.  Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987) (henceforth KU) 5: 452. He takes Spinoza (perhaps unfairly) as an example of a person of conspicuous virtue who does not believe in God. But such people, Kant thinks, will have a rational instability in their moral systems, because the observation of nature is not able to support a rational belief in the real possibility of the highest good. Real possibility here is different from mere logical possibility in that real possibility has to be grounded in something actual. 10  There is also a question about how we accomplish what Kant calls ‘the revolution of the will’ by which the initial order of incentives is reversed. Kant’s answer is to appeal to divine assistance. See Rel 6: 47–53, and 72–6; and John  E.  Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 156–62. 11  KpV 5: 71–82.

Beauty as a Symbol of Morality  29 themselves’. Respect is thus the crucial link between these two domains. We could compare it to a receiver that picks up signals only from what is morally good. Kant describes it as having two stages or ‘moments’. First, it humiliates our propensity to put ourselves and our happiness above the moral law. We are in the presence, for example, of a person who is a sterling example of virtue, and we feel a sense that we ought to be like that, and that this means we have to stop being the way we currently are, namely preferring our own interests illegitimately. In this way, the first moment after the reception of the signal from the moral law is painful. It is humiliation. But, says Kant, this humiliation removes a resistance, or dislodges an obstacle: ‘It increases the weight of the moral law by removing, in the judgment of reason, the counterweight to the moral law which bears on a will affected by the sensuous.’12 This is the second moment. Kant is picturing here a balance with two pans. When the weight gets less in one pan, the arm holding the other pan goes down. Self-­interest gets less motivating to us and morality gets more motivating. This picture reveals that respect is a feeling that comes in degrees. The passage just quoted (‘increases the weight’) indicates this and the context is full of such indications.13 But if respect comes in degrees, then we have merely postponed the difficulty about how we can sustain the moral life and grow in it. Even if it is true that we have this special feeling of respect for the moral law, it can wax and wane. What we need to know is what resources we have when respect is waning.14 The background for this question is that morality turns out to be, on Kant’s account, extremely demanding. We can see the problem from the ways Kant formulates the supreme principle of morality, as described in Chapter 1, and then by adding examples. First, we have to be able to will the prescription of our action together with our reason for it as universal law. When we examine the gap between the rich standard of living of many in the West and the desperate poverty in much of the rest of the world, can we prescribe this kind of distribution as universal law, not knowing our own situation in the distribution? We can also see how demanding morality is by looking at a second way Kant formulates the supreme principle, that we have to treat humanity in our own person and in the person of any other always at the same time as an end in itself, and never merely as a means. To treat another person’s humanity as an end in itself is to share her ends, her purposes, in as far as those are themselves permitted by the moral law

12  KpV 5: 76. I have had to spell the same word ‘judgement’ and ‘judgment’ depending on whether the text is English or American. 13  The moral law, Kant says, ‘has an influence on the sensuousness of the subject and effects a feeling which promotes the influence of the law on the will’, KpV 5: 75–6. 14  I owe to Ross McCullough the thought that even though Kant does not discuss this possibility, it might be the case that the reverse is also true. It might be that an increase in the strength of moral sense might increase the sense of beauty and the sublime.

30  The Beautiful and the Sublime and in as far as I can accomplish those ends by what I choose to do.15 This is true even if she is my enemy. In order to sustain the moral life in the face of these difficulties we need a supplement not explicitly connected with the moral law, because if the supplement is connected explicitly, and if respect is waning, the supplement will not work. It will be, so to speak, already contaminated. This brings us to aesthetic judgement, first the beautiful and then the sublime. Beauty, Kant says, is a symbol of mor­al­ity.16 He explains this by saying that beauty makes moral ideas perceptible by a kind of analogy, and ‘the pleasure that taste declares valid for mankind as such and not just for each person’s private feeling must indeed derive from this [analogy] and from the resulting increase in our receptivity for the feeling that arises from moral ideas (and is called moral feeling).’17 Why does Kant think that finding something beautiful increases our moral feeling? Moreover, he says here that when we judge something beautiful, we are making a claim that all humankind should agree with us. Why does he think the pleasure that is the source of this claim derives from the relation between beauty and morality?18 The best place to begin this discussion is with Kant’s statement of the antinomy of taste. An antinomy is an apparent contradiction between two theses (a thesis and an antithesis) both of which we find ourselves inclined to assert. In this case the thesis is: ‘A judgment of taste is not based on concepts; for otherwise one could dispute about it (decide by means of proofs).’ The antithesis is: ‘A judgment of taste is based on concepts; for otherwise, regardless of the variation among [such judgments], one could not even so much as quarrel about them (lay claim to other people’s necessary assent to one’s judgment).’19 What we have here is an apparent contradiction between two apparently obvious facts about our aesthetic judgements. The first is that each person has his or her own taste, and there is no way to prove one person right and another person wrong. There are no rules of beauty in this sense, as there are rules of logic by which one inference could be proved valid and another proved invalid. But the second fact is that we care about our disagreements in a way that shows we do not merely give each person leave to form his or her own judgement about beauty, in the way each person may le­git­ im­ate­ly have a different taste in ice cream or breakfast cereals. Kant says, we quarrel about beauty. He is right that both theses seem obviously true and right that they seem to contradict each other. As always with Kant’s solutions to his antinomies the solution depends on the distinction between things as they appear to us (phenomena) and things as they 15  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 37–108 (henceforth Gl), 4: 429–30. 16  KU 5: 351. 17  KU 5: 356 (emphasis added). 18  The problem is powerfully articulated by Mary McCloskey, Kant’s Aesthetic (London: Macmillan, 1987), 91–3. 19  KU 5: 338.

Beauty as a Symbol of Morality  31 are in themselves (noumena). In the present case, the solution hangs on different kinds of concepts. There are concepts of experience (namely of how things appear to us) such as ‘hedgehog’, and we have rules for telling when something is a hedgehog. Judgements of beauty are not reducible to concepts like that. On the other hand there are concepts (technically ‘ideas’) such as ‘freedom’ that go beyond experience. In the case of the judgement of beauty, Kant claims there must be such a concept to explain what we are disagreeing about. He says that this concept ‘is reason’s pure concept of the supersensible underlying the object (as well as underlying the judging subject) as an object of sense and hence as appearance.’20 This statement needs unpacking. The supersensible is what goes beyond sensation. What is this supersensible something that underlies both the object that we are judging beautiful and ourselves who are making the judgement?21 Kant says, in what I will call ‘the unity passage’: We are led to three ideas: first, the idea of the supersensible in general, not further determined, as the substrate of nature; second, the idea of the same supersensible as the principle of nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power; third, the idea of the same supersensible as the principle of the purposes of freedom and of the harmony of these purposes with nature in the moral sphere.22

So there are three supersensible things involved here, and Kant is saying all three are in fact the same. The first is what underlies nature as its substrate. Nature is the domain of things as they appear to us, and we can know it, at least in prin­ ciple. But behind this is the thing-­in-­itself, which we cannot know. This chapter is not the right place to try to defend this picture. Anyone who believes that there is a God whom we cannot perceive with the senses, and that this God acts within the universe, is likely to be drawn to some such distinction as this; there is the way we perceive things with our limited capacities and there is the way God knows them as their creator and sustainer, and we perceive what God creates only as it appears to us through our faculties. Kant’s three Critiques as a whole aim at what he calls ‘the unity of reason’ that ties the doctrine of these three works together. There are ideas, such as ‘God’ and ‘freedom’, which in the theoretical use of reason (analysed in the First Critique) we have to treat as merely regulative,

20  KU 5: 340. 21 Here Kant scholars diverge, and I am agreeing with Werner Pluhar, R.  K.  Eliot, and Paul Crowther. See Werner Pluhar’s introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), lxxxvi–­cix. See also, R. K. Elliot, ‘The Unity of Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” ’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8/3 (1968), 244–59; and Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 22  KU 5: 346.

32  The Beautiful and the Sublime without making existence claims about them; it is merely helpful to think as if they existed. But Kant is a strong proponent of the priority of the practical. And in the practical use of reason (analysed in the Second Critique) these same ideas have to be treated as constitutive; we properly make the claim that God and freedom exist. How does God act in the world to produce the harmony between nature and our judgement? This goes beyond our understanding, but in a later section of the Third Critique Kant says, How can we at least conceive of the possibility of such a harmony—­one that is presented as contingent and hence as possible only through a purpose that aims at it—­between the things of nature and our judgment? To do this, we must at the same time conceive of a different understanding . . . that, unlike ours, is not discursive but intuitive.23

Kant’s view is that God’s intellectual intuition is not, like our intuition, merely receptive, but it is productive; this intuitive intellect produces the things in themselves that we then receive as appearance. This is the role of the supersensible author of nature. Kant is here translating the more ancient idea that God is creating and sustaining the universe. Kant’s claim is that when we bring in the prac­ tical use of our reason, we can properly make existence claims for this God. The second supersensible in the unity passage needs some more explanation. When we perceive something as beautiful, Kant says, we are sensing something in ourselves; the object is prompting the free play of our imagination (which processes the image) and our understanding (which orders it under concepts). Our cognitive faculties are then in full liveliness in their interaction with each other. This perception is of a kind of purposiveness (the object is for this free play), but purposiveness without a purpose, because we have no empirical concept (such as ‘hedgehog’) by which to determine what the object is for. It is simply ‘for’ this fittingness between the object and our faculties that gives us such extraordinary pleasure. We could think of the videos showing the painter Mondrian playing around for months with his grids of black lines and his blocks of primary colours, until he gets the triumphant sense ‘this is right’. In this rightness the two faculties have reached unity in their free play with each other. The second supersensible is what underlies both the object and our subjective cognitive powers, so as to make possible this lovely harmony between them. The third supersensible in the unity passage lies behind two different things: the purpose of freedom, which is that we be morally good, and the harmony of this purpose with nature. Kant is here referring to his often-­repeated teaching that we should recognize God as the commander of our duties, but also as

23  KU 5: 407.

Beauty as a Symbol of Morality  33 responsible for the harmony of these duties with nature, so that they can in fact be accomplished. They could, after all, be doomed to frustration. R. M. Hare used to quote, in support of the ‘blik’ that the good is more fundamental than the evil, Psalm 75: 3 where God says of the earth and all its inhabitants, ‘I bear up the ­pillars of it.’24 The third role of the supersensible becomes clear when Kant goes on to ask, What is the final purpose we can ascribe to the (divine) intellectual in­tu­ition that produces things in themselves? The answer is the production of beings who can aim at the highest good, which is the union of our happiness and our virtue.25 Kant argues on this basis for what he calls ‘ethicotheology’, the view that we have to believe in a supersensible author of the world who can make this union really possible. Now how is it that these three supersensible things could be the same, as Kant states they are in the unity passage? If we start with the second supersensible just mentioned, namely ‘the principle of nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power’, we can see how this very supersensible can be the same as the other two. Since this same divine intuitive intellect also underlies (by creating and sustaining it) our own activity in cognition, we can understand how there could be a harmony between the object and our faculties that allows the sense of beauty; both come from the same source. This is Kant’s response to the apparent miracle that mere assemblages of material ingredients could occasion in us this intense and profound pleasure that we think everyone should enjoy.26 The explanation is that this pleasure is a foretaste of the unity we will enjoy between our moral purposes and the world, which we will experience fully when our highest good is realized, the purpose of this same supersensible author. Here then we have the basis for saying that it is the same supersensible ground that plays all three roles. And this gives us the conceptual tools we need to understand what Kant means by saying that beauty is the symbol of morality. A symbol, he says, has structural similarity to the thing symbolized. Thus a monarchy ruled by its own constitutional laws would be symbolized as an animate body, but the rule of an individual absolute will would be symbolized as a mere machine (such as a hand mill).27 Symbolism works by analogy. So then beauty is a symbol of morality because there is an analogy by which something true of morality is presented by a perceptible vehicle, the beautiful object. This analogy is important because, as quoted earlier, ‘the pleasure that taste declares valid for mankind as such and not just for each person’s private feeling must derive from [this analogy].’28 So here we get Kant’s solution to the antinomy of taste we started 24  R.  M.  Hare, ‘The University Discussion’, in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955). 25  KU 5: 435. Kant’s statement of this is anthropocentric, but could be modified to ac­know­ledge the possibility of other creatures with this capacity. 26  KU 5: 353, ‘such a pure liking’. 27  KU 5: 352. 28  KU 5: 356, emphasis added.

34  The Beautiful and the Sublime with. Because we are justified within the practical use of reason in believing what Kant calls ‘the fact of reason’ that we are under the moral law, we are justified in believing in the real possibility of the highest good, which is the end that morality itself gives to us. This possibility is grounded in the existence and the providence of God, who creates and sustains both us and the world and who promulgates this law. But our sense of a fit between us and the world is precarious at best, and is often defeated, though we long for it. The experience of beauty gives us a foretaste of what such a fit is like. When we experience the harmony of the world and our faculties in full vitality in our enjoyment of the aesthetic object, we are encouraged to think the same supersensible author of nature is producing the analogous harmony which is our destination. This is one account of the common experience of being led by physical beauty to something beyond it. ‘My eyes for beauty pine’, writes Robert Bridges (in a poem set marvelously for choir by Herbert Howells), ‘my soul for Goddës grace. No other care nor hope is mine; to heaven I turn my face.’ There is thus an argument that leads from our aesthetic experience of beauty to the existence of a supersensible ground and thus to God. The argument has much the same structure as Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God from the rational requirement that we believe in the real possibility of the highest good, and indeed the aesthetic argument uses premises from the moral one. In the aesthetic case the starting point is the pleasure that taste declares valid for humans as such, and not just for each person’s private feeling. How can mere pleasure be the ground for such a universal claim? Kant suggests that the answer is that there is something all humans should value that the aesthetic enjoyment connects with and depends upon. Given the difference between people in what attracts them, this something cannot be merely empirical (like the pleasure in salted herring). It is, he thinks, the highest good, of which aesthetic pleasure gives us a foretaste. But this rationally requires that we believe in God as the ground for the union of our happiness and our virtue and the ground for the analogous fit between the aesthetic object and our faculties.29 29  What is it that the moral good and the beautiful have in common? In judging something to be beautiful, we are not subjected to rules from experience, as we are when judging that something is a hedgehog. Rather, ‘Concerning objects of such a pure liking, [judgment] legislates to itself, just as reason does regarding the power of desire. And because the subject has this possibility within him, while outside [him] there is also the possibility that nature will harmonize with it, judgment finds itself referred to something that is both in the subject himself and outside him, something that is neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible, in which the theoretical and the practical power are in an unknown manner combined and joined into a unity’ (KU 5: 353). There are again three points to the analogy here. The first point of analogy is that the judgement of taste and the practical judgement of duty are both free because they are not determined under empirical law. Kant says that in judging the beautiful we present the imagination as harmonizing with the understanding under no ‘rule’ of beauty, and in a moral judgement we are under universal laws of reason, not empirical laws. The second point of analogy is that there is the possibility of harmony between this freedom and nature. The contrary is also possible, that we never find objects that ­occasion this pure kind of pleasure in us or, in the moral case, that we never actually achieve the

The Sublime  35

2.2  The Sublime Kant wants us to find the same kind of role for the sublime with respect to ­mor­al­ity as he finds in the case of the beautiful. Indeed in work on practical ­philosophy written prior to the Third Critique Kant uses the term ‘sublime’ for our morality without tying it to aesthetic experience at all. Thus in the Groundwork he says that ‘the freedom from dependence on interested motives . . . constitutes the sublimity of a maxim.’30 In the Second Critique he says that personality, which is our susceptibility to the incentive of the moral law for its own sake, ‘places before our eyes the sublimity of our nature (in its [higher] vocation)’.31 But in the Third Critique Kant widens his usage to include not just our morality, but the connection of this morality with an aesthetic experience of a particular kind.32 Kant distinguishes what he calls ‘the mathematically sublime’ from what he calls ‘the dynamically sublime’, which involves force and movement rather than mere greatness of size. We sense the mathematically sublime in cases where we perceive something in nature that has awesome size, as where we are at the base of a mountain that towers over us, or (in Kant’s own example) ‘the bewilderment or kind of perplexity that is said to seize the spectator who for the first time enters St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome’.33 Kant’s account takes us through the concept of infinity. Summarizing and abbreviating, the claim is that when we see something of such greatness that everything else is reduced to smallness, we feel the need to have a measure of this greatness in order that we might get an idea of the whole (which Kant thinks Reason demands).34 But no measure is going to work for the absolutely great except infinity. And infinity, Kant says, is not a concept to which we have sensory access; it is an idea of Reason. So in the encounter with the math­em­ at­ic­al­ly sublime we first have an unpleasant or frustrating moment of incapacity, but it is followed by a moment of pleasure when we realize that we do have inside ourselves this idea that is sufficient for the task.35 The effect of the mathematically moral ends we aim at. Indeed the world sometimes feels like this in both cases; it feels as though we are lost in a waste of ugliness and that nothing in our lives makes any moral sense. The third point of the analogy is between the actual achievement of beauty and the achievement of the end that morality itself gives to us, namely the highest good, the union of happiness and virtue. Kant is saying that physical beauty gives us a foretaste of our highest good. In both the judgement of beauty and the moral judgement we are referred to the supersensible, by which nature and freedom are combined in an unknown manner and joined into a unity. We have here the same God who plays all three roles previously discussed in the unity passage, in reference to the solution to the antinomy of taste. Only the God who underlies the laws of nature can combine them with the laws of freedom in such a way as to produce a unity, and that unity will be in the practical case our highest good. 30  Gl 4: 106. 31  KpV 5: 194. 32  This is the case also with his pre-­critical work, Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime and  Other Writings, trans. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 33  KU 5: 252. 34  Crowther thinks there is a ‘minor account’ of the mathematical sublime that does not have this reference to infinity, The Kantian Sublime, 103–4. 35  KU 5: 254.

36  The Beautiful and the Sublime sublime is thus to produce in us the same kind of attunement that is present in the feeling of respect for the moral law.36 The dynamically sublime takes us through the idea not of greatness of size, but of greatness of might. Kant is thinking of cases where we are in the presence of something in nature so mighty that we would be powerless to resist, and we would be afraid if we were not in a position of safety. Consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightening and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place.37

Kant is here in tune with the enjoyment of the picturesque that one finds earlier in Shaftesbury, for example, and in Addison and Burke. But his account is different from theirs, and the difference resides in the structure of the two stages or ‘moments’ that he attributes to the experience of the dynamically sublime. This structure is very similar to the structure of the experience of moral respect discussed at the beginning of section  2.1. After we are presented with the mighty object, the first moment is one of finding it fearful (though we are not actually afraid), and is unpleasant. But the second moment, again, is one of pleasure. Though the irresistibility of nature’s might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-­preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.38

What is it that enables us to see ourselves as ‘independent of nature’ in this sense? Here again we have to return to the supersensible. We can regard as small the objects of our natural concerns: such things, Kant says breezily, as property, health, and life.39 And we do not have to bow before nature’s dominance if our highest principles are at stake. ‘Nature is here called sublime [in German erhaben] merely because it elevates [in German erhebt] our imagination, [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies

36  ‘[The aesthetic power of judgment] will produce a mental attunement that conforms to and is compatible with the one that an influence by determinate (practical) ideas would produce on feeling’, KU 5: 256. 37  KU 5: 261. 38  KU 5: 261. 39  KU 5: 262.

Beethoven and the Sublime  37 in its vocation and elevates it even above nature.’ Kant brings in the supersensible here because the effects of might in nature arouse in the spectator ‘the idea of God’s sublimity, insofar as he recognizes in his own attitude a sublimity that conforms to God’s will’.40 Kant is acknowledging that we are dependent on nature in the sense that we are creatures of sense and creatures of need. But we are also independent of nature because we are at the same time free, which means that we are following the vocation given us by the supersensible author of nature. We therefore do not have to be afraid that nature’s might can stand in the way of the purposes of this author being fulfilled. This means that the sublime can have the same morally elevating effect as the beautiful. In both cases this is accomplished by a sense of fit. The difference between the two is that the sense of fit in the sublime is preceded by a sense of lack of fit. But when we ‘come to ourselves’ we see that we are in fact as moral agents in tune with the direction of the world by its author.

2.3  Beethoven and the Sublime Beethoven uses the term ‘sublime’, for example in his directions to his song ‘Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur’, which he marks ‘majestätich und erhaben’.41 James Webster calls the whole period 1780–1815 ‘the age of the Kantian sublime in music’.42 We do not know, however, just from Beethoven’s use of the word ‘sublime’ that he was following Kant. The term had been used for fifty years to talk about music, since Telemann used it in 1755, and it had become a commonplace.43 Moreover, Kant was not talking about music at all (he does so infrequently, and unconvincingly). But if we want to talk about Beethoven in terms of the sublime, a Kantian account fits some of his music better than some other accounts that will be discussed in a moment. To take this short song first, it is a version of Psalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’. Beethoven thus uses ‘Majestic and Sublime’ in his directions for a piece in praise of God and God’s creation. The piece has just forty-­two bars, and starts and ends with four C major chords fortissimo in the same metrical configuration in each place. The first movement of the Eroica starts in the same way with two chords in E flat. Like the symphony, also, the opening theme of the song starts with just the notes of the triad (the home chord). In the song the theme is answered in a phrase of the same

40  KU 5: 263. 41  This song is discussed in Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), chapter 2. I am grateful to him for performing this piece with me during our colloquium. 42  James Webster, ‘Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: “First Viennese Modernism” and the Delayed Nineteenth Century’, 19th Century Music, 25/2–3 (2002), 126. 43  I owe this point to Markus Rathey.

38  The Beautiful and the Sublime length that ends on the dominant (the fifth note of the scale). There is then a ­sudden unprepared modulation to E flat, pianissimo, where the text asks: ‘Who conveys the innumerable stars of heaven?’ expressing fear or awe in the presence of a power that could govern such a multitude. Then there is a triumphant return of the theme, to the tonic (the home key) and to forte, ending fortissimo with three sforzandos (sudden emphases) as the sun like a strong man rejoices to run its course. We can call this kind of sublime ‘the hopeful sublime’, and then distinguish it from some other types. What is important, however, is not the word ‘sublime’. What is important, rather, is what Beethoven is doing in his music, and sometimes, and in particular in the two places we are going to look at in more detail, he is doing what can be understood in terms of the category of a Kant-­like hopeful sublime rather than other notions of the sublime that can be distinguished from that one. Beethoven had on his desk the famous inscription from the temple of Isis, taken from an essay by Schiller, ‘I am all that is, and that was, and that ever shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from my face.’44 Kant says, of this very inscription, ‘Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance, or a thought more sublimely expressed, than the well-­known inscription upon the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature).’45 He is thinking of Isis here as the supersensible ground of nature. The contrast he intends is between nature as it appears to us and mother nature (a locution he does not elsewhere use, but which belongs to the Kantian project of translating religious language ‘within the boundaries of mere reason’). But Kant makes this reference to Isis in a footnote to a passage about the effect of the consciousness of virtue that ‘spreads in the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings’. So he is making the connection again here between the supersensible substrate and the moral law. Beethoven also quoted Kant’s remark about the starry heavens and the moral law, as mentioned in Chapter 1. And he said to Bettina Brentano that music ‘is founded upon the exalted symbols of the moral sense; all true invention is moral progress’.46 All this is perfectly consistent with Kantian doctrine about the sublime, but none of it requires this analysis. There are many different accounts of the sublime, and Beethoven’s work has been understood in terms of several of them. E. T. A. Hoffman’s influential review of the Fifth Symphony in 1810 uses the term, and says more generally that Beethoven ‘irresistibly sweeps the listener into the wonderful spirit-­realm of the infinite’.47 But Hoffman’s idea of the sublime is primarily one of ‘nameless, haunted yearning’ (in German Sehnsucht): ‘[Beethoven] unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable . . . destroying 44  See Robert L. Jacobs, ‘Beethoven and Kant’, Music and Letters, 42/3 (1961), 249. 45  KU 5: 316 (emphasis original). 46  See E. Michael Jones, Dionysus Rising (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994), 61. 47  Jeremy Begbie, Music, Modernity and God: Essays in Listening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 108.

Beethoven and the Sublime  39 within us all feeling but the pain of infinite yearning.’ Paul de Man calls this yearning ‘a persistently frustrated intent towards meaning’.48 He himself liked this account of loss of meaning and tends to find it in his favourite sources.49 We can call this ‘the uncanny sublime’. It does not fit Kant on the sublime because for Kant, even though the veil is there, and we go through the experience of not being at home (unheimlich, usually translated ‘uncanny’, means literally not being at home), and even though we cannot have knowledge of the supersensible, we can still have justified true beliefs about it. This is Kant’s idea that we deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.50 The main point for present purposes is that there can be a sense of the sublime that does not require ending with the sense of alienation, or of not being ‘at home’, or of the world being disenchanted. If we want to understand Beethoven in terms of the sublime, it is sometimes the hopeful sublime that fits him better. This is not to deny that there are other times when an analysis in terms of the uncanny, or of not being at home, or of the loss of meaning, may be exactly right. The hopeful sublime, it is important to add, does not culminate in a ‘Pollyanna’ denial of turbulence and real suffering, but in what we can call ‘moral hope’. Kant is here different from Herder, whose conception is more Edenic, as though humans had not fallen into evil. Kant’s commentary on Job dismisses most of the usual attempts at theodicy, but nonetheless praises Job for persevering in the conviction that although God creates both the beautiful (the horse and the falcon) and the terrifying (Behemoth and Leviathan), the good is more fundamental than the evil and will in the end prevail over it.51 This is why the hopeful sublime is hopeful. Another account of the sublime is the ‘authoritarian sublime’.52 Nicholas Mathew compares the moment in Beethoven’s Der Ruinen von Athen at which the Hungarian converts sing ‘es wurde hell’ with Haydn’s climactic ‘there was light’ in the Creation. In the Beethoven piece this is the sublime used for political effect; in the Haydn it is not. Another example is the sixth and final movement of Der glorreiche Augenblick. The power that is felt here and honoured is glorious political power, and there is no succession of the two moments as in Kant’s account. Indeed, Kant would be offended by the notion of respect or esteem, in his tech­ nical sense, being offered to the state. Only human moral dignity, the capacity for

48 Begbie, Music, Modernity and God, 116. 49  The point I am making is similar to that of Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, in Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 47. Wurth distinguishes Kant from the early Romantics in that their sense of the sublime was of a longing that ‘that was bent on preventing its own realization.’ 50  KrV, B xxx. 51  See John  E.  Hare, ‘Kant, Job, and the Problem of Evil’, in Ethics and the Problem of Evil, ed. James P. Sterba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 27–42. 52  I am taking this account from Nicholas Mathew, ‘Beethoven’s Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration’, 19th Century Music, 33/2 (2009), 110–50.

40  The Beautiful and the Sublime morally good action and its exercise, and the God who commands this action deserve esteem (as opposed to mere admiration).

2.4  The Slow Movement of Op. 2, No. 2 So now to the slow movement of Op. 2, No. 2, written in 1796. Tovey says, ‘The slow movement shows a thrilling solemnity that immediately proves the identity of the pupil of Haydn with the creator of the 9th symphony.’53 The movement is marked ‘largo appassionato’. The opening theme is in D major. Staccato sempre is marked in the left hand and tenuto sempre in the right. The dynamic is marked ‘piano’. The contrast between left hand (detached) and right (sustained) produces an uneasy tension, a sense of foreboding. There are four bars of transitional ma­ter­ial, and then the theme returns. Bars 1–18 and 33–51 are identical. Then there are another four bars of transition, resembling but not identical to the ma­ter­ial after the first full statement. We come to a cadence expecting D major and another repetition, and then there is the surprise. There is a brutal, unprepared shift into the minor, marked fortissimo (from mezzopiano). And the piece then migrates into B flat, a distant key, with doubled octaves in the left hand going down to the very bottom note then available on the keyboard. There are three sforzandos (sudden emphases) in the same bar in the right hand. The effect is violent. And then we get a return in four bars to the home key of D major. The return is accomplished by three reversed sforzandos in the left hand, marked ‘sfp’, on three descending octaves on the dominant (the fifth note of the home scale), each approached from the lower semitone. By the fourth bar we are at pianissimo, and then the opening theme comes back in the major key. But this time, for the first time, there is a mediating figure of four sixteenth notes (semiquavers) that picks up the dominant approached from the lower semitone in the preceding bars. This figure fills in the spaces left by the staccato base line, signalled by each group of four sixteenth notes starting with one staccato note followed by three notes under a slur. Then this figure itself starts to move towards the tonic (the home key), reaching a mezzo forte, and the piece decrescendos to a peaceful pianissimo. Here is a suggestion: There is a Kantian (‘hopeful’) story that is easy to tell about the structure of this movement. The brutal shift is an expression of something that causes us fear (though we are not really afraid, on Kant’s account, because we know we are safe), as in the first moment of the dynamically sublime. But the function of the brutal shift needs to be seen against the structure of the 53  Sir Donald Tovey, Complete Pianoforte Sonatas (London: ABRSM, 1931). A good recording that emphasizes, in an extraordinarily slow tempo, the points in this chapter is Glenn Gould, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, vol. 1 (New York, CBS Masterworks, 1990).

The First Movement of the Third Symphony  41 whole movement. The brutality is itself an explosion into actuality of the uneasy sense of nature as inhospitable that we start with, an unfocused sense of threat.54 But we are brought back to this same theme at the end, with a sense now of resolution or peace. What accomplishes the resolution is the mediating figure, which is itself introduced by the striking reversed sforzandos on the dominant, when the piece has veered the farthest harmonically from its base. The affect is like what Kant describes as the response to the call of duty, which then, under God’s providence, comes into harmony with our happiness. The movement is not a piece of programme music designed to illustrate some philosophical theory. But there is here a structure of the changes of affect and of the musical signals to which the affect responds, and this structure fits well the structure of changes in affect that Kant gives us in his treatment of the sublime six years before (1790). At least, it fits this better than it fits an account in terms of final alienation. If we wanted a sonic picture of general anxiety, followed by ter­ rible confrontation, followed by a call from outside that then itself mediates a return to oneself and eventual repose—­if we wanted all that, this movement would give us an excellent example. We can find this same structure in some of the other slow movements of the early piano sonatas (e.g. Op. 7). We also find it in the first movement of the Eroica, written in 1803. Looking at this movement will enable us to compare the hopeful sublime with other versions of the sublime that music historians have found there.

2.5  The First Movement of the Third Symphony We can start with Scott Burnham’s account in Beethoven Hero.55 Much in Burnham’s book is helpful, for example his recounting of the various programmes associated with the movement (the travails of Napoleon, Hector, Prometheus, the Will), and his demonstration at four loci in the movement (the opening theme, the new theme at bar 284, the ‘premature’ horn call at bars 394–5, and the coda) that these different readings have much of their basic shape in common. But when it comes to Burnham’s own reading of the ethical meaning of the music, it seems underdetermined by the strictly musical evidence he presents. It is determined, rather, by his account of the cultural context in which Beethoven was composing. This context is what Burnham calls ‘the Goethezeit’ (the age of Goethe). But we should be hesitant about such a monolithic characterization of this time period, which was in fact full of diverse currents of opinion even in 54  Beethoven is thus separating the first moment of the sublime into two parts; the general sense of anxiety is succeeded by the actualization of the brutal shift. A similar separation happens in the first movement of the Eroica with the tension produced by the initial C sharp and then the fury preceding bar 280. 55  Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

42  The Beautiful and the Sublime Germany, let alone the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. Burnham, like many scholars, fixates on the stream that leads to Hegel. He says: ‘For the age of Goethe, Kant, and Hegel was a watershed in the history of humanism. Man once again became the measure of things . . . a perspective decidedly sub specie humanitatis’.56 The earlier part of this chapter argued against such a view of Kant. But leaving Kant aside for the moment, there is an alternative narrative that leads not through Hegel to the Nietzschean ‘Death of God’, but to Kierkegaard and the rejection of early Fichte and Hegel precisely because of their perceived neglect of the transcendent and of revelation. There are many voices in this period, and many narratives to be constructed. What is important for present purposes, however, is not the accuracy of Burnham’s monochrome picture of the early nineteenth century in Germany but the effect that this has on how he hears Beethoven’s Third Symphony. As mentioned earlier, both Kant and Beethoven were struck by the inscription on the temple of Isis. But what does this inscription mean to them? There is a telling reading by Novalis of this same inscription: ‘To one it was granted: he raised the veil of the goddess of Sais. And what did he see? He saw—­wonder of wonders—­ himself.’57 This is Burnham’s reading of the Goethezeit: ‘an age characterized by the centrality of Self ’.58 Burnham also ties this conception of ‘the constitutive autonomy of the self ’ to the ‘unarguably sublime’. We can call this ‘the solipsistic sublime’, adding it to the list of different types of theory of the sublime we have already encountered. The chief difference from the hopeful sublime is that while it can still have two moments, we do not end up with the human will attuned to the will of the supersensible author of nature; we just end up inside ourselves. Burnham says, ‘The self is made sublime’, and this is how he thinks the opening movements of the Eroica and also the Fifth Symphony can be both awe-­inspiring as the command from an authoritative voice and at the same time no more than the self, since, by the hypothesis of ‘the age’ the self is all there is: ‘because the passionately individual self, which is heard to be projected in the music, is all there is’.59 By contrast, for Kant as this chapter understands him, it is our vocation that gives us this sublime status, and this vocation comes to us as law-­giving members of the kingdom of ends which has not merely members but a head.60 Does the solipsistic sublime fit the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony? A good place to start is the new theme in E minor, the second of Burnham’s four loci. This theme is preceded by a build-­up of unprecedented ferocity, and then by the extraordinary silence at the beginning of measure 280,

56 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 113. 57  Quoted in Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 112. 58 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 113. 59 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 150 and 121. 60 Kant, Gl 4: 434. The head of the kingdom is ‘a completely independent being, without needs and with resources adequate to his will.’ It can only be God.

The First Movement of the Third Symphony  43 a silence that Leonard Meyer calls ‘the loudest silence in musical literature’.61 But what is this new theme? Here we can learn from Michael Spitzer, who quotes from the 1807 review in the Allegemeine Musikalische Zeitung, ‘It is a total surprise when, in a novel and beautiful way, just as the development of this earlier material becomes almost excessive, an entirely new, as yet unheard melody (­ein ganz neuer, noch nicht gehörter Gesang) suddenly enters in the wind’.62 Burnham is alive to the ‘otherness’ of this theme, and yet he misses the archaic tone detected by Peter Schleuning.63 Spitzer claims (following Schleuning) that there may be a reminiscence of both the old German hymn Christ ist erstanden and Luther’s chor­ale Christ lag in Todesbanden (also in E minor, which Bach used in his E-­minor Cantata no 4).64 Spitzer says: ‘Its sacred air suggests to Schleuning a sense of divine intervention from without, in accord both with Beethoven’s “Christ worship” (as in the contemporaneous Christus am Oelberge, Op. 85) and with his “self-­image as a martyr” ’. This last reference is to Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter written to his brothers at Heiligenstadt in 1802, when he becomes aware of his probably incurable and progressive deafness. At the very time he writes this oratorio about Jesus’ agony in the Garden (1802), he becomes aware of his impending loss of hearing and devotes himself, as Daniel Chua paraphrases the Testament, to ‘dying to self ’ and ‘living for art’.65 We should take ser­ ious­ly the motif of dying to self, and the identification with Christ’s ‘not my will but Yours be done’.66 As Thomas Sipe describes, following Alan Tyson, the tormented aspect of Beethoven’s personality first found expression in works like the introduction to Christus am Oelberge and Florestan’s dungeon scene in Leonore. Both Christ and Florestan suffer under the threat of painful death, and both find resignation in consigning themselves to the will of God. The Promethean works composed by Beethoven after the Testament—[the piano sonata in B flat minor] Op 35 and the Eroica—­show the other side of that crisis, the triumphant side.67

61 Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard  B.  Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 139. This is quoted in Daniel Chua, ‘Revolutionary Freedom: An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven’, in Theology, Music, and Modernity, ed. Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 20. 62  Discussed in Martin Zenck, ‘Geschichtsreflexion und Historismus im Musikdenken Beethovens’, in Beethoven und die Rezeption der Alten Musik, ed. Hans-­Werner Küthen (Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-­ Haus, 2002), 16. The reference is in Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 63  Peter Schleuning and Martin Geck, ‘Geschrieben auf Bonaparte’: Beethovens ‘Eroica’: Revolution, Reaktion, Rezeption (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989), 119. 64 Spitzer, Music as Philosophy, 209. Both are reminiscent of the plainsong Victimae paschali laudes. 65  Chua, ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, 22. 66  Matthew 26: 39. 67  Thomas Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20.

44  The Beautiful and the Sublime We should take seriously the possibility that this theological motif is found in the first movement of the Eroica, but we also need to be cautious here. The Eroica may not be about Beethoven himself, and it may have nothing to do with the Testament. Moreover, the connection of the E-­minor theme in the Eroica with the Protestant hymn is ‘somewhat tenuous’, though the suggestion of a hymn-­like quality in the theme is persuasive.68 The new theme sounds like a deliberate backwards reference to the archaic or pre-­modern, not mediated by any intermediate material to soften the contrast with what precedes, but presented deliberately as sudden, ‘from the blue yonder’.69 Why does Beethoven do this? Daniel Chua, in a striking ‘twist’ at the end of a paper on this topic, suggests that the E-­minor theme is ‘a theological motif: a new creation . . . a miraculous gift . . . a higher grace’.70 All of this seems excitingly right, and consonant with the hopeful sublime. But the idea is starkly inconsistent with what Chua has been saying for the previous twenty-­ five pages, in which he has been attacking Beethoven by tying him to a particular damning conception of Kant, a conception articulated by John Milbank and Theodor Adorno, according to which humanity is put on the throne in place of God: ‘Evil is self-­governing autonomy—­ evil is the Kantian good, the modern good’.71 Chua acknowledges that Kant would not accept this designation, but he goes on: ‘And yet it is precisely this Kantian “evil” that Adorno hears in Beethoven.’ On this conception, what we hear in the Eroica is the glorification of a kind of individual freedom that Chua ties to a corresponding notion of the sublime, and calls a ‘theological displacement’; the self has become sublime in place of God. The tale told by the symphony is of ‘a hero whom one might find in one of David’s revolutionary paintings, striking a pose in the knowledge of death. . . . Death is the theme of the first movement’s autonomy.’72 Death, he says, is expressed in the climactic silence on the first beat of bar 280, and by the new theme at bar 284: ‘This theme is such a contradiction to the non-­ theme of the hero and so distant from the tonal anchor that it can only be heard as a negation of the hero, and so—­death.’73 Heroic autonomy is ‘defined by death’. Chua draws a sharp antithesis between this kind of freedom and the Christian picture of a freedom that can love and is stronger than death, but which at the same time is modelled by a divine person who for our sake took on the form of a slave. We will return to this claim in section 2.6. But is this really what we hear 68  Chua, ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, 22. 69  Burnham discusses Heinrich Schenker’s analysis, in Beethoven Hero, 11–13. But the Schenkerian analysis does not diminish the sense of the strangeness of the new theme. 70  Chua, ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, 25. 71 John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 25. The inconsistency in Chua is deliberate. He likes to write ‘dialectically’, like Hegel. 72  Chua, ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, 24. The painter Jacques-­Louis David painted heroic portraits at the time of the French Revolution. 73  Chua quotes without demur the view of Wilhelm von Lenz (1852–3) that the new theme signals the hero’s death.

The First Movement of the Third Symphony  45 with the new E-­minor theme—­death? A more convincing reading is to see here the same structure as in the sonata movement—­anxiety, sturm und drang, call from beyond, mediation, and coming home—­where the new theme represents the call from beyond. The picture of Kant in Adorno is a travesty. If the self really did replace God, Kant would be without an answer to the great difficulty he sees in the moral life: how to believe in a rationally stable way in the real possibility of the highest good. But if we take the alternative picture of Kant that this chapter has been presenting, we can ask how the Eroica’s first movement would sound if this were its philo­ soph­ic­al lineage. The new E-­minor theme would be truly an outside voice, a heavenly voice, represented deliberately in archaic style as a reminiscence of the style of an old German hymn. It would be preceded by rage and terror, sturm und drang, but it would not itself be an expression of death, but of something with power over death. It would indeed be a miraculous gift. We can connect this locus briefly with the three other loci in the first movement that Burnham takes for comment, namely the opening thematic material, the premature horn call, and the coda. He writes convincingly of the tension in the opening thematic material between the pure triadic material in bars 3–6 and the C sharp in bar 7. The whole movement can be seen as working out this tension, and we can hear it resolved when the C sharp resolves downward (as D flat) at bar 404 and then to C, and there is a secure cadence into F major. As Sipe says, following Philip Downs, it is surely significant also that ‘this cadence involves the only use of the conventional trill figure in the entire movement’, and the theme which then appears is marked ‘dolce’.74 The new E-­minor theme also reappears in the coda, but in the key first of F minor and then E flat minor in bars 581–94; it too is moving back to the home key. Moreover, before we get back to the tri­umph­ ant final statement of the main theme at bar 631 in the home key there is one more partial statement or echo of it, in bars 615–21, in the same minor key as the last statement of the new (originally E-­minor) theme, namely E flat minor. What is Beethoven doing? From the perspective of the hopeful sublime and Kant’s account of the supersensible, the heavenly voice is grounding the possibility of something higher, nobler, something that lies beyond the tension experienced at the beginning of the movement, and something that becomes a real possibility for the agent. In the final triumphant statement, this possibility is realized. Again, the movement is not a piece of programme music designed to illustrate a philo­soph­ ic­al theory. But there is a structure of changes in affect that fits the two moments in Kant’s account of the sublime. One final sign of this is the premature horn call in bar 394. This is not a trumpet call, which would more strictly fit the context of battle. The fragment of the

74 Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, 102.

46  The Beautiful and the Sublime theme is heard pianissimo in E flat, in bar 394, against the simultaneous dominant seventh in B flat, tremolo and triple piano in the strings, so that the theme is not yet fully born; it is like a premonition, a hint of what it is being called to become. At bar 631 the horns burst out with the theme in its full form, again the full real­ iza­tion of the earlier possibility. Burnham points out that all the various interpreters he canvasses end up with some sort of completion or entelechy signalled at the end of the first movement.75 He emphasizes that the ‘recapitulated new theme in turn leads to the final affirmation of eternal glory’ and at the end of the movement ‘untold legions will understand the waves of affirmation signaling the tri­ umph­ant closure of a meaningful process’.76 Certainly, there are other Beethoven first movements (for example the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies) where the tonic is given a longer closing run. In the final movement of the Eroica the tonic gets twenty-­one bars. But the point is not so much that the first movement is complete, but that we hear the theme as reaching its destination.77 This movement is not, therefore, best seen as an expression of the ‘uncanny sublime’, of ‘nameless haunted yearning’. It is not best interpreted as ending with alienation, or not being at home, or disenchantment. The movement is also not an expression of the ‘authoritarian sublime’. It is not primarily glorious political power that is in play here. But our confidence here should be less robust. The original inscription of the piece was, after all, to Napoleon. Moreover, Beethoven’s music, including the Eroica, has been conspicuously used by authoritarian regimes for propaganda purposes. When we listen to Beethoven’s music that is avowedly political, we get the uneasy sense that there is no clear dividing line between when his repertoire or musical vocabulary is being used for political purposes and when it is not. Nonetheless, in the Eroica the primary conflict that is being represented sounds more like an inner psychological conflict than an outward political or military one. Unlike Wellington’s Sieg we do not get a march or trumpet calls, as the great interpreter Adolf Bernhard Marx pointed out already in 1825. Sipe says, ‘pictorial representations of a battle, employing marches, would have distracted from the representation of the hero’s character, which transcended purely military pursuits. The psychological drama of conflict, not its actual representation, forms Beethoven’s theme.’78 What about the solipsistic sublime? At least for this listener there is nothing in the first movement of the Eroica to support the solipsistic reading. Burnham does not seem to be led to this interpretation by the music but by his reading of what 75  One exception is Sipe, who denies that the movement ends with completion, because ‘the lack of sustained tonic at the end of the coda [makes] the first movement sound somehow incomplete’, Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, 104. 76 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 23. 77  The point is also not about the symphony as a whole, and in particular not about the second movement. 78 Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, 99. To say that psychological drama is portrayed here does not diminish the violence, but it takes it inside.

Christian Autonomy  47 he takes to be ‘the spirit of the age’. His interpretation has a harmful consequence. It leads Burnham to say that the music is paradoxical, and therefore ironic. The paradox is supposed to be that the self has both to be ‘all that is’ and has to be commenting on and narrating itself. Burnham then concludes: ‘The ultimate and abiding effect of this simultaneity of enactment and distanced telling, of story and narrator, is one of irony.’79 But is this really what we hear in the first movement: irony? Burnham is led to say this because of his initial solipsistic premise. But on  the account of the hopeful sublime this chapter has been proposing, there is  a  genuine encounter with something outside the self. We do not know that Beethoven is expressing in this music his own encounter with the divine. But it is significant that in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 we read, ‘Divine One, you can see into my inmost thoughts, you know them, you know that love of my ­fellowmen and the desire to do good are harboured there.’ Beethoven does not present himself here as talking to himself, even his bigger self. He is talking to God, and like Kant he recognizes that his own moral sense is the place where he is given access to the divine. It is virtue that has kept him from suicide, he says. He came ‘to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life.’ The movement ends with hope and it is a hope that is plausibly connected not with self-­sufficiency but with divine grace.

2.6  Christian Autonomy This chapter has assumed that Kantian autonomy is consistent with the idea of freedom presented in the Christian Scriptures. This consistency has been denied, by, for example, John Milbank.80 But the autonomy under attack by ‘radical orthodoxy’ is not, in fact, Kant’s notion. It is, rather, the notion that takes God off the throne and puts human beings in God’s place. If we return to Kant’s actual notion, we can then find all sorts of parallels with the Biblical texts. Richard Bauckham is useful here, in his book God and the Crisis of Freedom.81 In his final chapter Bauckham quotes with approval Ellen Charry’s proposal of ‘a Christian theological understanding of emancipation that is keyed to transformation’, a critical retrieval of the tradition’s insights that emancipation is needed ‘from the unlovely side of the self ’ and ‘that the way to emancipation is through self-­ mastery achieved by attending to God.’82 Bauckham is defending a notion of 79 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 145–6. 80 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 81 Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, GA: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). 82  Bauckham (God and the Crisis of Freedom, 196) is quoting from Ellen Charry, ‘The Crisis of Modernity and the Christian Self ’, in A Passion for God’s Reign: Theology, Christian Learning, and the Christian Self, ed. M. Volf (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 93.

48  The Beautiful and the Sublime freedom as obedience. It is not only obedience, because it is also dependence and intimacy, but it is at least obedience. The correct dichotomy is not between law and freedom, on this conception, because for the Christian God’s law is not the will of another, in the ordinary sense in which this would be true of the will of another creature, but, as the law of the Creator and his cre­ ation, also the law of our own being, in conforming to which we become most truly ourselves.83

Bauckham ends with Luther’s Christian Liberty: ‘Hence, as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works’.84 The parallels with Kant are striking. Kantian freedom wills in accordance with and for the sake of the moral law; it is what Kant calls ‘practical love’. In thinking through our duties Kant repeatedly says that we have to recognize them as God’s command.85 We have, Kant thinks, a lower kind of freedom that is simply the power to will either for or against the good, and we have a lower kind of will (Willkür) with which we do this. But the higher kind of freedom is only for the good, and the higher will (Wille) operates only this freedom: ‘a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same’.86 It might seem that Paul’s insistence that we are not under the law is inconsistent with Kant’s insistence on the ‘fact of reason’, our consciousness of being bound by the law, which is his starting point for the moral argument for the existence of God. But Paul is not denying that the law applies to us, but warning that if we look to the law to save us, we are under tyranny and we will die. Neither Jesus nor Paul ever soft-­pedals the view that God is the one who commands, and our fulfillment comes in obedience. And with this understanding, the law becomes a treasure. As Psalm 119: 111 puts it: ‘Your decrees are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart.’ For Kant, our problem is that we are born with an innate but imputable tendency to prefer ourselves and our happiness illegitimately, and since this evil is radical, it is not to be extirpated through human forces.87 Therefore, if we are to overcome this tendency, ‘some supernatural cooperation is needed’ or ‘co­oper­ ation from above’.88 This argument was outlined in Chapter 1 and is made in more detail in The Moral Gap.89 But the basic picture is this. There is a moral gap: the 83 Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom, 208. 84  Martin Luther, Christian Liberty, ed. H. J. Grimm (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1957), 30–1. 85  Rel 6: 84. See KpV 5: 129; KU 5: 460; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary  J.  Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (MdS), 6: 487–8. 86  Gl 4: 447. 87  Rel 6: 37. 88  Rel 6: 44 and 6: 52. See Hare, God and Morality, 162–71. 89 John  E.  Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chapters 1–3.

The Holy Spirit  49 moral demand is given us by God, but we are unable to follow it with our capacities in the state in which we are born with them; therefore, God intervenes to make it possible for us to live in a way that pleases God. This is a Lutheran picture, and plausibly also a Biblical one. There are various parts of Kant’s theory with which a Christian should prob­ ably feel uncomfortable.90 The same is true of Beethoven. We should concede that the boundaries between the authoritarian sublime and the hopeful sublime are not always clear. Much of Beethoven’s musical vocabulary can fit both of them. If the ‘hopeful’ interpretation of the symphonic movement were merely a structure of affects, the distinction might be hard to make. Affects of anxiety followed by tumult followed by mediation followed by resolution could fit imperial projects perfectly well. The chapter has suggested, however, that there is a fit in content between this movement and Kant’s sublime. The new theme at bar 280 is rem­in­is­ cent of a chorale. Horns and not trumpets announce the main theme in a pre­lim­ in­ary way in bar 394 and then in a full form at bar 631. But the claim is not that these observations remove all the ambiguity. In terms of the Christian theology that is the topic of the final section of this chapter, we should remember that Christian vocabulary also can be and has been used for authoritarian propaganda. Critics of Beethoven and critics of Christian theology can both find many examples of this. The Eroica was performed at Nazi rallies and Hitler sometimes used Christian as well as pagan symbols to glorify his regime. There is in Kant also an ugly readiness to accept imperialist and racist views about some other human beings. But none of this shows that Beethoven or Kant or Christian theology have to be abandoned; we just have to be cognizant of their potential and actual use for harm.

2.7  The Holy Spirit Kant has a good deal to say about the Holy Spirit, but it is split up here and there, and not joined up into a single treatise. In the Third Critique, the work we have been dealing with primarily, he talks about God without splitting up the functions of the members of the Trinity. But when he does split up these functions, for example in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, he talks mainly about the work inside us as the Spirit’s work, and it is this work understood in relation to justification and sanctification in a Lutheran way. The work inside us is to form us into a holy unity pleasing to God. Translating this within the boundaries of mere reason, this means that we are given the assurance that our own observable works are together consistent with an orientation of the will towards God, 90  For example, Kant’s view of what the afterlife is like and his view of what loving God is like are both too restrictively moral. See Hare, The Moral Gap, 48–60, and God’s Command, 75–7.

50  The Beautiful and the Sublime progressively working itself out in our experience over time. This translation, as usual, is designed to give us a reading that does not make reference to special revelation. Since the experience of the beautiful and the sublime is, for Kant, an important vehicle of this process, it is appropriate to see it as the work of the Holy Spirit. This means that it is the Spirit who is working with us cooperatively (by concursus) in the free play of our imagination and understanding. But this is not to claim that Kant actually says this; it is what we should say. Kant’s actual doctrine puts undue emphasis upon morality and duty, especially in his account of our glorification which he understands as an eternally closer and closer approximation to virtue. It is probably more true to say that moral virtue will no longer be relevant in its present form. Chapter  6 will argue (using ideas from Bonaventure) that our sense of what is beautiful and sublime on this earth is a foretaste not only of our eventual moral good, but of something analogous to aesthetic pleasure in the new heaven and the new earth. Kant’s moralizing emphasis is in this way an impoverishment, and we can take as our guide instead the work of an older contemporary of Kant, Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards proposes that the Holy Spirit has the particular function of communicating beauty and harmony to the world, and this idea has a long trad­ ition behind it. It is worth looking briefly at this tradition.91 In Bonaventure, for example, we see God’s beauty in and through the beauty of the physical world, and the end of Chapter 1 distinguished this view from that of Augustine on discarding the plank after being saved from the sea. Bonaventure attributes to the Spirit this work of God in sharing beauty with us. He also has a robust conception of the way our senses are still open to delight in the next life, even though our bodies are very different. Before Bonaventure, the connection between beauty and the Spirit can be found in Clement of Alexandria, who gives the example of Bezalel (the craftsman of the tabernacle) being inspired by the Spirit and then says that this text makes it plain that this kind of artistry and skill is from God.92 And the reason behind this is that God is in Godself beauty and the maker of beauty as its Artist.93 There is here, as in Plato’s Symposium, a ranking of various forms of beauty, where spiritual beauty ranks above material beauty. But the difference from Plato is that God is not merely the Form of Beauty, but a personal agent, an

91 Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 29, 384, quoted in Chapter 1. In describing this history, and Edwards’s contribution to it, I have been helped by Patrick Sherry, in ‘The Beauty of God the Holy Spirit’, Theology Today, 64 (2007), 5–13, and Spirit and Beauty, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2002), especially chapters 4, 6–7. 92 Clement, Stromateis (Miscellanies), 1.4, trans. William Wilson, in Ante-­Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). The biblical text about Bezalel is Exodus 31: 2–5. 93 Clement, Stromateis, 2: 5, 4: 12. See also Clement, Paedagogus, 2: 12, 3: 1–2, 11, trans. William Wilson, in Ante-­Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885).

The Holy Spirit  51 artist. And Clement explicitly says that physical beauty as well as spiritual beauty is brought about by the agency of the Holy Spirit. Behind Clement is the language about beauty in the Bible. There are various terms in the Hebrew Psalms, with different resonances: the ‘beauty’ of the Lord in Psalm 27: 4 (or ‘sweetness’), God’s ‘beauty’ in Psalm 71: 8 (or ‘splendour’), the ‘beauty’ of holiness in Psalm 29: 2 (alternatively rendered as ‘in holy attire’), the ‘beauty’ of Zion from which God shines forth in Psalm 50: 2, and ‘the glorious splendor of [God’s] majesty’ in Psalm 145: 5. These terms are related to the terms ‘glory’ and ‘shining’, and in the New Testament also this idea of glory is associated with radiance or shining. For example, in Revelation 1: 16, there is a vision of one ‘like a son of man’, and his face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. Paul also connects light and glory in 2 Corinthians 4: 6: ‘The light that shines in our hearts’ is what gives us ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.’ We will return to the ‘radiance’ of Moses at Sinai and Christ at the transfiguration at the end of this section.94 So there are complex biblical sources for the idea of God’s beauty. There are also sources in Neoplatonism, though Plotinus tends to say that it is the second God (namely Intellect) who is beautiful, not the first God (namely The One).95 He stresses his proposed etymology, that beauty (in Greek to kalon) is what calls us (in Greek kalei) towards what is good. In accordance with this idea von Balthasar speculates that we have lost the attractiveness of the good in forgetting the importance of beauty, and he makes ‘beauty’ his first word in recovering the unity of the transcendentals ‘good’, ‘true’, and ‘beautiful’.96 Jonathan Edwards is a theologian who brings these sources (biblical and philo­ soph­ic­al) together in a very effective way. For Edwards, God’s beauty is first among God’s qualities and is the source of all beauty in the world, though God’s beauty is not the same as worldly beauty.97 Edwards ties the role of the Holy Spirit in this production of beauty to an account of the relations of the three persons of the Trinity. He is assuming the Western view that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and urging that their delight in each other ‘breathes out’ the Spirit in love and joy. The Spirit ‘being the love and joy of God, is his beauty and happiness, and it is in our partaking of the same Holy Spirit that our communion with God

94  When Aquinas gives his famous analysis of beauty in the Summa Theologiae, he includes ‘radiance’ along with ‘integrity’ and ‘proportion’, Summa Theologiae, Ia. 39. 8, trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Blackfriars, 1969). Aquinas ties this radiance especially to Christ, and this is true of Edwards also. It is usually for Edwards Christ who is beautiful and the Spirit who shares this beauty with us. 95 Plotinus, Enneads V, 8, and see I, 6, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 96 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982). 97  Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 265, 298–9.

52  The Beautiful and the Sublime consists.’98 This is why the Spirit has the particular function of communicating beauty and harmony to the world, as quoted at the beginning of this section of the chapter. Edwards interprets Genesis 1: 2 to mean that ‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters or of the chaos to bring it out of its confusion into harmony and beauty.’99 The Spirit is here connected with bringing about physical beauty, and this remains true even though there are higher grades of beauty (moral and spiritual) that are also associated with the Spirit’s work. For Edwards, the highest beauty is the same as holiness: ‘What an honor must it be to a creature who is infinitely below God, and less than he, to be beautified and adorned with this beauty, with that beauty which is the highest beauty of God himself, even holiness.’100 This means that sanctification is understood as beautification. Though this is the work of the Spirit, Edwards will often say that the beauty which the Spirit brings to our minds is the beauty of Christ. For example, he says it is a sight of the divine beauty of Christ that bows the wills, and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men, and be more than they can endure; but the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were by an omnipotent power.101

There are two other features of this passage that are important for the project of this chapter and this book. The first is that Edwards here discusses a sequence of two moments reminiscent of Kant’s discussion of the sublime. There may be, first, a sight of the greatness of God (perhaps God’s infinite being or God’s power). But this is succeeded by a sight of the divine beauty of Christ, which draws the heart. The second point is that Edwards here identifies regeneration (what he often calls a new ‘sense of the heart’) with a revolution of the will. It is the heart or will that is here drawn by Christ’s beauty. We will come back to this in Chapter 5, in the discussion of contemplation, where we will look at a Christian view of contemplation which makes it, unlike Aristotle’s picture of contemplation, a work primarily of the heart.

98  Jonathan Edwards, Discourse on the Trinity, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 21, ed. Sang Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 130. 99 Edwards, Discourse on the Trinity, 123. 100  Jonathan Edwards, Sermons and Discourses 1720–23, 430, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 10, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 101  Jonathan Edwards, ‘True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils’, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (London: Bohn, 1865), 49, a sermon preached in 1752. See also Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).

The Holy Spirit  53 The Spirit enables us to apprehend Christ’s beauty.102 Edwards says that the light of the Holy Spirit, which is ‘a kind of emanation of God’s beauty’, gives a ‘sense of the heart’ whereby the saints discover ‘the true superlative glory . . . and excellency of God and Christ.’103 This language of ‘emanation’ and ‘light’ is rem­in­ is­cent of the Neoplatonic sources mentioned earlier. But Edwards is equally drawing on the biblical idea that we can shine with glory from God, as Moses did at Sinai (Exodus 34: 29–35), and as Christ did on the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9: 28–36). Light is here associated not primarily with illumination of our understanding but with the radiance of glory. The cloud which enveloped Jesus on the Mount is best understood against the background of Exodus 40: 35, where a cloud of glory filled the tabernacle, or Ezekiel 10: 4, where the cloud filling the temple means that the court is filled with the radiance of the glory of the Lord. We can imagine that the cloud on the Mount is a cloud of light, not (as we tend to think of clouds) of obfuscation, but it is too bright for the disciples. When we read in the Psalms (e.g. 4: 6) the prayer to God: ‘Let the light of your face shine upon us’, we should not think primarily of light to the understanding, as in Plato’s Republic, but light as the manifestation or radiance of God’s glory. Light in this symbol system is not primarily connected with intelligibility but with presence. Edwards also has a strong sense of the succession of religious affections, of our humiliation followed by the sense of the sweetness of our place in the working of God’s grace.104 Though he does use the term ‘sublime’, it is not in the context of this succession of the two moments (as in Kant).105 But he has the idea of what he calls ‘evangelical humiliation’, which he contrasts with ‘legal humiliation’ following the usage of Thomas Shepard.106 The difference is that legal humiliation is the sense available to all human beings ‘that they are small, indeed nothing, before the great and terrible God. They feel undone, and wholly insufficient to help themselves.’ By contrast evangelical humiliation is grounded in ‘seeing for oneself the beauty of God’s holiness and moral perfection.’ But the saints may, like Elijah, hear ‘first a stormy wind, earthquake, and devouring fire, and then a still, small voice.’107 It is God’s way of dealing with humankind, says Edwards, ‘to lead them into a wilderness before He speaks comfortably to them.’ ‘[God] commonly first reveals Himself in a way which is terrible, and then later by those things that are assuring and comforting.’ We have here the functional equivalent of Kant’s two moments of the sublime, though Edwards makes the distinction that Kant does not between natural and spiritual responses to God. The important thing for our 102  Edwards, ‘True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils’, 49. 103  Jonathan Edwards, ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 17, ed. M. Valeri (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 413, 422. 104  Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. James Houston (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany, 1984), 132. Edwards did not however claim to have experienced personally this succession of ‘legal’ and ‘evangelical humiliation’. I owe this point to Justin Hawkins. 105 Edwards, Religious Affections, 5, 54. 106 Edwards, Religious Affections, 64, 126–8. 107 Edwards, Religious Affections, 50–1, but the translation of 1Kings 19: 12 is disputed.

54  The Beautiful and the Sublime present purposes is that Edwards attributes this twofold revelation of the divine to the Holy Spirit. This final section of the chapter has tried to show that the connection of beauty and sublimity with the work of the Holy Spirit has a tradition behind it. In order to make this connection plausible, we do not have to accept Edwards’s view that beauty is primary among God’s qualities. We merely need to see that the Spirit aims at what is beautiful and sublime; this is one of the things the Spirit wants. The beautiful and the sublime come from God and return us to God, and this is the Spirit’s work. This is the picture that Kant translates in the unity passage discussed in section 2.1 of this chapter: God lies both behind the things we ex­peri­ ence as beautiful and sublime and behind our power to experience them this way, and this experience is a vehicle for our return to our freedom in the strong sense, under the law that God gives to us. Our aim in this chapter has been to characterize the Spirit this way so that we can know the character of the Spirit better. At least with human persons, we know them better when we know what they want. Perhaps that is true with divine ­persons as well.

3 Gender Introduction Chapter 1 proposed that we explore the idea of gender identity as a three-­term relation, metaphysically speaking, though this is my phrase, not the phrase of the trans male whose life was my starting point, my son Thomas. He found something inside and he matched it at least roughly with something outside, with a social picture of what a man is like, and he himself, the third term in the relation, his heart or his will, endorsed this match. Now what does gender transition have to do with theology? Suppose we think of an individual essence, what Scotus calls a haecceity, named on the white stone that God gives us in heaven.1 What is the relation of gender identity to this individual essence? One way to ask this is eschatologically: In the next life are we going to be men or women or any of the other gender identities in between or different from these? Or we could ask: Can the same individual be reincarnated one time as man and another time as woman or some other gender? The analysis of gender identity as a three-­term relation is helpful in thinking about this. The social picture which is one term in the relation constituted by gender identity is itself likely to be a mixture of what is good and what is corrupt. Christian the­ ology has the concept of sin. Take the term ‘bravery’, in Greek andreia, which means literally ‘manliness’. We get, in Aristotle for example, a whole set of descriptions of bravery which is restricted to males and citizens, and the paradigm is the citizen soldier in battle, who acts ‘from a desire for what is noble (honour, in other words)’.2 Speaking philosophically, ‘brave’ is a ‘thick’ term of evaluation, which takes up into its meaning not just the evaluation but the criteria for the evalu­ ation. The same is true of the term ‘man’ in such expressions as ‘Man up’ or ‘Act like a man’, where the term is being given an evaluative use. But Christians should be deeply suspicious of these criteria. Jesus was brave on the cross, but was he manly in the cry of dereliction? We get in the Gospel what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of value. The prevailing social categories of virtue then and now

1  John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, d.3, q. 5 and 6, trans. Paul Vincent Spade, discussed in Chapter 1, section 1.1. See also Revelation 2: 17. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III, 8, 1116a27, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) (henceforth NE).

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0003

56 Gender entrench power relations that are full of sin, though they are also not purely ­rotten; they are morally a mixture. Does this mean that gender identity is, for Christian theology, unimportant? Not at all. A trans male may have the sense that his gender identity is the most important thing in the world, though here again there are many possibilities—­ people differ in how important gender identity is to them. Gender identity is like the pervasive character of racial identity in the American context: it affects almost everything else. We have been coming to see how much of our lives, including our intellectual scholarly lives, is bound up in both race and gender. We have to go, so to speak, through this part of life (not around it), and how we go through it may well have a decisive effect on what we finally become. But this kind of im­port­ance is not essentialist in the sense that it says we are essentially man or woman or white or black or brown. It is possible to imagine a world in which we exist but we are not bound up in this way with race and not bound up in this way with gender. This is one reading of one strange feature of Galatians 3: 28 (the central biblical text for this chapter), which says that in Christ there is not Jew or Greek, not slave or free, not male and female. Why the change to ‘and’? This text is probably quoting Genesis, and modifying it.3 The text recognizes a difference between the three dichotomies mentioned: in all three cases there is a social div­ ision to be overcome, but in the case of male and female we are called to modify what seems like a natural classification because we were created that way. We will return to the relevant chapters of Genesis in section 3.6. The conclusion of the chapter will be in one way agnostic: We do not know that we are gendered in our final destiny and we do not know that we are not gendered.4 If gender identity is a three-­term relation, with the second term (the socially constructed picture) being a mixture of good and bad, what about the first term? Suppose there is an individual essence, then it will not be true that all identities are penultimate; what is penultimate is our access and we get only hints of the essence itself.5 Could the sense we get inside of how we are with respect to gender be one of those hints? Again, we do not know. We cannot rest even in the  view that we are not gendered essentially, because there may be something 3  Genesis 1: 27, ‘Male and female [God] created them.’ 4  This position is thus stronger (more ‘apophatic’) than that of Susannah Cornwall in ‘Apophasis and Ambiguity: the “Unknowingness” of Transgender’, in Trans/formations, ed. Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-­Reid (London: SCM Press, 2009), 13–40. She thinks that we know that our des­tin­ ation is not gendered, because we know that God is not gendered and we know that our destiny is to be divinized. 5  See Scotus, ‘The intellect not only cognizes universals, which is of course true for abstractive intellection . . . but it also intuitively cognizes what the senses cognize.’ John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio IV, d. 45, q.3, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), discussed in Allan B. Wolter and Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Memory and Intuition: A Focal Debate in Fourteenth Century Cognitive Psychology’, Franciscan Studies, 42 (1993), 205. But Scotus’s views about this are disputed. See also Robert Pasnau, ‘Cognition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 285–311.

Social Construction  57 analogous to gender that is true even in the next life. If we just do not know, what we need is an account of how to proceed in the absence of such knowledge. Despite the disappointing agnosticism of this conclusion about the next life, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can help us to say something positive about why we might take gender transition in this life to be part of the path to our eventual entering into the love between the members of the Trinity which is our destination.6

3.1  Social Construction Sometimes people say that ‘sex’ is a biological term and ‘gender’ a term of culture or social construction. But the situation is more complicated than this. One text that is often appealed to here is Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, in which she says: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’7 This distinction has, however, been made problematic by the realization that the biology (in the sense of what the biologists study) has itself been influenced by social conceptions. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is important here.8 We do not have one term (‘sex’) securely anchored in natural science, and the other term (‘gender’) wandering about with the vagaries of social fashion. A non-­biologist has to take this claim from others. But apparently the three main ways of dividing people into sexes

6  Scotus discusses our destination in these terms at Ordinatio III, suppl. dist. 27, and we discussed this in Chapter 1, section 1.2. 7  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). The question of what she herself meant by this statement is a different one, since she did not use the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. See Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 8  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 5, where she asks ‘To what extent does the category of female achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the gendered matrix?’. She answers this question at Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8, ‘Paradoxically, the inquiry into the kinds of erasures and exclusions by which the construction of the subject operates is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism. For there is an “outside” to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute “outside,” an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive “outside,” it is that which can only be thought—­ when it can—­in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.’ The structure of this answer is Kantian. There is a something-­X which is outside the categories of our experience, but which we are trying to track in our discourse. Kant’s term for this something-­X is the ‘noumenon’, a ‘thing-­in-­itself ’, as opposed to the ‘phenomenon’, a ‘thing-­as-­it-­appears-­to-­us’. Butler is saying that the ‘outside’, in this case sex, is indeed only accessible to us through our categories of gender, but that does not mean that these categories capture what sex is in itself, and we can imagine that it could appear in other categories. (Kant would be surprised to discover that sex is noumenal!) This thought structure enables Butler to pass between the horns of a dilemma, just as it enables Kant to get past both a Humean scepticism and a naïve realism. Butler is not an essentialist, but she is also not a social constructivist all the way down. She is not an essentialist because she recognizes the contingency of the social categories, and indeed she has worked to change them. On the other hand, she is not a social constructivist all the way down because she wants to acknowledge that there is something ‘outside’. If we put the Kantian point in Butler’s terms, we have to think of sex in relation to the categories of gender because gender influences so completely how sex appears to us. If we thought that the social cat­ egor­ies were all there is, we would not be in contact with reality outside our constructs at all.

58 Gender (by  functioning genitalia, chromosomes, and hormonal levels) do not in fact cohere.9 People may fit into one of these divisions and not the other two, and then choices about categorization are made in accordance with prevailing social norms. Also sections of the brain may be, though this is not yet clear, sexually dimorphic, and that would be yet another potentially non-­coherent criterion. Moreover, the biology in a different sense (the bodies we actually live with) has been influenced by social conceptions, because newborns with ambiguous sex characteristics have routinely been altered so as to fit the prevailing norms.10 Biology by itself ul­tim­ate­ly does not settle either sex or gender. Does all of this mean that we have construction, so to speak, all the way down? A transgender male may insist, to the contrary, that being a man is something he discovered, not simply something he made. He discovers a set of preferences, some of which are for what is ‘biological’ in a broad sense but is not directly concerned with reproduction. They include preferences for what are sometimes called ‘secondary sexual characteristics’ such as hair in certain places on the body, a voice at certain registers, a certain musculature, etc. The set can also include preferences for reproductive capacity, but when we are thinking about gender transition these are not the key preferences in play. The set of preferences is not confined to biology in this broad sense, however, including both reproduction and the secondary sexual characteristics, but extends to characteristics that have a large socially defined content, such as the preference for being able to help elderly parents with heavy suitcases. This example has a physical basis, namely a certain musculature, but in other examples the preferences can be for items that do not have such a basis in the person’s own body, as for example a preference for smoking cigars. As the centrality of the person’s own body to the preference decreases, the amount of social construction increases. By the term ‘gender’ we can mean the conjunction of the first two of the terms of the relation mentioned in the first paragraph of the chapter, and with the term ‘gender identity’ we can add the third. In other words, gender is the set of these preferences together with the social pictures which these preferences either do or do not match. The gender identity is then the endorsement (the third term) added to these two, taking ‘identity’ to imply ‘identification’.11 This analysis implies that both gender and gender identity have both biological and socially constructed elements. 9 See Ásta, Categories We Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 71 (henceforth Categories), citing, for example, Gerald Callahan, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of the Two Sexes (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2009). See also Dean Spade, ‘Doctors . . . only seek to produce genitals that fit into one of two narrowly defined options’, in ‘Mutilating Gender’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 323–4. 10  See Anne Fausto-­Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 11  There will be a distinction drawn between endorsement and identification in section 3.4 of this chapter, but it is not needed at this point.

Social Construction  59 To get clearer about this, it will help to be clearer about what ‘social construction’ means. A category is socially constructed if its existence is dependent on the ­conventions of society. But there are different ways in which this dependence arises. We can start from a relatively simple case discussed by Ásta in Categories We Live By. In order to understand this case, we need a prior distinction between base properties and the social properties that attempt to track them. An example will make this distinction easier to see. Ásta gives the example of a ball being ‘in’ or ‘out’ in tennis. The base property here is a tennis ball touching or not touching the line. The referee calls the ball ‘in’ or ‘out’ (the ‘social property’ or ‘tennis fact’) on the basis of this base property. Now we can make a distinction between two different accounts of the relation between the base property and the social property, accounts that Ásta calls ‘conferralism’ (her view) and ‘constitutionalism’. The conferralist holds that the ball being ‘in’, the tennis fact, is conferred by the referee, and is not determined by whether the ball does or does not actually touch the line. The constitutionalist holds, by contrast, that the tennis fact is constituted by the base property. Both parties to this dispute agree that the referee can get the base property wrong, and can think the ball touches the line when it does not. But the conferralist, unlike the constitutionalist, thinks that the referee cannot be wrong about the tennis fact, because she creates that fact by declaring it. Surely the constitutionalist view is better? When watching a tennis game on the television, one sees first the player’s shot and then (in doubtful cases) a computer-­ generated image of the ball and the line. The referee sees the same image, and can be seen to consult the screen when in doubt. It seems much more plausible to say that if the referee were to declare the ball out when (according to the screen) it touches the line, the referee would be wrong about the tennis fact. The conferralist holds that saying that someone is ‘man’ or ‘woman’ has, in J. L. Austin’s term, an ‘exercitive’ dimension.12 This is a term from speech act theory. Austin defines ‘exercitives’ as ‘the exercising of powers, rights, or influence. Examples are appointing, voting, ordering, urging, advising, warning, etc.’. The important distinction is with ‘verdictives’, which Austin defines as ‘giving a finding as to something—­fact, or value—­which is for different reasons hard to be certain about.’ People who use an exercitive bring a new fact into being with their speech: their saying so makes it so. The conferralist holds that conferring the label ‘man’ or ‘woman’ also has a verdictive dimension, because there is a fact (the base 12 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 150. Austin himself regarded saying that the ball is ‘in’ as a verdictive. John Searle used Austin’s account to talk about social construction, in The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1997). Mary Kate McGowan has argued that there are ‘covert exercitives’ where the usage changes the ‘permissibility facts’ for some norm-­governed activity, and the usage does not require explicit authority, but simply participation in that norm-­governed activity. Participants are able to do this because their usage of the term ‘triggers’ the norms of the activity in question. See Mary Kate McGowan, ‘Conversational Exercitives: Something Else We Do with Our Words’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 27/1 (2004), 93–111.

60 Gender property) that this usage is supposed to be tracking; and the nature of this base property will depend upon what the conferrers of the label are trying to track. The base property might be a person’s capacity to carry a foetus in the womb, or it might be a person’s own self-­identification in terms of gender. In other contexts, the base property might be bodily presentation; in others, a role in societal organization of various kinds. Ásta gives the example of being a member of an extended family in which, when they get together, the women do the cooking and the men sit in the living room and smoke cigars.13 The conferralist has to say that the labeller can be wrong about the base property in each of these contexts, but ­cannot be wrong about the social fact, the person’s being a man, because the labeller creates this fact. But surely in the case where the base property is ­self-­identification, people trying to track this property get it wrong all the time? For example, they take a person to be self-­identifying as male whereas in fact he identifies as ‘fluid’, though preferring the male pronoun to the female. If they do get it wrong, surely their labelling as ‘man’ is wrong as well? Consider the analogous case of marriage. Suppose a woman gets married to a man, and is declared married by the relevant authority, but then discovers that her ‘husband’ was in fact previously married to someone else who is still alive and has not been divorced. Surely the most plausible thing to say is that she was in fact not married to him even though she thought she was? Here the conferralist has to say that the social property of being married was in fact conferred by the appropriate authority even though it did not track with the base property of being currently single. Ásta holds that even if conferralism is wrong about tennis, it is still right about gender: ‘The reason is simply that to give a metaphysics of social properties is to give an account of the properties that do matter socially, not the ones that should matter, but don’t.’14 But consider the phrase ‘do matter socially’. ‘Matter’ is often an evaluative term, as in ‘Black Lives Matter’. What matters has importance and significance. In this sense, what ‘matters socially’ is what is important for a society; for example liberty, fraternity, and equality matter. The phrase ‘what is valu­ able for me’ has the same ambiguity. Ásta is trying to use the phrase ‘do matter’ in a purely descriptive sense. What matters socially in this sense is what is in fact appealed to in societal practices of constraining and enabling how people in that society behave. She says that gender is conferred in some context if those with standing to do the conferring in that context in fact confer the property ‘man’, and what the base property is will depend on what those people are in fact trying to track. To say this, she holds, is not to pass any judgement on whether they should or should not be conferring the property on the basis of that base property.

13 Ásta, Categories, 75.

14 Ásta, Categories, 11.

Social Construction  61 But  a  metaphysics of social properties need an account of what matters in the evalu­ative sense, which is the more common sense. Speech act theory has an alternative account of labelling a social property. R. M. Hare discussed the example of a sign posted in a city park ‘wheeled vehicles prohibited’.15 The city authorities then have to decide what counts as a wheeled vehicle. Bicycles, yes. Prams, no. What about roller skates? If the case comes to court, the judge may have very good reasons of public interest or morals for his decision; but he cannot make it by any physical or metaphysical investigation of roller skates to see whether they are really wheeled vehicles. If he had not led too sheltered a life, he knew all he needed to know about roller skates before the case ever came into court.

The example is supposed to illustrate how we should think about abortion, where the term ‘person’ is the analogue for ‘wheeled vehicle’. The present project is not about abortion, and there are some difficulties about the analogy. But what R. M. Hare says about ‘wheeled vehicle’ has the same structure of base property and what he calls ‘supervening’ property as what Ásta says about ‘woman’. He says that in the case of evaluations, the value predicate ‘supervenes’ on the descriptive criteria, which provide the ‘subvening’ base (for example, we might say that a strawberry is good if it is ripe, red, sweet, juicy, etc.). He was in fact the philosopher who reintroduced the term ‘supervenient’ within analytic philosophy for just this function.16 But this relation also obtains between disputed descriptive terms and the criteria for their application. In Austin’s words, verdictives give ‘a finding as to something—­fact, or value—­which is for different reasons hard to be certain about’. So ‘wheeled vehicle’ on the sign in the park needs criteria for deciding which wheels to allow there. The choice of criteria, for both the evaluative term and the disputed descriptive term, is what R.  M.  Hare calls ‘a decision of principle’, and to use the term is to endorse that decision. This means that before the decision of principle that I endorse redness and sweetness as criteria for ­goodness in strawberries, there is no implication from my statement ‘The strawberry is good’ that I believe that the strawberry is red and sweet. But after the decision of principle the implication between ‘good’ and ‘red and sweet’ goes in both directions.

15  R.  M.  Hare, ‘Abortion and the Golden Rule’, in Essays on Bioethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 150. The example is discussed by H. L. A. Hart. See ‘Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals’, Harvard Law Review, 71/4 (1958), 607. There is a more detailed account of R. M. Hare’s views and their development in John E. Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), chapter 4. 16  R. M. Hare, ‘Supervenience’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 58 (1984), reprinted in his Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66–81.

62 Gender We can apply this framework to the trans male, if he says: ‘I am a man’. Sometimes he can ‘say’ this without words. I remember an occasion when my son did this triumphantly, stripping off his shirt to reveal his bare flat chest after his reconstructive surgery. He loves a song by Joe Stevens, ‘I said goodbye to everyone I know and one morning I awoke and I was this guy named Joe.’ If he says: ‘I am a man’, he is using criteria that he has endorsed for this disputed term. This endorsement is the third term in the relation that constitutes gender identity; it is an endorsement of a socially constructed set of criteria for ‘man’. It is what Ásta misses in her account, which aims not to adjudicate what criteria should be used.17 Unless the user of the term cancels the endorsement by using an ‘inverted commas sense’, the user is by default manifesting a decision of principle. An inverted commas use of a term is where the speaker withholds her own endorsement and quotes the use of others, often others whom she opposes. For example I might write self-­deprecatingly ‘I suppose I’m just a “soggy liberal” ’, meaning not that I regard myself as soggy, but that my views are what are often referred to by conservatives as ‘soggy liberalism’. There can be intermediate or mixed cases where a person is not whole-­heartedly endorsing or opposing, but expressing an ironic or ambivalent awareness of the complexities involved in a label.18 If a trans man says ‘I am a man’, is he using the term ‘man’ evaluatively? The answer is not straight-­forward and could go different ways on different occasions. R. M. Hare drew a sharp distinction between evaluation and description on the grounds that evaluations do and descriptions do not imply a prescription, but he also acknowledged that it is very hard to find pure cases of description, and many terms (like ‘generous’) have evaluative as well as descriptive components in their meaning. Perhaps we should say that the trans male who says ‘I am a man’ not only finds a fit between something he discovers inside and a conventional picture outside, but he thinks this fit is itself good and a fit between things he finds good. But the fact that he makes an endorsement of the criteria does not depend upon the fact that he is making an evaluation; the same need for criteria applies to disputed descriptions. In the same way, the judge’s finding that roller skates are wheeled vehicles ‘within the meaning of the act’ means that he is endorsing some such criterion as ‘likely to cause damage upon impact’, but does not mean that for him the term ‘wheeled vehicle’ is an evaluation. The relationship between the first two terms of the three-­term relation is that the preferences (the first term) are about a body of a certain kind (discussed in the following section), and this is matched (either as fitting or as not fitting) with a picture that is socially constructed. The third term is then the endorsement or rejection of the matched pair. 17  The account in Ásta’s Categories does not miss the important point that while ‘constitution’ is a kind of social construction, it is not a causal construction. 18  I owe this point to Sarah Zager.

What Is the ‘ Something Inside ’ ?  63

3.2  What Is the ‘Something Inside’? We began with the claim that a trans man discovers a fit between something he discovered inside and something outside, a social picture of what a man is like. We can now say more about what this something inside might be. Note that to say that this outside picture is socially constructed is not to say that the something inside is socially constructed. So what is it? First, it is a set of preferences: a preference for having hair on the face and other places on the body, a preference for having a voice in the lower registers (so as to sing tenor or bass, and not alto or soprano), a preference for having a flat chest and a certain musculature. These are all what are often called ‘secondary sexual characteristics’. We now have the technology for altering these features of a person with hormones and surgery and they are not the same as that person’s reproductive capacity. But the preferences do not stop here. There is a whole set of practices conventionally associated with these characteristics. The set of preferences discovered inside may include preferences to play a certain role in these conventional practices. But the trans male may not endorse the separation into roles that society has ordained. This will be clearer with an example. We can take a practice such as Ásta described, an extended family where the women at the family gatherings go to the kitchen and the men stay in the living room and smoke cigars. Suppose someone in this f­ amily is a trans male. He might prefer, given the alternatives, the cigars to the cooking. But he might also strongly disapprove of this division of roles. He might be specially sensitive to the injustice he perceives here because he was, before transition, seen by the family as female. Which preferences he endorses, and so which preferences he accepts as constituting the kind of man he wants to be, will depend upon what he thinks about the social practices of gender discrimination. We can see the set of preferences that this trans male discovers and endorses as described in a life-­narrative that gives a normative trajectory relating where he is now, how this has developed over time, and where his life is headed.19 At each stage there is a relation between the set of preferences he actually has (the descriptive trajectory) and the set it would be good to have at that stage (the normative trajectory). This picture has the advantage of allowing that the preferences can change, and then making these changes intelligible within a structure. A story, for example about my son’s life, that he had unthematized gender preferences that

19  I am grateful to Janna Gonwa for drawing my attention to some of this literature on narrative and its relevance to questions of identity. The idea of ‘maleness’ as a normative trajectory is also present in Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), ‘A male isn’t someone who is made, but someone who has to be made. A male, then, is a non-­being or rather a being-­for, a potential being, a volition, an edge concept, a guiding principle.’ See Seghal Parul, ‘A Prize-­Winning Blend of Fact and Fiction Makes Itself at Home in the Minds of Killers’, New York Times (7 August 2019). But this book is utterly pessimistic about maleness, calling it an incurable disease.

64 Gender were at odds with his assignment as female at birth, can make sense of all sorts of apparently anomalous events of his childhood and adolescence. This story-­ fragment can bring unity retrospectively to his experience even though it is only part of the story of his life as a whole. The connection between narrative and identity has been a large theme in recent anglophone philosophy. Thus Charles Taylor writes, Now we see that this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative. . . . It has often been remarked that making sense of one’s life as a story is also, like orientation to the good, not an optional extra; that our lives exist also in this space of questions, which only a coherent narrative can answer. In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.20

There are also dangers to this picture of gender identity as narrative, and we will look at these dangers presently, but the advantages are greater. The suggestion of this chapter is different from Taylor’s, however, in one respect, namely that it is explicitly theological. It proposes that the original story-­teller is not the person herself, but the Spirit, and the person herself has the task of receiving and retelling this story as best she can. Chapter 6 will claim that it is a comfort that God can see the whole picture all at once, even though our recapitulation of the story has to be temporally sequential. At the end of the present chapter we will look at the questions of whether there are alternative normative trajectories and whether we can change from one to another. The picture of a narrative is better than the picture of a stationary hierarchy of preferences (first-­order, second-­order, and third-­order), which is common in the literature about rational agency.21 On this stationary picture, I have desires for things or events (for example, a chocolate éclair), and then desires for desires (for example, the desire to be the temperate kind of person who does not have this first desire, since the éclair has 300 calories), and then desires for desires for desires (for example the desire to be the conscientious kind of person who sticks by the desire to be temperate). This picture is helpful, but narrative theory adds something important; it gives us diachronic continuity, and we can explain what is central in a life by appealing to what makes sense of it as a whole. Perhaps the notion of a narrative will also allow us to say when change has been so

20  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 47. 21  See the classic description of such a theory by Harry Frankfurt in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Centrality  65 devastating that no unity of narrative that the person can tell for herself can ­survive it (perhaps in some cases of trauma or dementia). If we can be clearer about the notion of centrality here, we can then ask whether gender is central in the sense clarified. We will have to make a rather long detour here through more general philosophical categories.

3.3 Centrality It is helpful to start by asking why we need the notion of centrality at all. This will recap in a new context some distinctions from the first volume of this trilogy.22 We need the notion of the centrality of a preference in a person’s set of preferences in order to have a counterweight to mere strength of desire in the decision about which desires to endorse both intrapersonally and interpersonally. There has been a tendency in some forms of utilitarianism to accept a strength of desire principle. This principle says that we can satisfy the requirements of justice by giving initial preference in moral decision to the stronger of two desires, in­de­ pend­ent­ly of whose that desire is. According to this principle, if two people are in competition for some good, and the first desires the good more strongly than the second, the good should be awarded to the first, other things being equal. Thus Peter Singer considers the case where he is about to dine with three friends when his father calls saying he is ill and asking him to visit. Singer writes, ‘To decide impartially, I must sum up the preferences for and against going to dinner with my friends, and those for and against visiting my father. Whatever action satisfied more preferences, adjusted according to the strength of the preferences, that is the action I ought to take.’23 What does ‘strength’ mean here? It is a measure either of intensity or tendency to action.24 Intensity is a term of phenomenology, of in­tern­al experience. On the hydraulic picture of motivation it is felt pressure towards action. Tendency to action is a behavioural measure, where a desire is stronger to the extent that it leads to action, and it may not correspond to any phenomenological marker. But tendency to action is no use in deciding what desires to endorse, since it is only observable retroactively. We can therefore focus on intensity. The problem with the strength of desire principle on this interpretation can be seen, first, in interpersonal cases. Some people have more intense desires than other people do. Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias, suggests that ‘a man who is going to 22 John  E.  Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 116–41. 23  Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1981), 101, emphasis added. 24  There is a good discussion of the relation between the tendency to action and experienced intensity in Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 25–32.

66 Gender live a full life must allow his desires to become as mighty as may be and never repress them’.25 Perhaps adolescence is a stage of life in which our desires are more intense, and adolescents are (without knowing it) following Callicles’s advice. A 50-­year-­old who has to go to a boring children’s piano recital reflects that she gave the same kind of pain when she was a child and she did not mind so much when her own children were on stage. The adolescent at the same event feels he is going to die if he has to stay in the room a moment longer. But it is unfair to give precedence to people who are simply wired in this way to have more intense desires. One way to try to mitigate the unfairness here is to observe that the 50-­year-­old, even if she does not have so intense an aversion, has desires and aversions that are more integrated into a coherent package. This is partly because she knows herself better. It is also partly because her conflicting desires have, over time, worn each other down, like sharp stones in a polisher. The result of this integration is that a single desire on a single occasion is likely to be networked with desires throughout what we might call her ‘desire profile’. If this is so, then frustrating the single desire will be frustrating many other desires in the profile, and the strength of desire principle may not require giving precedence to the adolescent after all. But this reply does not work. The trouble is that the very integration of desires which is appealed to here works against the 50-­year-­old. Because she knows herself better, she knows that there are many alternative ways to get what she wants. The mature person takes herself less seriously, and therefore takes less seriously her boredom on any one occasion. The interpersonal objection to the strength of desire principle is that it is unfair to maturity in this way, and it encourages people to become the sort of person who (by intensity of desire and aversion) makes life more difficult for everyone else. This is the interpersonal objection. But more serious for our present purposes is the intrapersonal objection that we need within our own lives a way to decide which desires to endorse, and mere strength or intensity of desire is not enough. Our most intense desires might be ones we should resist. We need a notion of the ‘centrality’ of a desire to our lives, though even central desires should sometimes be resisted. Merely appealing to a hierarchy of first- and second- and third-­order desires is not going to be enough either. There are all sorts of different relations between desires that can be described as ‘desires for desires’. We can distinguish four, and try to illustrate how the idea of a life-­narrative is helpful in seeing the difference between them. Sometimes desires seem to pop into our heads without any connection to who we take ourselves to be.26 I might be walking along the street and see an elderly 25 Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. D. Woodhead, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 492a. 26  Susan Wolf discusses this in Freedom within Reason (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1990). There is also the psycho-­analytic literature about the subconscious. See Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1984.

Centrality  67 man with a cane walking towards me, and think for an instant how funny it would be to kick away the cane and see him fall to the ground. An atrocious thought, and one I very reasonably dismiss as an alien intruder. In contrast with this are desires that I acknowledge as genuinely mine, but which I refuse to endorse. An example would be the desire for a chocolate éclair, which I know to be inconsistent with my long-­term goals for reduced weight and increased health. This desire is not an alien intruder, and is indeed all too familiar, but I reject it. We can call this ‘acknowledging a desire’. Different from this is what we can call ‘identifying with a desire’. This is where I recognize a desire as familiar, in that sense ‘mine’, and I know situations where it has led to good; but I also know it has in some situations led to harm and it is therefore not trustworthy. As we get to know ourselves better, we can come to see that often our defects are the reverse side of our virtues, the very same dispositions, but resulting in harm rather than benefit. For ex­ample, I may have the disposition to concentrate on my work to the exclusion of any interest in what is going on around me. This is a virtue when I am writing my manuscript and a defect when I am supposed to be also keeping an ear out for my infant son upstairs. This desire and ability to concentrate is one I identify with, and I see it as part of my long-­term pattern of desire, but I do not yet endorse it for a particular occasion. The third kind of relation I might have to a desire is what we can call ‘endorsing’. Here I prescribe acting in accordance with the desire. This endorsing is the third term in the three-­term relation with which we started this chapter. On a prescriptivist account, the endorsement in a judgement carries with it a disposition to act, though there are hard questions here about weakness of the will. Perhaps we should say, with Aristotle, that there is not the disposition to act until both the universal and the particular premises of the practical syllogism are present and active.27 But this is not the place for further discussion of this. So far we have three different relations to our desires, that we have called ‘acknowledging’, ‘identifying with’, and ‘endorsing’. The fourth relation is the centrality of a desire to our desire profile as a whole, and we are now in a better pos­ ition to say what this means. We can say that a desire is central in a desire profile if it has large unifying power over the normative trajectory of the profile as a whole over time. We described a life-­narrative as responding to a normative trajectory that relates where a person is now in respect to his desires, how this has developed over time, and where his life is headed. This narrative is teleological. It is, that is to say, a story about where we should be ending up, not merely a prediction about where we will in fact end up. Thus a person might say, looking at his life and his circumstances, ‘I’m not where I’m supposed to be’. Telling the story is completely consistent with acknowledging that we are not currently in the place 27 Aristotle, NE, VII, 3. But the interpretation of this chapter is much disputed. See Hare, God and Morality, 58–61.

68 Gender where the story says we should be. I can acknowledge, identify with, and even endorse a desire or preference without it being central to me in the defined sense. But if a desire is central, that gives me a reason to endorse it. An example might be helpful. A philosopher might find central the desire and the ability to be clear about things that people care about; that explains why she went into the field, how she now writes and teaches, and it gives a hint about her final contribution to God’s realized kingdom. Marya Schechtman, who has been working on the notion of personal narrative for many years, says that we build a unity of meaning and purpose into our lives. She also insists that we occupy, in relation to the narratives we tell about our own lives, the positions of character, author, and critic.28 We are not merely participating in the story, and telling the story, but judging whether the story is a good one, and whether we are directing our lives as far as possible in the direction of the meaning that the story gives us. If the narrative is teleological, however, the next question is about the objectivity of its prescriptions. Here Schechtman wants to be ontologically modest. She distinguishes between what she calls ‘narrative belief ’ (which she thinks is too ambitious) and what she calls ‘narrative attitude’ (which she accepts). Narrative belief holds that ‘there is an overall theme or aesthetic purpose in the unfolding of a person’s life’.29 Narrative attitude, by contrast, assumes no ontological reality behind the story, but the meaning is imposed by the story-­teller. Schectman is, in Ásta’s term, a conferralist and the story-­teller has the standing to confer the label. She holds, however, that narrative belief would be appropriate if there were a ‘transcendent author’ telling the story (but she thinks there is not). After all, stories do not exist in themselves; they have to be told. But if a person can be wrong about her own story, it cannot be simply she that is telling it, though she may be trying to repeat it in her own retelling. Schechtman’s position about narrative belief is like John Mackie’s position about the objective prescriptivity of moral judgement. Mackie held that ‘although most people in making moral judgements implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.’30 He thinks the claims are inconsistent with natural science and with the large variation in people’s moral beliefs. But Mackie, who is an atheist, also holds that if there were a god, we could hold that moral obligation is grounded in this god’s commands. Following Mackie, Michael Ruse believes that ‘ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good 28  Marya Schechtman, ‘The Narrative Self ’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 414. I am grateful, again, to Janna Gonwa for this discussion of Schechtman. 29  Marya Schechtman, ‘Art Imitating Life Imitating Art: Literary Narrative and Autobiographical Narrative’, in The Philosophy of Autobiography, ed. Christopher Cowley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 30 (emphasis added). 30 J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 35. I have discussed his position and that of Michael Ruse in more detail in John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 273–8.

Centrality  69 cooperators’, even though he also wants to insist that the moral sentiments are real, in the same way that a perceptual illusion of an oasis in the desert is real; we really have the sensation, but the oasis in not really there.31 Another philosopher who belongs in the same intellectual family is Daniel Dennett, who holds that the ‘self ’ is a useful fiction given us by evolution for the sake of effective agency.32 The problem with all these views can be illustrated by looking more closely at one of them, at Michael Ruse’s view that ethics is an illusion. There are millions of people in the world who, whether they belong to an official religion or not, believe that there is a meaning to their lives that is not simply a product of human construction, their own or others’. If they come to believe that this meaning is simply a product of human construction, it tends to lose its prescriptive force. This is not a problem if we are simply willing to jettison objective prescriptivity in the way grown-­ups jettison belief in Santa Claus, but this is a heavy price to pay. There is some empirical evidence for the conclusion that assuming self-­construction of value diminishes its prescriptive force, but it is also plausible on its face.33 Consider the following thought experiment. The ancient Epicureans used to believe that the gods had no care for us or our lives, but set us up and watched us for the sake of their own entertainment, rather in the way we now watch soap operas on television. Suppose they gave us the moral sentiments because this made our consequent agonizing more interesting to watch, and suppose I discover this about the gods. I will then still have the moral sentiments, but when I feel coming upon me the urge to help my neighbour in some sacrificial way, I will say to myself ‘That’s just the gods again, curse them’. If, as Ruse concedes, morality sometimes tells us to do what is not to our adaptive advantage as individuals, and if I discover it is natural selection that has given me this prompting, I am likely to say, ‘That’s just my genes again, curse them.’ Ruse is important here because, while he is dependent on Mackie for his scepticism about objective prescriptivity, he is also, to his credit, aware that we no longer occupy the intellectual space in which Mackie’s arguments for this scepticism were plausible. In the 1960s there were many philosophers who thought that they could defend a version of empiricism according to which the physical sciences were the sole final arbiter of reality. But Ruse now concedes, ‘These central core claims [of the Christian] by their very nature go beyond the reach of science. I do not say that you must be a Christian, but I do say that in the light of modern 31  Michael Ruse, ‘Is Darwinian Metaethics Possible (and If It Is, Is It Well Taken)?’, in Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology, ed. Giovanni Boniolo and Gabriele De Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13. Ruse is quoting from Michael Ruse and E.  O.  Wilson, ‘The Evolution of Morality’, New Scientist, 1478 (1985), 108–28. 32 Daniel  C.  Dennett, ‘The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity’, in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Frank  S.  Kessel, Pamela  M.  Cole, and Dale  L.  Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992), 103–15. 33  See Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, ‘Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7/2 (1993), 159–71.

70 Gender science you can be a Christian. We have seen no sound arguments to the contrary.’34 He extends this permission to a commitment ‘to a form of what is known as the “divine command theory” of metaethics.’35 The point here is that once Ruse has made these concessions, which he is perfectly right to make, he ought for the sake of consistency to take back the claim that science shows that objective prescriptivity is an illusion given us by natural selection. This claim is part of the kind of imperialism about physical science that he has subsequently come to reject. Many of the writers we have been looking at tie objective prescriptivity to theism. This is too swift, and it is possible to defend accountability to an objective teleology for our lives that does not invoke a transcendent author.36 But theism does have some resources for the discussion of normativity about gender and these will be the topic of the last four sections of this chapter. What is it like to think that there is a proper trajectory of my life that I can discover, and that I do not invent? Here is an example. Suppose I am a professor engaged in research that I have been accustomed to think gives my life much of its point. And suppose my wife develops multiple myeloma, and has to go through extensive back surgery, months of hospital, and then extensive chemotherapy for the rest of her life. I may discover that the academic research I was doing is actually less important to my life than I had thought. It is not just that I have changed my value-­ordering (though this happens in some cases). It is more true to say that I have discovered what already mattered most, even though I was not adequately living by it. My narrative was mistaken. This is the kind of discovery we should attribute in some cases to the trans male. Sometimes the discovery is of a value-­ ordering that is proper to human beings in general. But in the cases that concern us in the present context a preference ordering is discovered that is particular to  the agent, but he should still live by it when he discovers it, and not merely because he is already committed to it. This means that it is not enough for living in accordance with what matters (in the evaluative sense) for a person’s life that she is satisfied most of the time with the choice that she makes.37 A person may not be a good judge of what matters 34  Michael Ruse, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 233. 35 Ruse, Science and Spirituality, 210, 214. 36  There is a large literature on non-­theistic axiarchy. See Derek Parfit, ‘Why Anything? Why This?’, in London Review of Books, 20/2 (1998), 24–7. 37  I have in mind Jan Bransen’s claim that what we are aiming at is an ‘optimal balance of agent-­ satisfaction over agent-­regret’, in ‘Alternatives of Oneself: Recasting Some of Our Practical Problems’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60/2 (2000), 381–400. Again, thanks to Janna Gonwa for this reference. The endorsement of a preference-­set requires that agents be sufficiently aware of themselves and what matters to them to make such a decision. There are large implications of this point for the question of how old an agent has to be in order to make such a decision responsibly. I am not going to enter into this hotly debated topic. There are also implications for the question of the proper role of a person’s community in making these kinds of decision, which are best made, at any age, after

Three Objections to Life-­N arratives  71 even for her own life. We can grant that there is a large danger here of opening the door to paternalism and a ‘big brother’ state, where those in power think they know better than their fellow citizens what those fellow citizens need for a good life. This is what is ultimately horrifying about the structure of Plato’s Republic, and the place it gives to the philosopher kings and queens. But the point is not that some other human being knows better than the agent herself what matters for her own life. It is merely that a person is not always a good judge of this herself. Moreover even if gender is central to a person’s path, and occupies a large place in her life-­story, and even if she thinks it is also central to her destination, she might be wrong about her final state.

3.4  Three Objections to Life-­Narratives Before returning to gender, we should look at three objections to giving narrative the sort of role in a life that I have been giving it. The first objection is that a life is not a literary product, and standards of evaluation that may be appropriate to a ‘good story’ are not necessarily appropriate to a good life. Aristotle famously said that poetry (primarily tragedy and comedy) is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history.38 He explains in the following sentences what he had in mind. Poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact. A universal is: The sort of thing that (in the circumstances) a certain kind of person will say or do either probably or necessarily, which in fact is the universal that poetry aims for (with the addition of names for the persons); a particular, on the other hand is: What Alcibiades did or had done to him.

Aristotle’s use of Alcibiades here is significant, rather than his usual ‘Coriscus’ or ‘Callias’.39 Alcibiades was in many ways extraordinary and his life cannot plaus­ ibly be used for purposes of generalization. But our lives from the inside are individual also, and also properly resist generalization; they are more like history in Aristotle’s dichotomy. Moreover, Aristotle’s insistence that a good plot have a natural beginning, a natural middle, and a natural ending will often not fit the messiness of an actual human life.40 To insist on narrative unity of this kind will result sustained consultation. I have been to some degree involved in the writing of church statements about transgender issues, which have the potential to be either helpful or disastrously unhelpful. 38 Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 1451b5–6, trans. James Hutton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). 39  See D. W. Lucas, Aristotle’s Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 119, ‘Possibly Alcibiades is chosen here . . . because he was so strikingly individual.’ 40 Aristotle, Poetics, 7, 1450b26b. See Henry James, ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ Preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1907), viii. There will be circumstances in which a person is

72 Gender in distortion. But this objection can be disarmed if we make a distinction between story and trajectory. A teleological story is proposing a narrative trajectory for a person’s life. But any human story may fail to capture what is actually the best trajectory; it will always be an artificial construct. It is like a pho­tog­raph­er framing a scene for aesthetic reasons. The photograph that results will not be the same as what we originally see in that place, but a good one may help us see what is there. Perhaps the objector will reply: ‘It is not selectivity itself that is the problem, or the aesthetic character of the selection criteria, but the fact that narratives are intelligible only because the tropes they use make sense to the public, and so allow the person telling the story about herself to make sense of herself to others. But especially in the case of gender, it is the public tropes that are the problem. The problem is not just that a trans male may not fit, in his early life, the publicly accessible pictures of gender. Those pictures also have power inside a person and can make it hard for him to see his actual preferences. This is especially true about the trans male because there are socially prevalent demeaning pictures of what it is to be female.’ There are three replies to this reply. The first is that narrativity itself is not the source of this problem, which is certainly very serious. We can see this when we see that the trans male can construct a counter-­narrative, in solidarity with his own community, that has power to resist the prevailing norms. Chapter  1 mentioned that my son has been involved in a group called ‘Transmission’, and they meet together to tell their stories to each other. Their testimony is that these meetings are a source of great strength, and help greatly with what would otherwise be, for many of them, intensely lonely lives. The second reply is that the wider public can, over time, change its narratives. We are starting to see this happen, though there is much suffering on the way. It is not publicity itself that is the problem, but the prevailing configuration. The third reply is that the objection is to human stories, not the story told us by the Spirit. We can often get this story wrong as we try to appropriate it. But that is our fault, not the story’s. The second and third objections come from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, from the two characters Kierkegaard constructs there: ‘A’ (representing the aesthetic life) and Judge William (representing the ethical).41 Kierkegaard is important here because he both gives us a powerful picture of a person living ‘in the moment’ in the words of such a person himself (namely ‘A’), and he gives us a critique of such a life in the words of another constructed character (Judge William) who lives unable to construct a narrative that makes sense of her life, such as the cases mentioned earlier of severe trauma or dementia, but that does not mean that it is impossible for God to tell such a story. 41  Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Similar objections are also presented by Galen Strawson in ‘The Unstoried Life’, in On Life-­Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2015, 284–301, and in ‘Against Narrativity’, in The Self? (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Three Objections to Life-­N arratives  73 with a constant sense of his life as a whole. Kierkegaard then gives us a critique of the life of Judge William from the perspective of a third life (different from both the aesthetic and the ethical), which is the life of faith. This is not the right place to discuss at length this rich dialectic; but the following two objections to narrativity emerge with great vividness from A’s and Judge William’s self-­descriptions, and it is helpful to see the objections against the background of the two lives that embody them. This is Kierkegaard’s particular genius, to let us see radically different lives from the inside. The second objection is that narrative kills the ability to be present in the moment, and thus spoils a life. A (the aesthete) has the ideal of a kind of transparency in which the whole of reality quivers in sympathetic vibration with his being, and he finds this when deeply attending to great music (for him, especially Mozart’s Don Giovanni). The trouble with a life-­narrative is that it puts a screen between him and his experience, and his preferred kind of intense aesthetic transparency is prevented. The great goal of A’s life is to find interest and to avoid boredom. Judge William tells him that he is doomed to disappointment, because the only things that in fact have the power to sustain interest are the very commitments that A has foresworn, for example the commitment to a long-­term relationship and the commitment to a job that is worth-­while. A has avoided these things because they are, in the long run, boring. He can keep interested for the short term (in relationships or projects), but the idea of a life-­commitment fills him with dread. For A, it is important not to invest experience with too much expectation, not to ‘hoist full sail for any decision’.42 That way, one can take each situation on its own merits, find amusement in it, and then escape. He tells of having to meet a boring philosopher who insists on a little lecture at each meeting, but A notices that during the lecture the philosopher perspires profusely, and ‘I watched how the pearls of perspiration collected on his forehead, then united in a rivulet, slid down his nose, and ended in a quivering globule that remained suspended at the end of his nose.’43 From then on the meetings were a delight. But Judge William has, at least for this reader, the better of this dispute. It is doubtful that the moments do have enough intrinsic appeal to sustain interest without the connective tissue of a life-­story to hold them together. Even Don Giovanni, after a definitive performance, cannot completely satisfy again. The third objection is that life-­narratives can easily be self-­deceptive. Judge William says that A needs to collect all his little disappointments together, acknowledge that his life cannot in fact sustain the interesting, and then choose the despair that results. In choosing it, Judge William thinks A will find a new kind of transparency, ethical transparency, because he will have found a position from which all humans are the same, namely the position of radical choice; he

42 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, I, 293.

43 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, I, 299.

74 Gender will have found what the judge calls ‘a kingdom of gods’, and in choosing from this position he will be transparent to his duty.44 But we can ask the judge, ‘Are you sure that when you go inside yourself, you will find yourself in your eternal validity?’. We can hear in the judge’s phrase ‘kingdom of gods’ an echo of Kant’s phrase ‘kingdom of ends’.45 But Kant would not say that we will go inside ourselves and find gods. The point is that Kant does and Judge William does not acknowledge the existence of radical evil. The judge’s self-­narrative is in fact also self-­deceptive. We might point to the judge’s treatment of his own wife, since the judge is holding up marriage as the central case of ethical life-­commitment. He treats her as not capable of despair and therefore not capable of transition into the ethical life, and he is thus not treating her as a full member of the kingdom of ends. We can see his own self-­deception starting to unravel at the end of his second enormous letter to A, and also when he appends a sermon from a pastor in Jylland with the title ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’. There is a reply to this third objection from within the perspective of a third life, the life of faith. Anticlimacus, the pseudonymous author of Sickness unto Death, describes a third kind of transparency. He writes that the goal is that ‘the self rests transparently in the power that established it.’46 Here is a foretaste of the theology which will occupy the final sections of this chapter. It is true that a person has to be open to discovering that her previous narrative had been entirely self-­deceptive (the third objection). But the suggestion of Anticlimacus is that the self is established by a trustworthy power outside the self, to which it aspires to be transparent. There are indeed temptations to self-­deception, and Anticlimacus details many of them in his account of the different forms of despair. But if this trustworthy power is establishing the self as Anticlimacus claims, it is this power that is telling the story to which we are aspiring to be transparent. And it is not a good objection to this picture to say that we might be deceived about the story; that is the key point of the picture.

3.5  Centrality and Gender Now, at last, we can apply these thoughts about centrality to gender. The first thing to say is that we need to be faithful to the experience of the trans male for whom his gender transition was the most important thing in his life. I remember one occasion not long before the reconstructive surgery when he was in hospital 44 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II, 292. 45  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (henceforth Gl) 83 (4: 443). 46  Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14.

Centrality and Gender  75 for another serious medical procedure unrelated to his gender; but all he could think about was keeping his chest tightly bound, and he did not trust the nurses to do this for him. The perils of the current procedure were as nothing to him. But this intense importance is not the end of the matter, because mere strength of desire does not settle the question about how we should live. We discussed earlier the idea of discovering and endorsing a set of preferences as a part of a life-­ narrative that gives a normative trajectory that relates where one is now, how this has developed over time, and where one’s life is headed. In those terms a desire (or preference) is central in a desire profile if it has large unifying power over the normative trajectory of the profile as a whole over time. This means that the narrative is teleological. It is a story about where we should be ending up, not merely a prediction about where we will in fact end up. Telling the story is thus completely consistent with acknowledging that we are not currently in the place where the story says we should be. But then this opens up the possibility that even a very intense present preference might not be endorsed as part of the story about one’s destination, even if it is acknowledged as part of the story about where one is now. What is meant by ‘large unifying power’? A good way to approach this is by contrasting Charlotte Witt’s controversial view ‘that gender is the function that unifies and organizes all our other social roles and is thus uniessential to us as social individuals.’47 We should distinguish a set of preferences being pervasive and being central (which is Witt’s view about gender). Consider, for example, the preference for enough air to breathe. This preference is pervasive in the sense that it accompanies all my other preferences for social interaction, indeed for any action at all. But does it therefore have ‘large unifying power’? It gives us something like a necessary condition for life. But not many of our life decisions are explained by it in normal circumstances. To unify is at least to give an explanation with a relatively simple set of terms that makes the thing to be explained more intelligible. Since the narrative is teleological (giving an account in terms of a purpose or goal), the intelligibility given by central desires recounted in that narrative is going to be in terms of what is good. An example may help here. We can think back to the analysis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 2, No. 2, given in Chapter 2. The analysis (in terms of a particular conception of the sublime) should make the piece more intelligible. It should make for a better playing and hearing. It will do this by linking up the details of the text, for ex­ample the four-­note mediating figure introduced into the final statement of the theme, into a unified overall structure. Now does gender do this? If I am, for example, playing or hearing the sonata, does the fact that I am male or female or somewhere else on the gender spectrum make my playing or hearing intelligible in this sort of way? This is doubtful. Or consider a different case. Being a multiple 47  See Ásta, Categories, 83. Ásta is recounting Charlotte Witt’s view in The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

76 Gender myeloma patient is a social role (though it has a subvening base of light-­chain changes in the blood), but gender has very little explanatory power over whether it is good to have a stem cell transplant. Why does Witt think gender is ‘uniessential’? Her account is explicitly Aristotelian, and indeed she is a specialist in Aristotle’s metaphysical theory.48 Uniessentialism is a theory about the unity of individuals, that they exist as individuals by virtue of a function, ‘an essential property that explains what the individual is for, what its purpose is, and that organizes the parts towards that end.’49 An example from the domain of artefacts would be a house, whose function is to provide shelter. But Witt separates carefully between the person, the human organism, and the social individual, and it is only the social individual that is ‘uniessentially’ gendered. To make this claim is to give gender a ‘megasocial role’ as the single unifier of all social roles into a single individual. But why should there be a single unifier? Here the motivation is Aristotelian, even though Aristotle does not discuss gender as an essence. Witt’s theory is that there is an existing individual, the social individual who has a number of social roles, and there has to be (for an Aristotelian) an essence to hold this individual together. She says that the relation between the human organism and the social individual is like the relation between feeding and dining. Feeding is something humans have to do for survival, but dining is a set of socially constituted practices that manifest that function. In the same way Witt thinks reproducing is something humans have to do for survival, and what Witt calls ‘engendering’ is the set of social practices that manifest that function at any one place and time.50 But we should be sceptical here. The notion of a social individual is so far from Aristotle that we should be doubtful about whether his views about the relation between an individual and essence still apply. And we should be doubtful also about whether reproduction plays the constituting role she describes. Even if there is not one ‘megasocial’ role, however, there can still be unity within a person’s haecceity and unity within the trajectory or path towards it. That is what we are looking to understand. Gender, then, is pervasive, but that does not show that it is central, in the sense of making large sections of what we do normatively intelligible. To answer the question about centrality we need to make another distinction. Intelligibility in terms of what is good needs to be divided into centrality for a destination and centrality for a path. Again, an example may be helpful, and we can use the story

48  Her book Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-­IX (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), provides an analysis of some of the most dense material in the whole of Aristotle’s corpus. 49 Ásta, The Metaphysics of Gender, 14. 50  Witt acknowledges that a social individual can exist when she does not have reproductive cap­ acity, but she thinks the gender role is defined with reference to reproduction.

Centrality and Gender  77 of Jairus and the woman with the bleeding.51 In this story Jesus asks two people to  face very different temptations or characteristic difficulties; Jairus (the ruler of  the synagogue) has to wait for Jesus’s interaction with the woman, when his 12-­year-­old daughter is on the point of death and he needs Jesus to help her, and Jesus asks the woman to make public the whole twelve-­year history of her illness and her humiliation. The story by its details asks us to compare the two, and suggests that Jesus is seeing into the heart of each of them, taking them through what is hardest for them (through and not around it). We thus get hints of a trajectory for each, a path towards what Jesus wants each of them to become. We learn something about what kinds of people we are eventually to be by learning what we are now not to be. But overcoming these temptations or characteristic difficulties can be central to the path without being central to the destination, which is a particular way of loving God. The example of Jairus and the woman is a negative example (of characteristic difficulties to work through), but not all the hints we get on the path are negative. There can also be moments where some chosen change makes everything seem to fit together, and we seem to be in the right place at the right time with the right capacities for living this stage of the journey as we are supposed to live. But this does not necessarily mean we will be that way at our destination. Perhaps gender and gender identity are central in this sort of way to the path, both negatively and positively, but we have no knowledge about whether they are central to the destination. We can start with two reasons for saying they are not central to the destination, drawn from reflection on what human life is like. These are therefore truths about our common nature and not truths about our individual essence or haecceity, which is (according to Scotus, as described earlier in this book) a perfection of this nature but not determined by it. The first reason is drawn from a reflection about the stages of life, as for example in Hume’s observation that young people read Ovid, middle-­aged people read Horace, and old people read Juvenal.52 He is here treating Ovid as the poet of love and suggesting that amorous interest and activity declines with age. We can see the same point in the remark of Cephalus in Republic, book one, who reports having been with Sophocles the poet when someone asked him ‘How do you feel about sex, Sophocles? Are you still capable of having sex with a woman?’. Sophocles replies, ‘Be quiet, man! To my great delight, I have broken free of that, like a slave who has got away from a rabid and savage master.’ Cephalus whole-­heartedly agrees.53 They are talking about sexual activity and not about the centrality of gender, and this chapter has not been about sexual activity. But what Cephalus and Sophocles say about sexual desire is 51  Luke 8: 40–56. See John  E.  Hare, Why Bother Being Good? (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 68–9. 52 David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, vol. i, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1882), 279. 53 Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 329c.

78 Gender probably true about the centrality of gender; it declines with age. Writing personally, I am a male in his 70s, and being male is less important to me than it used to be. I have also observed this in others. My beloved mother still cared about being a woman after my father died in 2002, but to my observation she started to care more about other things; for example, her relationship to God and to her community was expressed in her new willingness to become senior warden in her local Church of England parish. This is mere anecdote. But there is another reason drawn from reflection on human life for thinking gender is not central as destination. This reason comes from the account of gender given earlier. The trans male finds something inside and matches it at least roughly with something outside, with a social picture of what a man is like, and he himself, the third term in the relation, his heart or his will, endorses this match. We can see gender as a set of preferences discovered and endorsed as a part of a life-­narrative that gives a normative trajectory that relates where one is now, how this has developed over time, and where one’s life is headed. These preferences will be concerned partly with so-­called ‘secondary sexual characteristics’, but also with a whole set of practices conventionally associated with these characteristics. The present point is that as we get to know ourselves better in maturity we start to distrust these conventional pictures. This is especially true as the prevailing culture seems less and less to suit us in other ways. This is not usually because we are being deliberately excluded, but because the novelties that we do not understand accumulate until they develop a critical mass that becomes a barrier. This puts a distance between us and the surrounding culture. Moreover, as we get older we start to be able to see our earthly lives as a whole, since there is not much more or new that we are likely to accomplish. One side effect is that we start to see what has shaped these lives by external influence and recognize the contingency of this; it could have been otherwise and it changes from one generation to another. Since gender identity is a three-­term relation, and one of these terms is a social picture, the contingency of the social picture makes the gender identity itself seem more fluid or labile. There is a difference, however, between centrality to the path and centrality to the destination, and gender identity might still be central to the path. What does this mean? Centrality to the path was true in my son Thomas’s case, since a large number of the decisions he made for several years took their rationale from his gender transition. Here is one example of path-­centrality. Perhaps a trans male has a preference to have greater physical strength, and perhaps this preference leads to a regimen of exercise as well as hormones. The claim here is not that males are essentially stronger physically than females; any difference currently observed is in part created by social pressures for what ‘males’ and ‘females’ are encouraged to do. But this is not the whole story, and the tendency to greater strength may be one of the ‘biological’ markers of sex that do not cohere, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The trans male in question may have a

The Holy Spirit  79 preference for being stronger because, in part (as suggested in Chapter  1), he wants to be able to help elderly parents with heavy suitcases. But this is path not destination. We do not know whether there is something analogous to carrying suitcases or differential physical strength in the new heaven and the new earth. But this preference for his present life fits with his overall moral values, and he endorses it. On the other hand, this very differentiation has a negative side. Those who have been classified in society as ‘male’ have tended historically to a morally illegitimate domination of those classified as ‘female’, and this domination has been in part enabled by differences in physical strength. This is surely not a controversial statement. The trans male may have to recognize that he is a beneficiary in his new gender identity of centuries of oppression, even if he now wants to overcome it. One implication of the idea of a normative trajectory, however, is that there is a good way of being male. If we go back to the earlier distinction between ac­know­ ledg­ing, identifying with, and endorsing, we can see being male as something we identify with, because it can be used (like many of our tendencies) for good and ill. But the present point is that it can be used for good. This may seem controversial because so much of the violence we observe (sexual violence and mass shootings, for example) is committed by males. Moreover, there is good evidence that males have less tendency to sexual faithfulness within relationships than females, though these sorts of comparisons are distorted by the dichotomy male/female which was questioned earlier.54 Again, the various traditional markers of ‘male’ and ‘female’ may not cohere as markers of a single set. But suppose we thought of identifying with maleness, and then asked what would be the good way of using it? Perhaps (using an Aristotelian picture of virtue) the virtues are the other sides of observed vices. The example given in section 3.3 was the disposition to concentrate exclusively on a single task at hand. The disposition is a virtue in one kind of context and a vice in another. Perhaps violence is a bad way of using intensity of anger and promiscuity is a bad way of using sexual drive. But intensity of anger and sexual drive can be good things and can be used well. The tentative suggestion is that this would be a place to look for male virtue. But to work out this suggestion is a project for a different book.

3.6  The Holy Spirit We can now turn to the Holy Spirit, and the remainder of this chapter will be explicitly framed in terms of Christian theology. We can take as our starting point

54 See John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 124–56.

80 Gender that the Spirit ‘is the constant overflow of the life of God into creation’.55 This means that we should not take it that the Spirit is sent only after Jesus ascends to the Father; rather, there is then a new work for the Spirit to do.56 There are indeed special works that the Spirit does only in the church, but the Spirit was always active in the world from the time at the very beginning when ‘The Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.’57 The language of ‘overflow’ is Neoplatonic, and we should resist the Neoplatonic tendency to say that God flows into creation by necessity. The Spirit is present in the Trinity, proceeding from the Father and the Son, independently of creation which God does freely. But the Spirit moves to accomplish God’s will, and this work is not merely ‘special’ within the church but ‘general’ within the creation. We can start with the special work and move to the general. In Romans 8 we are told something about how the Spirit works in the believer’s heart. We are told that we, who have the first-­fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. We are hoping for what we do not yet see. In the terms of the present chapter, we do not yet see the destination but we long for it. The Spirit, we are then told, helps us deal with this alongside us (sunantilambanetai). This word is only used here and in Luke 10: 40, where Martha asks for Mary’s help alongside her with the burden of preparing the meal for Jesus and his disciples. Martha is not going to stop the preparations if Mary comes to help. We have here a word for cooperation in something too hard for a person on her own. The Romans passage goes on to say that we do not know what we ought to pray for. In the context, this should include that we do not know how to pray towards our destination, since we do not see this yet. We long for it, and for movement towards it, but the only expression for this is in groans that go beyond speech. But the passage suggests that the Spirit sees it. The Spirit has the story about how, by what path, we can get to our inheritance as children of God, and this is the ‘mind of the Spirit’ which God knows, because this story is in accordance with God’s will. Our task is to retell this story, to recapitulate it. But we will not be able to do this completely until we reach the destination. Here is another description of this movement within a believer’s heart. It is from the preface of the first reasonably accurate translation into English (by Sir Tobie Matthew) of Teresa of Avila’s The Flaming Heart.58 We will come back to 55  Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24 (henceforth GSS). See Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt, in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology (London: SPCK, 1940), 86–7, ‘The Divine Existence . . . extends Its goodness by the very fact of Its existence into all things . . . as our sun, through no choice or deliberation, but by the very fact of its existence, gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its illumination.’ But I will be departing from Coakley’s account of gender in what follows. 56  John 16: 5, where Jesus says: ‘Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you’. 57  Genesis 1: 2. 58  Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart, trans. Sir Tobie Matthew (Antwerp: Johannes Meursius, 1642), 31. I have preserved the seventeenth-­century spelling and punctuation and capitalization in

The Holy Spirit  81 Teresa’s visions and to a poem about her by Richard Crashaw, when we discuss the relation of gender and sanctification in section 3: 9. Sir Tobie is anxious that the reader not be scandalized by Teresa’s ‘sensible’ (sensory) descriptions of her visions. He says: Nor yet are yow, my Reader, whosoever you may be, to be idly scandalized, by any meanes, at the Formes, whereby things are represented sometimes, in the Visions, and Revelations of Saints; and this, upon another, and that a very substantiall reason, which followes heer. For, the important business, in those cases, is, that our Blessed Lord, is pleased to imprint, at such, and such times, upon the Soules of such, and such of his deare Servants, such, or such a kind of virtue, or Favour, or Strength, as himself is pleased to designe, for the comfort, progresse, and perfection, of that Servant of his. And so, that Servant, consisting both of a Bodie, and a Soule, his Divine Majestie is also gratiously pleased, manie times, to affect both the Bodie and the Soule, together, with a sensible kind of feeling of that grace.

Sir Tobie is talking about the design of Christ for the ‘comfort, progresse, and perfection’ of his servants, and he is treating Teresa’s visions, the gifts of the Spirit, as given in order to promote her ‘virtue, or favour, or strength’. So this kind of gift of favour and strength for their progress is given to some of the saints. This is a special work of the Spirit within the church. But is there also a general work of life-­guidance by the Spirit, like the general work of moving us towards the beautiful and the sublime discussed in Chapter  2? This chapter is arguing affirmatively, that the Spirit is telling each of us the story that connects our past, present, and future, in the direction of the good. If this is right, can this guidance and comfort encompass a gender transition? There is an important objection to the idea that the Spirit could ever guide someone along such a path. The objection comes from an interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1: 27 tells us, ‘God created humankind (in Hebrew, adam) in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” ’. This passage suggests a created distinction between male and female and says nothing about anything in between the two, or a spectrum, or transition from one place on such a spectrum to another. It will be helpful to look first at a trans-­friendly reading of this passage, then at something this reading omits, and then at the significance of this omission.

Crashaw and Sir Tobie because I wrote these pages holding the vellum-­bound first editions in my hands, and it seemed to me that there was meaning in some of the antique idiosyncrasy that I did not want to lose.

82 Gender First, the trans-­friendly reading.59 The created distinction between male and female follows similar polarities earlier in the chapter between light and dark and dry and wet. God divides the day from the night and the land from the waters. In the same way within the human species God divides male and female and links this division to procreation. It is important to see that these divisions do not, in the earlier cases, mark out exclusive areas, as one might divide a cake. There are day and night, but there are also dawn and dusk. There is dry land and water, but there are also marshes and seasonal wetlands that are often dry. So it might be very important, even central, on a human path to discern where in this created gender distinction one belongs. But it would not follow that there were only two places one could be. There is an important omission here, however. The passage does not treat ‘male and female’ in the same way as ‘dark and light’ or ‘dry and wet’. Genesis is emphasizing that in this polarity male and female come together for procreation and God blesses this in the very next verse: ‘Be fruitful and multiply’. This does not mean that the division into male and female is only for procreation, but it is at least for this. What is the significance of this point for our question about gender transition? The passage is not teaching about gender differences that are distinct from reproduction. We now have the capacity to detach some of the secondary sexual characteristics from reproduction in a way that Genesis does not envisage. But the argument from silence is a weak one. We should not put much weight on the thought: Genesis does not mention these possibilities and therefore they are forbidden. The same structure of response is appropriate when considering the language in Genesis 2: 18 about the woman being a ‘helper’. The text reads: ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” ’ However this difficult term ‘helper’ is to be interpreted, it surely does not refer to the secondary sexual characteristics we have been considering in relation to gender transition. The woman is not a helper because of singing in a high register, the location of hair, etc. In fact, the context is stressing similarity rather than difference. We have to avoid trying to make Scripture speak where it does not.60 The significance of this point is that these chapters of Genesis do not license us to say that the Holy Spirit could not guide a person through gender transition. 59  One place to see this reading is Justin Sabia-­Tanis, ‘Wholly Creative: God’s Intention for Gender Diversity’, in Understanding Transgender Identities, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 195–222. 60  One reader of the manuscript for the press urged consideration of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si, paragraph 155, about the need to accept our bodies ‘as God’s gifts’, rather than seeing them as something over which we can ‘enjoy absolute power’. But having agreed that our bodies are God’s gifts, we then have to discern which features of those bodies we may change. Certainly we do not ‘enjoy absolute power’ here, or anywhere else for that matter. We have to make our decisions guided by the Spirit, and this is the topic of section  3.8. But the claim of the present section is that we do not know in advance from Scripture that any decision for gender transition is precluded.

Is There Only One Normative Trajectory?  83 There are functions of gender that are not covered by these passages. Thus it is wrong to say that a man or woman who is not fertile has thereby lost all point in being gendered.61 Closing off one way of using the body can open up others. With all three distinctions (light/dark, dry/wet, and male/female) there may be grey areas, and with the third there is also a teleology which includes at least reproduction; but this teleology should not be taken to limit how the Spirit can guide with respect to the use of gender outside reproduction. This is true for believers and non-­believers alike. If there is a general work of the Spirit in counselling and guiding human life, these passages should not be used to limit how the Spirit can carry out this work in connection with gender transition. We can now raise two questions about the path God has for us with respect to gender and then go on to the destination. The first question about the path is whether there is only one possible trajectory for each human being or whether the trajectory can change. The second is whether it can change by the human being’s choice or whether it is, in contrast, entirely God’s selection and God’s implementation. Put differently, does God give our choices purchase over the trajectory that is the subject of God’s story of each of our lives? Finally, with respect to the eschato­logic­al destination, the question is whether gender is part of it, and we will look at the hints we get of the destination in the lives of those who have progressed far in the process of sanctification. The next three sections of this chapter will take up these three questions in that order.

3.7  Is There Only One Normative Trajectory? The first question is whether there is just one trajectory possible for each individual human being. The answer is no. But we can start with a story written for children 160 years ago that answers the question with a ‘yes’. The story is called The Gold Thread, and it is by Norman Macleod, originally published in 1861.62 The story is about a young prince, Eric, who is told by his father that he has to keep his hand at all times on a gold thread that is invisible to all except him and that it will guide him back home if he gets lost. Alas, he is disobedient, and leaves the thread in order to ‘chase butterflies and gather wild berries and amuse himself ’, and gets lost in a dark forest, and ends up imprisoned by a robber chief. Because he repents, he is given a second chance and a beautiful lady tells him that his father has given her the gold thread which Eric lost, and has bidden her,

61  See Miroslav Volf, ‘The Gift of Infertility: From Despair to Celebration’, The Christian Century, 14 June 2005, 33. 62 Norman Macleod, The Gold Thread (London: H.  R.  Allenson, 1906), originally published in 1861.

84 Gender remind you with his warm love that if you keep hold of it, and follow it wherever it leads, you are sure to come to him at sunset, but if you let it go, you may wander on in this dark forest till you die, or are again taken prisoner by robbers. Know, also, that there is no other possible way of saving you, but by following the gold thread.63

Eric then kneels down to pray, and when he gets up, ‘there was no one there but himself; but he saw an old grey cross, and a GOLD THREAD was tied to it, and passed away, away, shining through the woods.’ He follows the thread and has many adventures that take him into dangers and through them. Finally it leads to a door. As he reached the door, he saw the thread tied to a golden knocker, shaped like the old cross in the forest. Inscribed over the door were the words, ‘He that persevereth to the end shall be saved.’ And on the knocker, ‘Knock, and it shall be opened.’ He seized the knocker, and the moment it fell, the thread broke and vanished like a flash of light.64

But even if we agree that the cross is necessary for salvation, the idea of a single thread to this door does not seem true to experience. Especially as one gets older, and one sees one’s life more as a whole, the truth seems rather to be that there were other ways the life might have gone well. There seem to be other possible threads. One sees that it was entirely contingent that one chose to take such and such a job, and that one therefore met the person who would become one’s spouse, and so on. Kierkegaard makes this point in Either/Or volume 1 under the pseudonym ‘A’ (the aesthete), who discusses the importance of ‘the occasion’ in his theatrical review entitled ‘The First Love’. ‘The occasion is always the accidental’, he writes, ‘and the prodigious paradox is that the accidental is absolutely just as ­necessary as the ne­ces­sary. . . . The eternal being flouts mankind by having something so insignificant and inferior, something people are almost ashamed to talk about in polite society, be absolutely part of it all.’65 In Kierkegaard the stages of life have a directionality, and what the aesthete A here describes mockingly as the eternal being ‘flouting’ humankind, is recognized by the person of faith (under the ­pseudonym ‘Anticlimacus’) as the activity of providence. We are here back with the goal mentioned earlier from Anticlimacus, that ‘the self rests transparently in the power that established it.’66 But to say that one’s situation is under the supervision of providence is not to deny that it is contingent. God does not have to act towards us in the person of the Holy Spirit in the way God does in fact act. Suppose, then, that we discover in ourselves a set of preferences framed in a narrative about a 63 MacLeod, The Gold Thread, 44, 49–50. 65 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, 234, 237–8.

64 MacLeod, The Gold Thread, 96. 66 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 14.

Can We Change the Trajectory?  85 gender trajectory in the way described earlier in this chapter. There is nothing here to require that the set had to be that way. Moreover, how we respond to these preferences may vary, and we may discover that the preferences themselves change. Given that the social pictures outside us are constantly changing, with increasing speed, we can ask ourselves the intriguing question: How would I have seen my gender and what choices would I have made if I had been born now? The Gold Thread is wrong, then, to suppose there is only one possible thread. But for a person of faith the story is right about three important things. The first is that there is a good way, as described earlier, ‘to get from here to there’. We do not have to despair that there is no way for us, given where we are now, to live in a way that takes us to a destination that fulfils us and makes us whole. Thomas did at one point reach this kind of despair, and many trans people have taken their own lives. The second thing is that God knows us better than we know ourselves, and loves us more than we love ourselves, and so we can trust that the path we are given fits us and fits who God wants us to become. This means that even with our tendency to self-­deception, to the limited extent we see that a path fits who we are and who we are to become, that is a sign that it is part of God’s story for us. The third thing is that following this way will likely require difficult obedience and may well require suffering. The gold thread is attached to the cross both in the middle and at the end. Why is this? It is because human power exercises itself on human bodies, and human power is corrupt. Here this chapter is committed, like Kant, to the doctrine of radical evil, and this evil is just as present in the way we treat each other through gender as it is in all our other dealings with each other. The sin will be present not only in how we are treated by others but in how we treat ourselves. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin, and another role is to comfort us when we fall victim to the sin of others.67

3.8  Can We Change the Trajectory? The second theological question is whether God gives our choices purchase over the trajectory that is the subject of God’s story of each of our lives. Here we are stuck in one of the great theological mysteries, and it would be foolish to claim to be able to see our way out of it. What is the relation between our freedom and God’s sovereignty? Whatever position we take about this, we are going to have difficulty explaining either freedom or sin. One good option is a theological compatibilist position modified by a refusal to accept the doctrine of irresistible grace.68 According to this position, God’s agency and our own are not in competition with each other, but it is in God’s sustaining power that we exercise our 67  John 16: 5–15 and 14: 16–21.

68  See Hare, God’s Command, 157–66.

86 Gender freedom of choice. We should distinguish here as the Christian scholastics did, and in different terms their Muslim predecessors, between God’s ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’ will.69 When Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the Garden of Eden they were disobeying God’s antecedent will which God expressed to them in the prohibition on eating it, but their decision was absorbed into God’s consequent will, which underlies everything that happens in the universe. God then brings everything, even our disobedience, to eventual good. This position holds that it is possible for us to disobey, and to say ‘no’ to God’s command and God’s call. If we do, we are frustrating God’s antecedent will for our lives. Does this mean that there is then no good way for us to get ‘from here to there’? Here is another thing that The Gold Thread gets right. There is a second chance. If there is a second chance, is that for a lesser good? Again, we should say that we just do not know. In the human situations that are analogous to this one, it is not always the case that the second chance is a second-­best chance. For example, I can fail in my first attempt to get married (because my beloved turns me down) and the second chance can be for a marriage that is better than the first one would have been. But in the possibilities that God offers to us, we do not know God’s will well enough to make this kind of judgement. Some may think that every divine call must be to what would produce the largest amount of good. But we need to distinguish here between what is best to do if called and what is the best thing to which to be called. There is reason to be sceptical that we know enough about God’s will to know that God is a maximizer of our individual or collective interest.70 Perhaps there is a large number of equally good possibilities, or perhaps the goods are incommensurable so that the notion of ‘equal goodness’ becomes problematic. But nonetheless if called by God to some form of life, it is best to follow the call, if I can be reasonably sure it is from God. But how can I be rea­son­ ably sure? To get back to gender, consider the case of someone in the benighted past centuries who did not have available the current variety of gender realizations that surgery and hormones now give us, and suppose that person had preferences that we would now recognize as preferences to be a trans male. Were such people unable to lead good human lives, or did they find ways to successfully compensate? There has been a large variety over human history of ways in which such preferences have found realization. We can cooperate with God’s Spirit, but what actions result from that cooperation can vary widely. God’s Command used the metaphor of a piano duet for four hands, where I am invited to play with a professional, a master of her instrument. I find myself swept away by the power of her playing and play much better than I normally do. Nonetheless, she does not play 69  See Hare, God’s Command, 203–12. 70  I have been persuaded here by Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 320–1 and elsewhere.

Can We Change the Trajectory?  87 all four hands. This is a metaphor for what Kant calls concursus, where God and we work together in some way beyond our understanding.71 If we make our gender decisions listening to the Spirit (as it were, playing our lives as a duet), we can make good decisions and they can be very different from one person and one social context to another. As Kierkegaard puts it in Works of Love, Indeed, if it were not so that one human being, honest, upright, respectable, God-­fearing, can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does who is also honest, upright, respectable, God-­fearing, then the God-­relationship would not essentially exist, would not exist in its deepest meaning.72

This view can seem to be completely open-­ended, as though bringing in the Spirit made no difference to the content of the decision. But it is not so. The Spirit brings the whole character of God, and this constrains what we can take to be a divine communication. God’s Command outlined five features of the phenomenology of receiving a communication from the Spirit in the form of a command.73 The present paragraph is a brief summary of this discussion, but the earlier book gives a fuller account of these constraints. These five features are additional to the constraints that come from the requirement to be consistent with the sacred texts and from the requirement to consider the wisdom of the church, both the wise people we know now and the wise people of the past in the discernments they have made. The first feature of the phenomenology is that the command is heard with a distinctness and persistence that separates it from the normal blur or cacophony of evaluative impressions. This is tricky, because we can and often do ‘plug wax into our ears’.74 But to the extent we are paying attention, the command is clear and distinct. The experience here can be ‘extraordinary’, as in the ‘auditions’ that some saints have claimed to receive with auditory sensation; or (much more frequently) it can be an ‘ordinary’ part of our reflection that we then recognize as God speaking to us. The ordinary case is not simply going through some ethical decision procedure such as Kant’s Categorical Imperative test, and then attributing the resulting prescription to God because we think God has authorized the pro­ced­ ure. The command is also heard as persistent and not easily shaken, resisting our 71 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, trans. M.  Campbell Smith (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1903) (henceforth PP) 8: 362. See Hare, God’s Command, 158f. 72  Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230. 73 Hare, God’s Command, 173–83, which acknowledges that I discovered all five features in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, ed. and trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, 14 volumes (London: T & T Clark, 2009) (henceforth CD). 74  This is Martin Buber’s phrase in I and Thou (1923), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 182.

88 Gender attempts to ignore it. The second feature of the phenomenology is that the command presents itself as having an external origin, outside ourselves. This is part of why it seems distinct from the rest of our reflection. This does not show that it has such an origin, but it sounds or feels as though it does. The third feature is that the command comes in a voice that is increasingly familiar; we come to recognize it as we might pick out a face we love from the crowd. The first time we hear it, it may be strange, as Samuel thought it was Eli calling, not God.75 But the recipient obeys the command on one occasion, even if she is not given the reason for it, and she subsequently sees the fruit of this obedience and comes to recognize and value the source. This means that the proper reception and recognition of divine command standardly requires practice, and indeed a life of discipline. The fourth feature is that the command is perceived as having authority.76 Barth says, ‘We subordinate ourselves to what [God] wills and orders.’77 This is the evaluative correlate of the persistence described in relation to the first feature. Persistence is a matter of power; the ‘voice’ is not easily ignored. But this might be true of some annoying jingle that we cannot get out of our heads. Authority is a matter of perceiving the voice as deserving to be attended to, whether we in fact attend to it or not. The fifth and most important feature is that the command is perceived as coming from a loving source. This is the essential addition Robert  M.  Adams makes to his previous divine command theory.78 The experience of receiving the command is an experience of being loved, even if the command is hard. Barth says that ‘the Gospel itself has the form and fashion of the Law’; God’s love issues in command.79 Because the command is perceived as coming from love, it gives us power to do what is commanded, as Jesus’s command to Peter gave him the power to get out of the boat and start walking on the water.80 There is an apparent circularity in this description of the five features. ‘Of course’, the objector may say, ‘if you think you are under the rule of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being who has legislative, executive and judicial authority, you will experience in a certain way what you take to be “being commanded”; but this is only because you have built this theology into your construction of the experience.’ The claim of the believer, however, is not that the phenomenology proves that God exists; she can concede that this would be viciously circular. Her claim is that there are constraints from within the experience, as understood within the tradition, that enable her to discern when she is being commanded and when she is not. This means that the constraints will be less vivid to someone who is not self-­consciously in the tradition. This book has

75  1 Samuel 3: 4–5. 76  See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), 371, ‘[The experiences] carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime’. 77 Barth, CD II/2. 657. 78 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 274–5. 79 Barth, CD II/2. 511. 80  Matthew 14: 28.

Is Gender Eschatological?  89 been talking often about the general work of the Spirit beyond the church, and we should ask whether these five constraints can operate outside this limit. The answer is that they can, but they will be harder to see. A person’s internal prescriptions can still be more and less clear, can seem to come from outside, can be increasingly familiar, can have apparent authority, and can seem to be from a loving source, whether or not she believes in God. What is important, however, for the question of the present section is our own role in changing the normative trajectory of our lives and the kind of ‘God-­relationship’ implied by that role, whether that relationship is acknowledged or not. What is implied is a non-­ competitive agency in which choices for transition can be made together with the Spirit. The point of describing the phenomenology is to show what kind of difference it might make to the experience of these choices if they are made with the Spirit in this way.

3.9  Is Gender Eschatological? Finally, we can ask whether gender is a proper part of our destination, and if so, is it an important or central part? Sarah Coakley distinguishes two views on this from the tradition, the view she attributes to Gregory of Nyssa and the view she attributes to Augustine.81 The contrast can be seen in how the two authors see the relation between the two stories about the initial creation of human beings that we find in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The relevant passages were already quoted in section 3.6. Gregory of Nyssa suggests in his treatise on The Making of Humanity chapters 16–17 that we see Genesis 1 as describing two different acts of God, first the creation of a humanity that is not differentiated into male and female and then the differentiation. Gregory appeals here to Galatians 3: 28, which was quoted at the beginning of this chapter, ‘In Christ [not] male and female’. At the general resurrection, Gregory says (in his oration On Those who have Fallen Asleep) that the process will be reversed, and we will again end up without the differentiation. Coakley says, however, that Gregory holds that we all then become ‘quasi-­female’ in our relation to God. By contrast, Augustine takes Genesis 1: 27 as a one-­stage event, and man and woman are thus from the very beginning physically different. Moreover, from the very beginning, Augustine seems to say, there is an asymmetrical dependence relation. He is here responding to I Corinthians 11: 7, ‘the woman is the glory of the man’, though he also quotes the same passage in Galatians. Augustine writes, in a way we can surely no longer accept,

81 Coakley, GSS 273–95.

90 Gender The solution lies . . . [in that] the woman together with the husband is the image of God. . . . When she is assigned as a help-­mate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God; but as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.82

For Augustine, ‘we shall still be physically (and recognizably) men and women at the end times, eschatologically.’83 Someone who is not a patristics scholar should not claim competence to judge whether Coakley has got Gregory and Augustine right. But if we ask her where she stands in this dispute, it is hard to agree with her. The key is her analysis of gender in her first chapter as ‘differentiated relational embodied being’.84 It is because of this analysis that she can say, approving Gregory as she understands him, ‘Yet even after death we shall still remain, on his vision of ongoing ascetical transformation, questing, longing, desiring, and – in the elusive sense discussed in Chapter  1—thus still “gendered” in relation to God, even despite the loss therein of “sexed” differentiation.’85 The idea that we are ‘quasi-­female’ because we are ‘questing, longing, and desiring’ should strike us as problematic in the same way that Coakley finds it problematic that Gregory thinks his elder sister Macrina displays ‘male’ qualities in the energy of her desire for God. Coakley says, ‘Here Gregory is using “male” to indicate a particular cultural and philosophical value.’86 But is not the association of longing, etc., with femaleness also a particular cultural value? Coakley does not mean to be using the conventional social categories. But simply putting scare quotes around ‘quasi-­female’ does not give us a clear estimate of our distance from these categories. It is promising to look, as she does, at ascetical practice to see what, if anything, gender might mean ‘in Christ’. This is promising if we grant the premise that we get more like Christ as we progress in the spiritual life. The difficulty is that it is hard to discern which aspects of the experience we should take to be, so to speak, eschatological forerunners or foretastes. Richard Crashaw, the seventeenth-­century religious poet to whom we will return in a moment, has these lines in defence of hope (against the attack by Abraham Cowley, who complains that hope is always experience deferred): Sweet hope! kind cheat! fair fallacy by thee We are not WHERE nor What we be, but WHAT & WHERE we would be. Thus art thou

82 Augustine, De Trinitate, XII, 7, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. II, ed. Whitney J. Oates, trans. A. W. Haddan (New York: Random House, 1948). 83 Coakley, GSS 290. 84 Coakley, GSS 54, 58. 85 Coakley, GSS 283–4. 86  Coakley, GSS 283.

Is Gender Eschatological?  91 Our absent PRESENCE, and our future NOW. Faith’s filter! Nurse of fair desire! Fear’s antidote! A wise & well-­stay’d fire! . . . True hope’s a glorious hunter & her chase, The God of nature in the fields of grace.87

Here he says that hope’s quest is to give us in these earth-­fields of grace the nourishment (hope is nurse) and warmth (hope is fire) we need to persevere through our hunger and fear. But to receive these, we need to avoid identifying where and what we are, and where and what we will eventually be, and we need to do this even in what Teresa of Avila calls (in Sir Tobie’s translation) her ‘rapts’. Teresa of Avila is important because she is a practitioner of the spiritual dis­cip­ lines who expresses the nature of her experience in strongly but not explicitly gendered language. This is indeed just what makes Sir Tobie so nervous, no doubt because of the analogy between her description and a sexual encounter. He warns us in a long introduction not to be scandalized. But the question is whether we should take her description as an indication that gender will be any part of our eventual destination. One famous passage is from chapter 29 of The Flaming Heart, and this vision is what Bernini sculpts memorably in the Cornaro chapel in S.  Maria della Victoria in Rome in 1645–52 (the same period as Sir Tobie’s translation and Richard Crashaw’s poems; Teresa was canonized in 1622). Teresa describes the seraph who appears to her, unusually, corporeally, but who was ‘not great; but rather little’, with a long Dart of gold in his hand; and at the end of the iron below, methought, there was a little fire; and I conceived, that he thrust it, some severall times, through my verie Hart, after such a manner, as that it passed the verie inwards, of my Bowells; and when he drew it back, methought it carried away, as much, as it had touched within me; and left all that, which remained, wholy inflamed with a great love of Almightie God. The pain of it, was so excessive, that it forced me to utter those groanes; and the sauvitie, which that extremitie of paine gave, was also so very excessive, that there was no desiring at all, to be ridd of it; nor can the Soule then, receave anie contentment at all, in lesse, then God Almightie himself.88

To make progress with the question about gender, here is an analogy, which will be in some respects inadequate. Suppose my wife develops multiple myeloma, 87 Richard Crashaw, ‘M.  Crashaw’s Answer for Hope’, Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris: Peter Targa, 1652), 130–1. In this edition he spells himself ‘Crashawe’, and this is important for him because the first poem in the book makes an anagram of his name with ‘He Was Car’ (his friend Thomas Car, the painter). 88  Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart, 420.

92 Gender and after we receive the diagnosis, I am beside myself. I have an intense love for her earthly life, her fragile body, and an intense desire that she suffer no more pain. Perhaps I start to find it difficult to breathe. But I can experience Christ’s presence in the midst of this and a feeling I describe to myself as ‘warm cream’ settling me down. Does any of this mean that these aspects of my experience are eschatological foretastes? On the other hand, if the answer is no, that does not mean that there is anything second-­rate about these aspects. Perhaps at moments of intense emotion our bodies become especially present to us, and this can change even the experience of the presence of Christ. We need to preserve a difficult modesty about aspects even of our religious experience that are highly important to us; they may yet be part of what passes away. There is another possibility for understanding Teresa, and here we come back to Richard Crashaw. He has three poems about her, the first written as an Anglican priest, the second acknowledging the errors of Protestantism, and the third en­titled ‘THE FLAMING HEART: UPON THE BOOK AND Picture of the seraphical saint TERESA, (AS SHE IS USUALLY Expressed with a SERAPHIM biside her.)’. The first poem is a hymn to Teresa, and its long title ends ‘A WOMAN for Angelicall height of speculation, for Masculine courage of performance, more than a woman. WHO Yet a child out ran maturity, and durst plot a Matyrdome’.89 The gendering here is reminiscent of Gregory’s praise of Macrina, mentioned earl­ier, where Coakley worried about a cultural overlay in the claim that the subject is more than woman. But we should focus on the third poem, because here we get something further; a transgendering. Crashaw rebukes the painter (Car) who has pictured the saint and the seraph in a conventionally gendered way: Readers, be rul’d by me; & make Here a well-­plac’t & wise mistake. You must transpose the picture quite, And spell it wrong to read it right; Read HIM for her, & her for him; And call the SAINT the SERAPHIM. Painter, what didst thou understand To put her dart into his hand! See, even the years and size of him Showes this the mother SERAPHIM. This is the mistresse flame; & duteous he Her happy fire-­works, here comes down to see.

89  Teresa ran away as a child with her brother, seeking martyrdom by trying to convert the Moors. The poem comes in Crashaw, Carmen Deo Nostro, 103.

Is Gender Eschatological?  93 The poet goes on to attribute all the great-­making properties of the Seraph to the Saint, and ends But before all, that fiery DART Had fill’d the Hand of this great HEART.

He goes on to imagine that we took all else from her, and left only her heart: Leave her that; & thou shalt leave her Not one loose shaft but love’s whole quiver, For in love’s feild was never found A nobler weapon than a WOUND. Love’s passives are his activ’st part, The wounded is the wounding heart.

In this great poem, here brutally excerpted, Crashaw makes Teresa a man (‘Read HIM for her)’. But in the end, he wants us to see that the passives and the actives are one. The wounded is also the wounding. We move in the poem beyond the differentiation. There is a statement of Jesus that appears in all the synoptic gospels, though it is marginally different in Luke, and which supports this same move beyond difference.90 Jesus is approached by the Sadducees with a trick question (a trick because they did not in fact believe in the resurrection from the dead). They say to him that according to Mosaic law a man should marry his brother’s wife when his brother dies, and they describe a woman who went through seven brothers in this way. Their question was whose wife she was at the resurrection. Jesus replies, ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry not be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.’ In that culture, sexual intercourse was supposed to be confined to marriage. Jesus is here suggesting that at the resurrection there will be no sexual intercourse, but he does not merely say this. He says we will be ‘like the angels in heaven’. The angels not only do not have sexual intercourse; they prob­ably do not have gender (though some think they may adopt the appearance of gender on some of their missions), because they are spiritual beings. But this too is beyond our knowledge. Crashaw has a short poem that makes a pithy point here: ‘I do not wish to seek for this part or that of heaven. O dear Father, give heaven, heaven to me.’91 We 90  Matthew 22: 30; Mark 12: 25; Luke 20: 35. 91  The poem is about Matthew 20: 20, where the mother of the sons of Zebedee asks for places of honour for her sons. The Latin is, ‘Coeli hanc aut illam nolo mihi quaerere partem/O coelum, coelum da (Pater alme) mihi’. Epigrammatum Sanctorum Liber (Cambridge: Ex Academiae Typographeo, 1634), and the translation is this author’s own.

94 Gender should be eager for heaven but not eager to know now what distinctions it contains. To deny the doctrine of irresistible grace is to say that it is possible to say ‘no’ to God’s call. Why might one say ‘yes’ to the gender trajectory that involves becoming a trans male, and why might one think that this could be a response to the Holy Spirit’s prompting, even without knowing that it is part of the destination? The most conspicuous reasons here are from a lack of fit between one’s preferences and the body one currently has (here someone who does not see inside the mind of a trans male needs to write tentatively). But there is also a positive side to this. When one is given a choice and can acquire a body and a way of life characteristic of at least parts of the dominant cultural picture of the ‘other’ gender, there can be a joyful sense of fit. Now self-­expression is not the same thing as identity. All the combinations are possible of thinking of oneself as X and presenting oneself as Y (where Y can = X). But for the outside observer (such as a parent), the self-­expression is a possible sign. This is easier in retrospect. Writing personally, when my wife Terry and I went back together over the photographs of our son’s childhood, we could see a pattern in his clothes preferences, bike preferences, and role-­play preferences, that made his subsequent trans decision make perfect sense. For example, he chose a blue man’s bike with a cross-­bar for his first bike, and we kept it, and he then cleaned it up and gave it with great joy to our 6-­year-­old grandson, his nephew. But seeing this at the time is much harder. My wife and I were helped by professionals who are trained to discern, and we belonged to a parents’ support group where we could tell each other our different stories. Why should we think that the choice of a trans male might be a response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit? The first thing to say is that the promptings of the Holy Spirit are not always identified by their recipients as promptings of the Holy Spirit. Especially where the world-­wide church has not acknowledged the validity of some choice, it will be difficult for someone making that choice to identify the prompting as from the Holy Spirit. But we are told that the fruit (in the singular) of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-­control.92 The singular is important because it discourages the thought that there is specialization, as with the gifts of the Spirit, as if some were called to love and others to joy and others to peace. These virtues are a sign, though not an infallible proof, that the Spirit is at work. We have to be careful here, because it is often true of the greatest saints that they are also the most aware of their failures to live lives that manifest this list of excellences. We should not say that we have only been visited by the Spirit if our lives are then continuously full of the fruit of the Spirit. Teresa of Avila is a good case in point. She is

92  Galatians 5: 22.

Is Gender Eschatological?  95 constantly grieving for her failures. She also experiences periods of what feels like God’s absence. Nonetheless, because she was also facing constant scepticism from the authorities about God’s favours to her that she recognized as ‘effects of his Spirit’, she took great pains to try to distinguish when she was meeting God and when the devil.93 For example, she distinguishes between two kinds of humility she experiences. On the one hand, there is the pain of recognizing what she has done against Almighty God; but at the same time ‘she exalts, and admires his mercie; she hath light wherewith to put self to confusion; and to praise his Divine Majestie, for vouchsafing to endure her so long.’94 On the other hand, in that other kind of Humilitie, which the Divel brings, there is no light, for anie thing, which is good; but it seems, as if God were readie, to put all the world, to fire, and sword. The Divel represents the Divine Justice to the Soule; and though he permit her to believe that God hath mercie, (for the Divel hath no such power, as to destroy her Faith) yet hath she even that, in such sort, that it is no comfort to her, at all; but rather, when she beholds God’s great mercie, he makes it serve her, for so much the greater torment, because she seems to have been obliged thereby, to have served Almightie God, so much the more.

The result of this second kind of humility is in fact dryness and anger, so much ‘that it seems to me, that I could even eate folkes up’.95 So Teresa does not claim that God’s favours to her mean that she always and continuously manifests the fruit of the Spirit. She also recognizes that the terms in which this fruit is described are ambiguous. The devil can give us his versions of humility, but also of the Spirit’s other fruit. But nonetheless she thinks that the ‘effect of [God’s] Spirit’ has a recognizable effect in her life that can be distinguished from the effect of the work of the devil. We will return to the topic of the fruit of the Spirit in Chapter 6. To end personally again, my wife Terry and I have observed in our trans male son what we take to be the fruit of the Holy Spirit. It is not that he is always loving or joyful or self-­controlled. But nonetheless there is a new character after his transition, an ability to care for other people in a new way and to pay attention to the beauty of the world around him. His own expression of this change is more Buddhist than it is Christian. But it is noticeable. It is the kind of change we associate with effects of God’s Spirit. My wife and I have been blessed by his care for us.

93  Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart, 426. 95  Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart, 435.

94  Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart, 430.

4 Love of Country Introduction This chapter moves us to the consideration of a different kind of unity, namely unity between people.1 It takes as its example the unity between the citizens of a country. This unity is based in a preferential love, a love for one’s country, and this immediately raises the question about the moral permissibility of such preferential loves from the standpoint of the Kantian ethical theory outlined in Chapter 1. How can a love of one’s country be consistent with the love of humanity at large? Should we not be cosmopolitans, citizens (politai) of the cosmos? The chapter is an attempt to locate in Kant’s work one source of the well-­known tension within liberal democracies between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, and then to describe a source in the same philosopher’s moral theology for the beginning of a solution to this tension.2 In particular, we will look at Kant’s view of the working of providence in the directing of nations. The chapter will discuss some recent attempts to defend cosmopolitanism without Kant’s moral theology. We will then propose a way to see the consistency of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in theory, through the Scotist notion of a perfection, and we will make use of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit to see how this consistency might be worked out in our practical lives. The first four sections of the chapter are about the problem of particularity, the problem of how to locate love of the particular within a universal love. This is a problem that affects Kant’s moral philosophy more broadly, and it has a significant impact on his treatment of the love that a citizen has for her particular country. Kant has a primary role historically in establishing the moral framework of 1  Some of the material in this chapter has already appeared in an article, John E. Hare, ‘Patriotism and Moral Theology’, Daedalus, 149/3 (2020), 201–14. 2  There is a large literature on the relation between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. One recent collection of sources is Claudia Schumann’s ‘Which Love of Country? Tensions, Questions and Contexts for Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Education’, Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 50/2 (2016), 261–71. She is responding to a shift in Martha Nussbaum’s position. Nussbaum had argued for a replacement of patriotism by cosmopolitanism, in ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. J. Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 3–17. More recently Nussbaum has argued for a reconciliation, in ‘Towards a Globally Sensitive Patriotism’, Daedalus, 137/3 (2008), 78–93. An excellent earlier collection of sources is Pauline Kleingeld, ‘Kantian Patriotism’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29/4 (2000), 313–41, and I will be making use of some of her distinctions. But she does not acknowledge the centrality of Kant’s moral theology.

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0004

Kant ’ s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity  97 cosmopolitanism that is still motivating its adherents. The chapter will argue that this moral framework is defective in one central respect, and it will attempt to illustrate empirically the consequences of this defect in the actual attempts to implement a cosmopolitan agenda. But the chapter is not here arguing against this cosmopolitan agenda. The question is how to balance this proper commitment with the equally proper preferential commitment to the well-­being of our fellow-­citizens in our own polis. Contrary to the list of human goods given by Jim Griffin, as described in Chapter 1, our good as citizens is one of the basic goods in a good human life, but it is only one of those goods and it needs to be balanced against our responsibilities to the rest of the world. The following sections 4.5 and 4.6 of the chapter look at some resources provided by Kant’s moral theology as he applies it to our political lives. Contemporary cosmo­pol­itans who have embraced Kant’s moral and political theory often do not know about his moral theology, and they do not know how central a role it plays in his overall system. Or sometimes they do know about it, but they are embarrassed by it because they are not themselves theists, and they try to develop a Kantian theory without the theology. But we should expect that when a central component of a system is removed, incoherence will result, and this is what we in fact find with contemporary cosmopolitanism. We will look at two recent ex­amples in order to illustrate this. The final two sections of the chapter explore the notion of patriotism as a ­‘perfection’ of love of humanity, and it uses the resources of a theology of the Holy Spirit to produce a richer picture of our obligations and of the resources available to meet those obligations. Sometimes it seems as though we have a crude choice in our current cultural situation between a blood-­and-­soil nationalism and a bloodless procedural liberalism that has nothing to say about our primary loves at all but only speaks to fairness in the adjudication between them. The richer picture gives us the prospect of a more generous third option. There is a general (as opposed to a special) work of the Spirit in the world, to show it about sin and righteousness and judgement, and then to work towards its transformation into a place where righteousness is at home.3

4.1  Kant’s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity Kant proposed as the supreme principle of morality what he called a ‘Categorical Imperative’ and he gave various formulas or formulations of this.4 Chapter  1 3  John 16: 8 and 2 Peter 3: 13. 4  I wrote about some of these formulations in John  E.  Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2009), 145–56. One elaborate discussion is Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011). But he interprets the first formula, the formula of universal law, to ask ‘What if everyone did this?’, and he shows that this question gives the wrong answer in many cases.

98  Love of Country ­ iscussed two of these and gave an interpretation of them that derives from d H.  J.  Paton, from whom R.  M.  Hare learnt it as an undergraduate.5 The first ­formula, the formula of universal law, is ‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.’6 The second formula is ‘So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.’7 The picture of moral obligation given in these two formulas is admirable in many ways, but it faces us with the problem of particularity. A defensible patriotism will require a modification of the first formula. Strictly, for a maxim to prescribe love for a country morally would require, by universalizability, that I be able to eliminate the singular reference to that country (and so that region of space and time). The name for a country is a singular term, making singular reference. If I say, for example, that all Canadians are virtuous, I am making reference to a particular region of space and time in which Canadians live. Kant holds that motivation is either by self-­indexed inclination or by universal moral principle, but that is a false dichotomy. We need an intermediate category of maxims that are not universal (since they contain ineliminable reference to an individual), but that are indexed not to the self but to some other individual.8 Suppose I judge that I ought to help my friend Elizabeth get rid of the bat in her house (she is terrified of bats). I may not be able to eliminate reference to her even in principle from the maxim of my action, because my obligation comes out of the particular texture of our relationship and its history, and the reason for my action that is part of the maxim may not be able to abstract universal properties that capture this history. Sometimes the right answer to a philosopher who keeps asking ‘Why are you helping Elizabeth?’ is ‘Because she is Elizabeth.’ This is not only a terminological question, whether to call a principle ‘moral’ if it contains ineliminable reference to Elizabeth. We should sometimes have the highest kind of admiration (what Kant calls ‘esteem’) for a person who acts on such a principle.9

For example, on this test I would not be able to say that it was morally permitted to become a doctor, because it would be disastrous if everyone did this. My own interpretation is different and is not liable to this objection. I return to Parfit later in this chapter. 5  See H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (Tiptree: Anchor Press, 1946), 133–64; and R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 107–16. 6  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (henceforth Gl), 6: 421. 7  Gl 4: 429. 8  There is the same dichotomy in Scotus, who claims that every motivation is either by the affection for justice or the affection for advantage. See John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan  B.  Wolter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), III, suppl. dist. 46, 153–4. 9  See Lawrence Blum, ‘Moral Perception and Particularity’, Ethics, 101/4 (1991), 701–25. I have discussed this in John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 144–59.

Kant ’ s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity  99 One way to put this point is that Kant’s two formulas can come apart on a very natural interpretation of the second formula, the formula of humanity.10 When I care for a person as an end in herself, or for her own sake, it is sometimes natural to say that I make her ends my ends just because they are her ends. But there is no necessity in this statement that I be able to express my obligation to her in terms that exclude any reference to her. One way to construe one kind of practical love for another person is that the object of my love is the individual essence of the person, which may not be accessible to my understanding, but which is still the object of my loving. ‘Practical love’ in Kant’s phrase is love that is not merely a matter of feeling, but carries internally a recognition that I have obligations or duties towards the person I love.11 He has another overstrict dichotomy between inclination and reason, and for him any sentiment attached to a particular person is ‘pathological love’ rather than practical love. But we should allow that the highest kind of relation to another person can involve feeling as well as obligation where these two cannot and do not need to be disentangled, and a person may not be able to express his obligations to his friend and the maxims that embody those obligations in terms that eliminate all singular reference to her. We should allow that this kind of relation can be a kind of ‘practical love’, even though this departs from Kant’s usage. A practical lover may not be able to will her maxim as a universal law, and so she will fail the test of the first formula of the Categorical Imperative. There will, however, usually be obligations that are fully universal that accompany particular practical love of this kind, even though the practical love is not reducible to them. For example, my particular obligation to Elizabeth is accompanied by my universal obligation to help my friends who have invasive animals in their houses. It is important that there are both particular and universal obligations in play, and the relation between them will be important for the rest of the chapter. Sometimes the object of my practical love of a particular person is her individual essence, or haecceity. We can now use Scotus’s idea that the haecceity is a perfection of the common nature, just as the common specific nature ‘human’ is a perfection of the common generic nature ‘animal’. What does it mean to say that A is a perfection of B? It means that A is good and B is good, and A is better than B, and A is better than B in respect of just the kind of goodness that makes B good. Humanity and bovinity are both perfections of animality because each of the species forms ‘human’ and ‘bovine’ has a greater unity that gives greater determinacy to the common generic nature. They do better than animality just 10  I am not claiming that this is Kant’s interpretation. 11 I am taking the term ‘practical love’ from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), (henceforth KpV) 5: 83. I have discussed this in John  E.  Hare, ‘Kant on Practical and Pathological Love’ in Love and Christian Ethics, ed. Frederick V. Simmons with Brian C. Sorrells (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 75–90.

100  Love of Country what animality does well. But this is true even more of ‘Socrateity’ and ‘Beulahhood’, the individual essences of Socrates the human and Beulah the cow. Chapter 1 section 1.2 claimed that the central goodness of humans lies in their destination as co-­lovers of God, and the individual essence of a particular human is a perfection of this goodness because it is a love of God developed uniquely and in detail through that human’s life. It would not make sense to violate some obligation I have to Socrates’s humanity in the name of Socrateity, because Socrates is essentially human even though his individual essence is not reducible to his humanity. There is a practical contradiction in loving a person, for example Elizabeth, with a practical love that requires helping her with the bat and then not helping another person who is also a friend with an invasive animal in her house. But even though this is a contradiction, this does not mean that my obligation to help Elizabeth is reducible to my obligation to help any friend in this sort of difficulty. We will apply this thought to the love of a country in section  4.7, even though countries do not have individual essences in the way people do. One might object that all universal obligations have to be instantiated in practice, so that Kant’s first formula already envisages obligations to particular people, such as Elizabeth. But the question is whether I can reduce the maxim that expresses my obligation, capturing it in the universal terms that I can indeed abstract from my relation to her. Is my obligation just to any human who is a friend and who is afraid of bats? The particularist objection to Kant is that there are some obligations that are not reducible in this way. If what is loved is the haecceity, then it is pointless to say that the obligation is to anyone who has the haecceity, because there could not be, by definition, more than one. The distinction between universal and particular is different from the distinction between general and specific.12 A maxim giving the reason for an action can be highly specific, e.g. ‘to anyone who is a friend and who is afraid of bats’, but still not particular, because it is expressed in entirely universal terms. In the same way a maxim can be highly general but not universal, for example ‘Love all Canadians’.

4.2  Love of One’s Country This point about false dichotomy can be made about my love for a country; this does not have to be either based solely on universal characteristics or merely a form of love of myself. The name for a country is a singular term. If I say that all Canadians are virtuous, I am still making reference to a particular region of space and time, even though there are many Canadians. This chapter is treating patriotism as a preferential love for one’s fellow-­citizens that issues in a sense of

12  R. M. Hare drew this distinction in Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) 41.

Love of One ’ s Country  101 obligation to them that is more demanding than one’s obligations to human beings in general. Love for one’s country is not only this preferential obligation to fellow-­citizens. We will look at some of the larger context in section  4.7. For example, I can love the land, and I can love the culture in which I was raised, and I can love the history of this land and its people.13 This last point (about the history) is like my love for my friend Elizabeth, which arises out of the texture and history of the relationship between us. When we look in Chapter  6 at Philip Gorski’s thoughts about covenant, we will see that he emphasizes that the as­pir­ ations of countries are embodied in stories about their past.14 Nonetheless most of the argument in the present chapter is about the sense of a specially demanding obligation to fellow-­citizens. Love for a country (whether it is because of universal properties possessed by that country or because of some singular property that it alone can possess) can take two different forms. Patriotism, or love for one’s country, is standardly a mixture of both forms. The first form is love for the country in itself. I can love my country without any reference, even implicit reference, to myself being a citizen of it. Or I can love my country because it is my country. Consider by way of ana­ logy that I can decide, when watching two sports teams play a match on television, that I will support one of the teams because it makes the game more interesting to watch. It is for the moment my team, but I do not care at all about what happens to the team after I have finished watching. On the other hand, I can cheer for the team because of its merits independently of my attachment. We will return to this distinction in section 4.3 and make a further modification. One way to think about the love of a country in itself is by analogy with the practical love for a particular person described earlier. We might try thinking of a country as having an individual indefinable essence in the same way that a person does. Duns Scotus suggests, as discussed in Chapter 1, that my individual essence (my ‘haecceity’) is a perfection of my common essence (my humanity). One basis for my love for another person would then be her individual perfection, not just something she has in common with all other human beings. By analogy, my prac­ tical love for my country and the obligations internal to that love would not be expressible in maxims that eliminate singular reference, even if (by this first kind of love) the maxims can eliminate reference to me. But there are large difficulties with this view. Countries are internally diverse and contain different cultures which are themselves constantly in flux. Even if we grant that there is a personal identity that can survive across an individual person’s life, this is harder to grant for countries. If I ask the question ‘Was England the same country after 1066?’, the 13  It is important to distinguish the preferential love for fellow-­citizens from these other forms of love for one’s country, because it is not confined by those other forms. I should not prefer only those who share my love for a particular kind of music, to use an example we discuss in section 4.7. 14  Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

102  Love of Country year of the Norman Conquest, the right answer might be ‘That is a bad question’. Perhaps England was in some ways the same and in other ways different, and there is no fact of the matter about whether it was ‘the same country’. But even if there are no individual essences of countries, I can still love my country in a way that is not reducible to universal properties or characteristics that another country could also possess (such as tall mountains and fertile plains).15 For ex­ample there is something very American about country music, and I can love its Americanness even if there is no essence of America. The particularist objection to pure Kantian morality is that even though, say, ‘Canada’ is a singular term, I  can still have a moral obligation towards or practical love for Canada even if singular reference is ineliminable. The requirement of universalizability (that I must be able to will the maxim of my action as a universal law) has to be modified. But suppose I love my country because I belong to it, or because it is my country. Now the object of my love contains essential reference to me, even if that reference is implicit and not articulated as such. Does that mean that this is no longer a morally permitted love? Here what is required is a recognition that a Kantian way of doing ethics, modified so as to remove the false dichotomy just discussed, does allow in some instances preference for oneself. Kant himself does not intend the moral agent to ignore her own interests. The formula of humanity requires an agent to treat humanity also in her own person always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. She is not merely a doormat for other people to walk on. It might seem that if she treats herself merely as one, and not as more than one, her own purposes are always likely to be morally outweighed by the competing purposes of others. But we need a recognition that rationality allows not only this kind of merely equal treatment of herself and those to whom she has a special relation, but a preference for herself and them. One way to accomplish this is to distinguish as R. M. Hare did between different levels of moral thinking.16 The critical level is the thinking of a being whom R.  M.  Hare calls ‘the archangel’, in order to avoid calling it ‘God’.17 This being knows all the relevant facts, loves all people impartially, and decides what prin­ ciples we should live by in our ordinary lives. We are not in the position of this 15  Kleingeld, ‘Kantian Patriotism’, distinguishes between three kinds of patriotism: civic patriotism, nationalist patriotism, and trait-­based patriotism. In civic patriotism, a person is committed to supporting her own country because it is just and democratic and cannot sustain that character without the support of its citizens. Nationalist patriotism is based on love for one’s own nation as necessary for a good psychological identity-­formation, and Kleingeld cites Alasdair MacIntyre as a proponent, in his ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 209–28. MacIntyre writes about being ‘doomed to rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere’. But the term ‘nationalist’ has associations that make it problematic, and we will return to this is Chapter 6, section 6.4. Trait-­based patriotism is loyalty to one’s own country because of features it possesses that could in principle be possessed by other countries. 16 Hare, Moral Thinking, 44–64. 17  R. M. Hare sometimes acknowledges that he is writing about God. See Moral Thinking, 34, 44, and 99, ‘and of course God’.

Love of One ’ s Country  103 being, but sometimes we try to approximate it. The intuitive level is the level of our everyday moral thinking, when we do not have enough time or information or calm or practical love to think out what principles to live by, but have to rely on principles already established. At the intuitive level there can be a degree of self-­ preference which is legitimated at the critical level, because it is what the arch­ angel or God (who has supervision of the whole) would prescribe for our intuitive thinking.18 But there are two ways of doing this legitimation, and we should accept the second and not the first. The first way makes the value of the self-­ preference second-­best and instrumental; our preferential attachment to ourselves or others to whom we have special relations is permissible only as a means to the overall impartial preference satisfaction that the archangel prescribes at the critical level. The second way finds intrinsic value in the particular relations that the preference expresses; the love of the particular person is a completion or perfection of the love of humanity at large. God, on this picture, values these haec­ce­ ities and wills that they be valued by us, and so the critical level embraces them and does not reduce the love of them to a love of universals. These particular loves are not second-­best or instrumental, even though the intuitive level remains merely human and not divine. Here is a statement of a principle for moral thinking from Derek Parfit that we might accept at the intuitive level: When one of our two possible acts would make things go in some way that would be impartially better, but the other act would make things go better either for ourselves or for those to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to act in either of these ways.19

This principle allows that we can have sufficient reason both for impartiality and for self-­preference. For Henry Sidgwick, from whom Parfit takes the point, this threatens an incoherence within practical reason because it makes the choice arbitrary. The only way, he thought, to get a rational combination of enlightened self-­interest with aiming at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future even at great cost to oneself, was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things and will reward and punish in accordance with this desire.20 Sidgwick did not, however, commit himself one way or the other as to whether this was enough reason to believe in such a god. We will return to this dilemma of Sidgwick in the final section of this chapter. R.  M.  Hare’s distinction of the two levels makes use of the same move, since it 18  I have discussed this view and some problems with it, especially R. M. Hare’s acknowledged failure of such a proposal to deal with moral ideals, in John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 124–8. 19 Parfit, On What Matters, 137. He calls this a ‘wide value-­based objective view’. 20  Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hacker, 1981), 509.

104  Love of Country supposes that God (if there is a God) would approve of some self-­preference. We should grant that it is a false rigourism to deny moral permission ever to prefer at the intuitive level our own interests or the interests of those to whom we have ties of kinship, friendship, or citizenship. But we will need some way to limit this ­permission, and this will be the point of rejecting practical contradiction, as ­discussed in section 4.7. When  R.  M.  Hare made the distinction between intuitive and critical levels of  moral thinking, God or the archangel was functioning as what Kant calls a ‘regulative’ principle, as opposed to a ‘constitutive’ principle. In other words, the claim is that it is helpful to think as if there were such a being, but no existence claim is made. A constitutive principle makes an existence claim, and Kant’s view is that within the practical use of reason God functions as a constitutive principle. What difference would it make if we thought of the distinction between intuitive and critical thinking in terms of an actual God who is deciding how it is best for us to think in our ordinary lives? In particular, why would God prescribe for us preferential love for our fellow-­citizens? Perhaps God puts us in political groupings in order that we can better accomplish the love of neighbour that God commands of us. This would mean that there is a good which is accomplished in this way, which we might call ‘unity under law’. We can then think of our actions of good citizenship as specifications of love of the neighbour. When we pay our taxes, stop at red lights, vote, and get vaccinated, we are loving our neighbours. Different groupings accomplish different goods in this way. For example, there is a kind of unity that is enabled by the structure of family, but it is not the same good. What is unity under law? This is the territory of Kant’s discussion of what he calls ‘Public Right’. The law of the state enables external freedom, which is the freedom to act in the physical and social world in a way that one freely wills, with the proviso that it does not prevent the other members of the social body from also acting in the ways they freely will.21 The value of external freedom thus derives from the value of freedom of the will. If we are ‘godly and quietly governed’, and we keep the laws that enable this external freedom, we have a juridico-­civil counterpart of the kingdom of ends.22 This is how good citizenship gives us a specification of neighbour-­love, just as humanity gives us a specification of animality. In both cases we get a new unity that gives a greater determinacy. The generic command to love the neighbour needs to be given content. The suggestion of this chapter is that the duties of a citizen are a partial content, and perhaps the good given us by this content (namely external freedom) is a reason that God might prescribe a

21  Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (henceforth MdS), 6: 231. 22  This phrase comes from the prayer for Christ’s Church Militant here in Earth, in the Communion Service of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.

Cosmopolitanism and Realism  105 preferential love for fellow-­citizens and place us in political communities where we can manifest this.

4.3  Cosmopolitanism and Realism False rigourism characterizes the ‘extreme’ or ‘strong’ cosmopolitanism that denies any validity to a preference for fellow-­citizens over the needs of humans in general.23 Cosmopolitanism comes in many degrees. Robert Audi defines cosmo­ pol­itan­ism as giving ‘some degree of priority to the interests of humanity over those of nations, and the stronger the priority, the stronger the cosmopolitanism’. On this picture, extreme cosmopolitanism holds that the ‘interests of humanity come first in any conflict between them and national interests (other things equal)’. The adjective ‘strong’ is less prejudicial than ‘extreme’. Strong cosmo­pol­ itan­ism holds, according to Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, ‘that we have no right to use nationality (in contrast with friendship, or familial love) as a trigger for discretionary behavior.’24 Cosmopolitanism in policy-­making has been opposed by the so-­called ‘pol­it­ical realism’ that has been one ingredient in US foreign policy for over a hundred years.25 What is surprising is that the political realists followed Kant in their ­eth­ic­al theory no less than the cosmopolitans did. It is instructive to see where the divergence arose. In the United States the most conspicuous political realists of the twentieth century were Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau.26 The key divergence from cosmopolitanism in policy-­making arises from the realists following another key part of Kant’s picture that has not yet been mentioned in this chapter. He thinks that we are born in radical evil, under what Luther calls ‘the bondage of the will’.27 Niebuhr takes a similar view, quoting Luther and insisting that the essential characteristic of Christian love is self-­sacrifice. This means that Niebuhr refuses to call the duties of a citizen a form of neighbour-­love, as we did earlier. He restricts his definition of love to what Jesus prescribes in the Sermon 23  The term ‘extreme cosmopolitanism is from Robert Audi, see ‘Religion, Politics, and Citizenship’, in Reasons, Rights, and Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 286. 24  Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 25  See Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-­Interest in America’s Foreign Relations (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1953). 26  I have written about these two thinkers and also George Kennan at greater length in John Hare and Carey Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), especially chapter 2. See Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), and Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946). 27  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (henceforth Rel), 6: 29–39.

106  Love of Country on the Mount.28 But this leads him to conclude that it is reasonable to hope for love in a tainted form from individuals in some contexts, but it is never rea­son­ able to hope for it from groups. This is because of what Niebuhr believed about the anthropology of groups. He gives several explanations as to why, in his view, groups are inevitably selfish. Social groups, he says, are held together by emotion rather than reason. They are therefore less likely to feel moral constraints, since these cannot operate in the absence of a high level of rationality; moreover, even altruism on the part of the individual is corrupted and ‘sluiced into nationalism’, since what is outside the nation is ‘too vague to inspire devotion.’29 Here the implication is that love of the nation cannot be in itself a moral emotion, first because morality operates at the level of rationality not emotion, and second because it is only human beings as such (‘what is outside the nation’) who are the proper objects of moral respect. Niebuhr distanced himself from both natural law theory (which he thought too optimistic about our knowledge because it denies the fallenness of our reason) and utilitarianism (which he thought too optimistic about our moral nature because it tries to assert the essentially ethical nature of politics). For him, patriotism may be altruistic in comparison with individual self-­interest, but ‘from an absolute perspective [it] is simply another form of selfishness.’30 The recent pervasive use of the term ‘patriot’ by white nationalists in America has reinforced the impression that the term describes not a lover of fellow-­citizens as such, but of those who are like the user of the term in some other respects.31 But Niebuhr’s point is that cosmopolitanism in foreign policy is unrealistic about the decision processes of nation states. Morgenthau attended Niebuhr’s lectures at Harvard and called him the greatest political thinker of his generation. For Morgenthau, as for Niebuhr, morality characteristically demands complete self-­sacrifice, and we cannot achieve this politically because we are infected by the animus dominandi. He quotes Luther here, just as Niebuhr had done.32 International politics, in this view, is by def­in­ ition a struggle for power. But Niebuhr and Morgenthau are surely too di­chot­om­ ous here about emotion and reason. Groups, including national groups, can form around rational interest and not just emotion, and cosmopolitans can be emotionally devoted to their own cause, not just following bloodless reason. The realists follow Kant too closely here. It is a mistake to rule out relations to irreducibly

28  Matthew 5–7. 29 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 91. 30  Reinhold Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, ed. Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good (New York: Scribner’s, 1960), 85. The beginning of this sentence is ‘Patriotism is a high form of altruism when compared with others’, and in the last chapter of Children of Light and Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s, 1944), he is more positive. I owe this point to Justin Hawkins. 31  For example, race. Kant uses the phrase ‘patriotic government’ to mean one that is not despotic but serves the native land (regimen civitatis et patriae), MdS 6: 317. 32 Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 192–6.

Cosmopolitanism and Realism  107 particular others from generating particular moral obligations and a mistake to separate reason so harshly from emotion. In the light of the realist argument, Kant’s position seems paradoxical. He seems to start with the pessimistic premise of the realist and end with the optimistic conclusion of the cosmopolitan idealist. He starts with radical evil and ends with the conclusion that humans will in the end form a foedus pacificum (a zone of peace created by the eventual free association of liberal states). This as­pir­ ation lay behind the formation of the League of Nations and eventually the United Nations. What enables Kant to make the transition is that he adds the possibility of divine assistance, which makes the zone of peace really, as opposed to merely logically, possible. A real possibility is one that is grounded in an actuality. In the present case, the actuality is that God makes assistance available.33 We will come back to the moral theology shortly, after an excursus about empirical reasons for rejecting strong cosmopolitanism. If Kant did not have this appeal to divine as­sist­ance, he would be vulnerable to the realist attack against a foolish optimism about human motivation. But Kant’s liberal followers have to a large extent dropped the theological context and thus made themselves liable to the charge that they have not taken seriously what the theological sources call original sin. On the other hand, both Kant and the realists have been misled by the false dichotomy and false rigourism about local attachment described in sections 4.1 and 4.2. This chapter is endorsing a form of cosmopolitanism in Audi’s sense, that we should give some degree of priority to the interests of humanity over those of nations, and also a form of patriotism, that we should have a preferential commitment to the well-­being of our fellow-­citizens in our own polis. How can both of these be true? If we believe that God has placed us in political communities, as a way in which the good of all human beings can be realized, then we can allow a default permission to work for the well-­being of our fellow-­citizens first. But there will be areas of policy in which this default permission has to be overridden, and these are areas in which, as far as we can tell, the well-­being of human beings in general is jeopardized. For example, it might be that my nation could prosper for a while with a heavy use of carbon-­based energy, but the effects of climate change on populations elsewhere would be disastrous. One kind of argument is patriotic, that my own nation will in the long run suffer. But the moral force of the argument for changing to carbon-­neutral energy is stronger than this, and should prevail whether the patriotic argument persuades or not. Should we accept Kant’s view that the creation of a foedus pacificum is one of these overriding imperatives, and that therefore it must be really possible? Should we believe, with Kant, that 33  It is important that the assistance be offered. Otherwise I could argue that I can jump to the moon because God could offer me the assistance to do it; the point is that God does offer assistance through the Holy Spirit in the moral life, but does not offer assistance to jump to the moon.

108  Love of Country the achievement of this international political association (though not a world state) is inevitable, even if the progress towards it is not linear? This kind of confidence has waxed and waned over the last two centuries, and this chapter is not taking a position on whether it is justified. All that the argument of the chapter requires is that progress towards justice and peace at the national and inter­ nation­al level is possible, and that we have an obligation to work towards it.

4.4  Two Empirical Objections to Strong Cosmopolitanism There are two empirical reasons for rejecting strong cosmopolitanism.34 They are objections to the way in which the view has issued in policy, rather than to the view itself. The turn to claims about the actual conduct of international relations is not foreign to Kant, who made the already-­mentioned ambitious prediction in the 1790s that states with a republican constitution would not fight with each other, and that the resulting zone of peace (the foedus pacificum) would gradually expand (though not without setback and tragedy) to a world-­wide federation of states that no longer use war as an instrument of policy against each other.35 Michael Doyle, in a series of articles in the 1980s, argued that with a couple of exceptions Kant’s prediction has turned out to be correct.36 This kind of optimism was one fundamental rationale for a policy of promoting democracy world-­wide. It was Woodrow Wilson’s rationale during and after the First World War and it was Bill Clinton’s rationale for US policy enunciated by his national security ad­visor, Anthony Lake, in 1993, ‘The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.’37 The final two sections of this chapter are going to look at some theological resources to support the weaker claim that patriotism and cosmo­pol­ itan­ism can cohere. But before we do that, we should examine two empirical

34  See John  E.  Hare, ‘Kantian Ethics, International Politics, and the Enlargement of the Foedus Pacificum’, in Sovereignty at the Crossroads, ed. Luis E. Lugo (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 71–92. There is an excellent response by David Lumsdaine, ‘Moral Rationality and Particularity: A Response to John Hare’ in the same volume. 35 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary  J.  Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (henceforth PP), 8: 356. A state is only a republic in the required sense if it operates three principles of government: the freedom of every member of the society as a human being, the equality with every other member as a subject, and the independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen. See Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice, in Practical Philosophy, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8: 290. 36 For example, Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, parts 1 and 2, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12/3–4 (1983), 205–35 and 325–53. 37  The New York Times, 21 September 1993. This was not a merely partisan commitment. Ronald Reagan already had proclaimed to the British parliament in June 1982, ‘a global campaign for democratic development’ or ‘campaign for freedom’, which he claimed would strengthen the prospects for a world at peace, The New York Times, 9 June 1982.

Two Empirical Objections to Strong Cosmopolitanism  109 objections to the strong cosmopolitan agenda of detaching people little by little from their local attachments and replacing these with universalist commitments to all rational agents as such. The first objection is that this agenda may in fact help undermine liberal regimes, and the second is that it could well make the conflicts between liberal and non-­liberal regimes more frequent and more violent. Michael Doyle’s story of the enlargement of the pacific union from three states to fifty in the 200 years from 1790 to 1990 does not take into account that states have gone in and out of the union; moreover, some of the bloodiest wars of history have been fought by powers that were at one time in the union but left it. The first objection to the optimism of the enlargement story is the familiar conservative objection to the corrosive acid of modernism, that the strong cosmopolitan agenda has the effect of fostering a kind of rootlessness that in turn makes the local attachments return in a more virulent form under certain historically observable circumstances. For Kant, local attachments do not have moral worth in themselves, but come under the heading of ‘pathological love’, and are valuable only to the extent that they promote what does have moral worth, namely the kingdom of ends. This results in a false dichotomy and a false rigourism, as argued in sections 4.1 and 4.2. But the present objection is that the strong cosmo­ pol­itan picture itself tends to undermine, in certain circumstances, the success of the regimes that are trying to implement it; in other words, the strong cosmo­pol­ itan agenda can be self-­defeating. In the case of countries such as Germany, Italy, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela, which have passed in and out of liberal democracy, what has been the role of the cosmopolitan agenda? For example, the manifesto of the conservative 1930 coup in Argentina lamented the gradual process of social decomposition resulting from a system which must be brought to an end, cost what it may. Ignorance and crime have replaced efficiency and respect for law, respect for tradition, and respect for all the moral values which we have received as a dear inheritance from our elders.38

According to Guillermo O’Donnell’s diagnosis, At stake were two very different ideologies and economic interests: the philosophy of the Enlightenment as opposed to that of late Spanish scholasticism, and the incorporation of Argentina into the world market as opposed to the presence of the closed, subsistence economies of the interior. . . . These terms [‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’] became the symbols of a minority that denied the traditional

38  See Peter H. Smith, ‘The Breakdown of Democracy in Argentina, 1916–30’, in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 19.

110  Love of Country culture and destroyed the social structures and forms of government of a large proportion of the population.39

The philosophical and ideological differences here are likely to be meshed with all sorts of other causal factors, but they are important all the same. We are seeing in the US and in Europe swings towards a kind of anti-­cosmopolitan agenda that is a response, in part, to the same kind of neglect of the value of local attachment by the liberal elite. In order to get the right balance between universalist and particularist loyalties we need to see the moral value of both, and this is something made unnecessarily difficult by the false dichotomy and false rigourism described above. The second empirical objection to the strong cosmopolitan agenda is that it makes conflict by liberal regimes with non-­liberal ones more likely and worse in some circumstances. This was Niebuhr’s complaint about Wilsonian idealism (though Woodrow Wilson was not a strong cosmopolitan in the sense defined above). It turned the First World War into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and therefore legitimated a scale of destruction that would otherwise have been intolerable. One of the mechanisms at work here is that in order to persuade liberal democracies to go to war, the enemy has to be demonized—­ painted in sub-­human colours—­so that negotiating a cessation of hostilities without the enemy’s unconditional surrender becomes more difficult. So much momentum, so to speak, has to be generated to get the war started that it is much harder to get it stopped. The idealism becomes itself an obstacle to diplomacy. The picture of the opponent as not fully civilized also legitimates inhumane treatment. A chilling example can be drawn even from the history of Kant scholarship. M. Campbell Smith’s introduction to Kant’s Perpetual Peace, written in 1903, says, ‘Wars between different grades of civilization are bound to exist as long as civilization itself exists.’40 Niebuhr and Morgenthau also point to the self-­deception about one’s own country’s motivation that strong cosmopolitanism tends to prod­ uce. During the Cold War, for example, a veneer of communist internationalism disguised Russian hegemony under the Brezhnev doctrine, and the same confusion of national interest with idealist rhetoric was true of the British in Egypt in 1881–2 and has sometimes been true of US foreign policy as well.41 The realists are right to see this kind of self-­deception as another contributory factor to making successful diplomacy harder. This point about self-­deception does not license, 39 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Permanent Crisis and the Failure to Create a Democratic Regime: Argentina, 1955–66’, in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, ed. Linz and Stepan, 142. It is interesting to compare the transitions out of democracy in Germany. See M.  Rainer Lepsius, ‘From Fragmented Party Democracy to Government by Emergency Decree and National Socialist Takeover: Germany’, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 73f. 40  Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, trans. with an introduction and notes M.  Campbell Smith (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1903), 98, emphasis added. 41  There is a vivid indictment in Osgood, Ideals and Self-­Interest in America’s Foreign Relations.

Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History  111 however, a general ‘realist’ scepticism about the possibility of any moral conduct by states. On the contrary, just as love of one’s country can be morally admirable, so there can be morally admirable aspiration for one’s country; but there are some conditions required for the rational stability of such a posture, and we will come to them in section 4.7.

4.5  Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History In the next two sections of the chapter we will look at Kant’s moral theology as it applies to his optimistic views about the growth of cosmopolitanism (section 4.5) and at two contemporary cosmopolitans who want to do without the theology (section 4.6). The thesis of these sections is that belief in God is a central component of Kant’s views about the progress of cosmopolitanism and they do not make sense without it. So what is Kant’s view about the place of theology in our as­pir­ ations for the political life of the world as a whole? The answer is difficult because it is not clear what Kant thinks about the real possibility of an ethical commonwealth on this earth.42 It is not surprising that he is not clear on this, because he is translating within ‘the boundaries of mere reason’ a Christian eschatology which is itself unclear on exactly this matter. The chapter will proceed by discussing a few of Kant’s texts and then by giving an account of where we can be sure of his view and where we cannot. The first text is from Religion part III, which is about the possibility of a transition from ecclesiastical faith, based on special revelation, towards the universal religion of reason.43 This discussion depends on the picture of the two concentric circles of revelation described at the beginning of Chapter 1. Kant quotes approvingly from Matthew 12: 28, ‘The kingdom of God is come unto you.’ He comments that we have reason to say this, even if only the principle of the gradual transition from ecclesiastical faith to the universal religion of reason, and so to a (divine) ethical state on earth, has put in roots universally and, somewhere, also in public—­though the actual setting up of this state is still infinitely removed from us. For since this principle contains the basis for a continual approximation to the ultimate perfection, there lies in it (invisibly)—as in a shoot that develops and will in the future bear seeds in turn—­the whole that will [in German soll, better translated ‘is to’] one day enlighten the world and rule over it.

42  Real possibilities, in Kant, are distinguished from merely logical possibilities, because real possibilities have to be grounded in something actual. The ethical commonwealth needs to be distinguished from the kingdom of ends in which we already belong just because we are under the moral law. 43  Rel 6: 115–24.

112  Love of Country This passage displays several of the difficulties of this topic. What is present in us already, because it is present universally, is said to be the principle of a gradual transition to a (divine) ethical state on earth. But Kant says that the actual setting up of this state is infinitely removed from us. What is already present is the basis for a continual approximation, like the basis in the shoot of a plant that will prod­ uce development towards the mature seed-­bearing flower. But the passage does not give us a prediction that we (unlike the plant) will achieve our perfect state on earth, only a prescription that we are to work for progress towards it. There are many passages in Kant that explicitly deny that we will ever reach moral perfection of the will, even in heaven let alone on this earth. In The End of All Things he says that we must never give in to the self-­indulgent persuasion that we have found suitable means to make religion in a whole people pure and at the same time powerful.44 In the Critique of Practical Reason, he says ‘for a rational but finite being [such as a human being] only endless progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection is possible.’45 Kant is warning us against the presumption of thinking that humans can ever achieve a state beyond which no moral progress is possible, even for individuals, but especially for a whole people. On the other hand, he also thinks that we can legitimately hope for a perfect juridico-­civil constitution. Thus in Conflict of the Faculties he asks: ‘What profit will progress toward the better yield humanity?’, and he answers: Not an ever-­growing quantity of morality with regard to intention, but an increase of the products of legality in dutiful actions whatever their motives. . . . Gradually violence on the part of the powers will diminish and obedi­ence to the laws will increase. There will arise in the body politic perhaps more charity and less strife in lawsuits, more reliability in keeping one’s word, etc., partly out of love of honor, partly out of well-­understood self-­interest. And eventually this will also extend to nations in their external relations toward one another up to the realization of the cosmopolitan society, without the moral foundation in humanity having to be enlarged in the least; for that, a kind of new creation (supernatural influence) would be necessary.—For we must also not hope for too much from human beings in their progress toward the better lest we fall prey with good reason to the mockery of the politician who would willingly take the hope of the human being as the dreaming of an overstressed mind.46

44  Immanuel Kant, The End of All Things, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8: 336, 221–31. 45  KpV 5: 123. 46 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary  J.  Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7: 91–2.

Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History  113 Here is a prediction about the course of human history similar to the one about the foedus pacificum with which we started this section. But it is a prediction that is not based on a premise of moral improvement (‘without the moral foundation in humanity having to be enlarged in the least’). In Perpetual Peace Kant makes a similar point. He accepts in this work ‘the depravity of human nature’.47 And he thinks that ‘even for a nation of devils (if only they have understanding)’ nature has a way of solving the problem of establishing order both internally within a state and externally between them, by such means as trade relations and the geographical conditions that lead to them.48 There are three places in Kant’s picture where theology enters in. The first is that Kant thinks that we should believe or at least hope that there is supernatural influence available for accomplishing what he calls in Religion ‘the revolution of the will’ by which we can go from living under the ‘evil maxim’ that subordinates duty to happiness to living under the ‘good maxim’ that reverses this order of incentives.49 This supernatural assistance is ‘an effect of grace’, and we can admit an effect of grace, Kant says, as something incomprehensible, even though we cannot incorporate it into our maxims for either theoretical or practical use.50 We cannot incorporate it for theoretical use because it goes beyond the proper limits of the theoretical use of reason which are the limits of sense experience, and we cannot incorporate it for practical use because it is something God does and not something we do. Nonetheless we need this belief, because otherwise we would be faced with an insoluble antinomy between the obligation to accomplish the revolution and our own incapacity.51 ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’, though it does not imply ‘can by our own devices’. The moral part of the improvement, by Kant’s idio­syn­crat­ic usage of the term ‘moral’, has to be imputable to us.52 But the improvement overall has to be cognized from a practical point of view as a joint venture, a concursus, of divine and human activity. The effect of grace is exercised not only in the individual heart, accomplishing a revolution of the will, but in the human race. Here is the second place where Kant’s theology enters into the picture. He believes that there is moral progress in the human race, even though as just described, he does not believe that we ever 47  PP 8: 355. 48  PP 8: 366. 49  Rel 6: 47. I say ‘or at least hope’, because Kant sometimes makes a distinction between belief and hope, and he says that we can ‘hope that what does not lie in [our] power will be made good by co­oper­ation from above’, Rel 6: 52, even though later on the same page he describes this as faith or belief (Glaube). See Andrew Chignell, ‘Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will’, in The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 50  Rel 6: 53. 51  Rel 6: 37, ‘This evil is radical, since it corrupts the ground of all maxims; as natural propensity, it is also not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—­ something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.’ 52 E.g. Rel 6: 44.

114  Love of Country reach holiness. Kant writes a short reply to what he takes to be Moses Mendelssohn’s view that the human race will never make moral progress.53 For Mendelssohn, as Kant understands him, an individual can make progress, but humanity regarded as a whole maintains in all periods of time roughly the same level of moral goodness. Kant thinks this view turns our history into a farce, and it would be ‘contrary to the morality of a wise creator and ruler of the world.’54 Instead, we should conceive of the human race as ‘progressing toward what is better with respect to the moral end of its existence.’ Even Mendelssohn himself needs to think this way, Kant says, because he worked zealously for the enlightenment and welfare of the nation to which he belonged, and ‘he could not rea­son­ ably hope to bring this about all by himself, without others after him continuing along the same path.’ Besides this practical argument, Kant says, there is ‘a good deal of evidence that in our age, as compared with all previous ages, the human race as a whole has actually made considerable moral progress (short-­term checks can prove nothing to the contrary)’. He sees the fact that his contemporaries complain about increasing depravity as itself a sign of moral progress, which makes them reproach themselves for not reaching what they now see more clearly to be their goal. Kant emphasizes, however, that if we ask by what means this unending progress towards the better can be maintained and even accelerated, it is soon seen that this immeasurably distant success will depend not so much upon what we do . . ., but instead upon what human nature will do in and with us to force us onto a track we would not readily take of our own accord. For only from nature, or rather from Providence (since supreme wisdom is required for the complete fulfillment of this end), can we expect an outcome that is directed to the whole and from it to the parts, whereas people in their schemes set out only from the parts and may well remain with them, and may be able to reach the whole, as something too great for them, in their ideas but not in their influence, especially since, with their mutually adverse schemes, they would hardly unite for it by their own free resolution.55

God’s work is here required in order to coordinate the unending moral progress of the whole, because we would otherwise become instruments of fragmentation, leading away from the common good by our schemes for our own private

53  On the Common Saying 8: 307–13. Mendelssohn did in fact believe in the possibility of progress, and worked for it, but he did not believe in the overall arc of progress in the way Kant did. I owe this point to Sarah Zager. 54  On the Common Saying 8: 308f. 55  On the Common Saying 8: 310.

Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History  115 advancement.56 This is true even if we reach the idea of the good of the whole as something too great for us. This is also the point of part III of Religion, section II, entitled ‘The Human Being Ought to Leave the Ethical State of Nature in order to become a Member of an Ethical Community’.57 Kant is a communitarian about the origin of evil, and therefore about recovery. He says that we humans mutually corrupt one another’s moral predisposition just because we are social beings, and we produce in each other, just because we surround each other, envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these.58 What we need is a union into an ethical community, so that we can be instruments of good to each other and not instruments of evil. But this, is the idea of working toward a whole of which we cannot know whether as a whole it is also in our power: so the duty in question differs from all others in kind and in principle.—We can already anticipate that this duty will need the presupposition of another idea, namely, of a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for common effect.59

Again, God’s role is seen as making possible a moral whole by coordinating the parts (‘organizing the forces’). The argument here is, like all of Kant’s moral arguments, transcendental, in the sense that it goes back to the condition for the possibility of something we already acknowledge, namely that we have a duty of a certain kind, in this case the duty of becoming members of the ethical community or commonwealth. Third and finally theology enters in even if we confine our attention to the juridico-­civil arrangements discussed in Perpetual Peace. In the passage from On the Common Saying just quoted Kant starts off by saying that our improvement comes from our human nature, and then corrects himself, ‘or rather from Providence’. In Perpetual Peace he says that he is going to stick with the term ‘nature’ because ‘in the context of this essay our concern is entirely theoretical’, which means that ‘human reason must remain within the bounds of possible [sense] experience’.60 But he goes on to acknowledge that ‘if we reflect on nature’s purposiveness in the flow of world events, and regard it to be the underlying ­wisdom of a higher cause that directs the human race towards its objective goal and predetermines the world’s course, we call it Providence.’ It is clear from all three of 56  Section 4.8 of this chapter will connect this view with the doctrine of ‘common grace’. 57  Rel 6: 96. See Rel 6: 100, ‘the sublime, never fully attainable idea of an ethical community’. 58  Rel 6: 94. 59  Rel 6: 98. See also Rel 6: 134, where ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is represented [in the Bible] not only as coming nearer . . . but as being ushered in as well.’ 60  PP 8: 362.

116  Love of Country Kant’s Critiques that he intends us to tie together what we can say when our ­concern is theoretical with what we have to say when our concern is practical, and that there is a ‘primacy of pure practical reason in its connection with speculative reason’.61 This overarching strategy applies also to what he says in Perpetual Peace about Providence. At the end of this work he discusses whether politics and morality (as a doctrine of right) are incommensurable.62 His conclusion is that they are not, but only if we grant that there is a public right, and he argues that a federative union of states whose only purpose is to prevent war between them is ‘the only state of right compatible with their freedom’. What Kant is doing here is to add nature’s purposiveness to the merely mechanical account that is possible when ‘our concern is entirely theoretical’, and the purposiveness he refers to is the working towards the destination of our external freedom. In turn, this means that we have to add reference to ‘the underlying wisdom of a higher cause that directs the human race towards its objective goal’ and therefore (by his previous ac­know­ ledge­ment) we are talking at the end of the work not merely about nature but about the use of nature by Providence. Here is a brief summary of this discussion of Kant’s texts.63 We can be sure that Kant asserts the following four theses: first, that there is moral progress of the human race, but this requires God’s activity; second, that there is a possible revolution of the will in the individual, but again this requires God’s activity; third, that humans will never reach a state of moral perfection in the sense of a state beyond which there is no progress; fourth, that there is progress towards and there will eventually be the realization of a juridico-­civil union of states, but again this requires the activity of Providence. We cannot, however, be sure about what Kant thinks about how much moral improvement is possible on this earth. If we do not follow Kant’s belief in the moral progress of the human race (the first of these theses), can we still be cosmopolitans in our aspirations for legal order? Yes, because, if Kant is right about the juridico-­civil union of states, it does not require moral progress at all. This is the point about ‘the nation of devils’. But we will still require, for rational stability, a ground in Providence for believing in this union as a real (as opposed to a merely logical) possibility. Given our propensity to self-­preference, we should accept that progress towards and eventually the realization of a juridico-­civil union of states requires the activity of Providence (‘the underlying wisdom of a higher cause’) and not merely human activity.

61  KpV 5: 119. 62  PP 8: 384–5. 63  I am following here Michel Despland, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1973), 307f.

Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans  117

4.6  Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans We can now look at two contemporary cosmopolitans who deny to moral ­the­ology the place in their cosmopolitanism that Kant gives to it. The first of these is Seyla Benhabib, and we will spend more time on her because she is clearer about her dependence on Kant, especially in her book Another Cosmopolitanism.64 Benhabib is an eminent exponent of the ‘universalist moral standpoint’ adopted by ‘the discourse theory of ethics’ of Jürgen Habermas, though she has her dis­ agree­ments with him. One theme she takes from Habermas is what he calls the ‘Janus face of the modern nation’.65 ‘All modern nation-­states that enshrine universalistic principles into their constitutions are also based on the cultural, historical, and legal memories, traditions, and institutions of a particular people and peoples.’66 Benhabib similarly distinguishes between ‘the ethnos’ (‘a community of shared fate, memories, and moral sympathies’) and ‘the demos’ (‘a democratically enfranchised totality of all citizens, who may or may not belong to the same ethnos’).67 Because the modern nation state has these two faces, there will very often be ‘a dialectic of universalistic form and particular content’, where the cosmo­pol­itan aspiration of the demos is in tension with the loyalties to the ­ethnos. Since we are now living, Benhabib says, ‘in a post-­metaphysical universe’, we cannot appeal as Kant does to God as a coordinator of the ethical commonwealth.68 Nonetheless, her book is full of teleology. The final sentence of the book is ‘The interlocking of democratic iteration struggles within a global civil society and the creation of solidarities beyond borders, including a universal right of hospitality that recognizes the other as a potential cocitizen, anticipate another cosmo­pol­it­an­ism—­a cosmopolitanism to come.’69 We will look at what she means here by ‘democratic iteration’ and ‘hospitality’ shortly; the immediate point is that she has the same hope as Kant for a cosmopolitan order, but she does not have the same theological ground for the hope. The hope is rationally unstable, however, without the ground.70 Whether we do in fact live in a post-­metaphysical universe, or whether (as most people in the world believe) the moral order is sustained by some kind of divine being or beings, is a different question, and one beyond the limits of this chapter. 64 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) (henceforth AC). 65 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The European Nation-­State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 115. 66 Benhabib, AC 169–70. 67 Benhabib, AC 68. 68 Benhabib, AC 72. 69 Benhabib, AC 177. 70  The term ‘unstable’ is Kant’s, from Volckmann’s notes on Immanuel Kant, Natürliche Theologie Volkmann [Lectures on Natural Theology (Volkmann)], Berlin Academy ed. (Berlin: George Reiner; later Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), 28: 1151 (my translation). Kant thought that perseverance in the moral life without belief in God was rationally unstable, though he knew people who lived with this instability and he thought of Spinoza as such a person.

118  Love of Country Benhabib quotes with approval Kant’s statement of the principle of cosmo­pol­itan right, ‘The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.’71 The term ‘hospitality’ here is misleading, as Kant realizes. It refers not to the kindness or generosity a person might display to her guests, but to the international recognition of the right of an individual to engage in commerce on a foreign territory (in a broad sense of ‘commerce’) without being attacked by the nationals of that territory. Benhabib takes ‘hospitality’, even though limited in this way, to have implications for ‘all human rights claims which are cross-­border in scope.’72 And she has confidence that even though there did not exist in Kant’s time (and still do not in ours) the enforcement mechanisms that lie behind domestic law, these will come and are ‘signaled’ by this principle: I follow the Kantian tradition in thinking of cosmopolitanism as the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations among individuals in a global civil society. These norms are neither merely moral nor just legal. They may best be characterized as framing the ‘morality of the law’, but in a global rather than a domestic context. They signal the eventual legalization and juridification of the rights claims of human beings everywhere, regardless of their membership in bounded communities.73

What are the grounds of her confidence in this eventual juridification? There are three, and we should worry that they are not sufficient singly or together. The first is the observation of the progress that has already been made. Benhabib is here in the same position as Kant looking at the international response in Europe to the ideals of the French Revolution. Kant was very encouraged by this response, even though he was horrified by what the Revolution in fact produced. Jeremy Waldron, who has a reply to Benhabib in Another Cosmopolitanism, bases his confidence about the emergence and internalization of cosmopolitan norms on the increasing interdependence of nations and the rising levels of international trade and commerce, drawing our attention to ‘the dense detail of ordinary life in which people routinely act and interact as though their dealings were conducted within some sort of ordered framework.’74 But Benhabib is sceptical of this line of analysis. She thinks it sounds like nineteenth-­ century mercantilism.75 If we restrict our attention, however, to the treatment over the last few years of immigrants and aliens in Europe and the United States, observation gives us at best equivocal results. Benhabib’s volume comes out of a set of lectures in 2004, and the interim has been discouraging. Kant himself was aware that he could not ground his hope in observation because the evidence is always ambiguous, and 71  PP 8: 357, quoted at Benhabib, AC 21. See also MdS 6: 352. 72 Benhabib, AC 149. 73 Benhabib, AC 20. 74 Benhabib, AC 94. 75 Benhabib, AC 153–4.

Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans  119 his argument is transcendental and finally theological. There are many in the US whose faith in democracy was fundamentally shaken in 2016 and is still in recovery mode. The events of the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 in the US showed the vulnerability of democratic institutions. As claimed at the end of section 4.3, the evidence is equivocal and confidence properly waxes and wanes. The second proposal of a ground for hope is an appeal to Hegel and his notion of concrete universals. Concepts that are concrete universals do not operate by subsumption alone; they show that the particular is itself caught in the dialectic of the universal and the particular, and that the concrete universal is itself a manifestation of the contra­dic­tions within the particular. The concrete universal captures the dynamic process through which the particular is constituted.76

This is not the right place for a discussion of whether Hegel’s notion of a concrete universal is coherent. For Hegel, the dialectic of the universal and the particular is the history of Geist, or Spirit, and he has the optimism that this history will end in Absolute Spirit as the all-­in-­all. The modest point to make against Benhabib is that we cannot appeal to this philosophy of history if we want a ‘post-­metaphysical’ account of the development of cosmopolitan norms. Finally, and most significantly, Benhabib appeals to the notion of ‘democratic iterations’. This is indeed the major contribution of her book. She takes the basic idea from Derrida, that every repetition is a form of variation. ‘Democratic it­er­ ations are linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-­in-­transformation, invocations that also are revocations. They not only change established understandings but also transform what passes as the valid or established view of an authoritative precedent.’77 She suggests that politics can be a ‘jurisgenerative process’, which creatively intervenes to ‘mediate between universal norms and the will of democratic majorities.’ She is right to point to this possibility. But as a ground for hope, we need more than this possibility, because there is equally the possibility of regress. Democratic iterations can go both towards and away from cosmopolitan norms, and she recognizes that these norms do not depend for their validity upon what actually transpires. If democratic practice gets closer to the norms, the norms are the measuring stick for our rejoicing; if the practice gets further away, these same norms are the measuring stick for our lament. But then we have the same objection as the first one: our observation over the last few years gives us at best equivocal evidence. Should Benhabib keep the elucidation and prescription of the cosmopolitan norms and drop the teleology? The trouble is that this will put her in the difficulty 76 Benhabib, AC 162.

77 Benhabib, AC 48–9.

120  Love of Country mentioned earlier in connection with Kant’s reply to Mendelssohn: ‘He could not reasonably hope to bring this about all by himself, without others after him continuing along the same path’. In Religion, as quoted in section 4.5, Kant puts the point in terms of ‘the idea of working towards a whole of which we cannot know whether as a whole it is also in our power’. Benhabib needs the teleology because she needs the sense that despite the equivocal evidence, she is, so to speak, on the winning side; the cosmopolitan norms will in the end prevail. But then she needs to give us the grounds for the teleology. In Kant the grounds are theological. The question is whether we can have such grounds when we ‘live in a post-­ metaphysical universe.’78 In the second and briefer part of this section we can look at the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, and especially his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.79 He has an account of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that is distinctively different from both Benhabib and Kant, but is still recognizable from our ordinary use of the word. He says that there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism: One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.80

To sum this up in a slogan, cosmopolitanism is ‘universality plus difference’.81 Appiah concedes that there will be clashes between universal concern and respect for legitimate difference, but he thinks ‘cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.’ Values, he thinks, are objective, binding on us whether we acknowledge them or not, but ‘there are some values that are, and should be, universal, just as there are lots of values that are, and must be, local.’82 But then how are we supposed to hope for a resolution of these clashes? Appiah is an atheist cosmopolitan like Benhabib, but this does not mean that he is a militant atheist. He does not, for example, think like Benhabib that religion

78  Benhabib could retreat to the more modest position of the present chapter that is agnostic about whether the juridification will ever occur, and requires only that progress be possible. But Kant’s pos­ ition is that even progress, if it is progress towards public right, requires the work of Providence, and this she cannot accept. 79 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) (henceforth CEWS). 80 Appiah, CEWS xv. 81 Appiah, CEWS 151. 82 Appiah, CEWS xxi.

Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans  121 is unreasonable. He just happens not to share it, though he knows lots of intelligent people who do. Appiah finds within cosmopolitanism the recognition of both universal and local values, but he sides more often than he should with the universal over the local. We can distinguish two groups that we can call ‘wanderers’ and ‘rooters’. As an example of a wanderer, Abraham lived ‘in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents . . . for he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.’83 Appiah, perhaps because his life has been on three continents, is like Abraham in this respect, a wanderer rather than a rooter. Writing personally as an immigrant myself, I recognize in him the sense of not being sure where home is, and of being irritated by features of all the places one has lived. Here are two examples of Appiah’s preferences. He says that ‘we do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogeneous system of values, in order to have a home.’84 But a settled community, even if it is not necessary for having a home, might be helpful to human flourishing. Rooters live by the maxim to ‘bloom where you are planted’. They put down deep roots. ‘A homogeneous system of values’ sounds boring, but common aspirations are a strength in a polis, even if their practical application is constantly contested.85 A second example is Appiah’s treatment of works of art from one place in the world that have been taken to another, for example the Elgin marbles (I write as a descendant of Lord Elgin). Appiah says, ‘The British Museum’s claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain but of the world seems to me exactly right.’86 He acknowledges that there is an aesthetic argument for a return of site-­specific art, but he dismisses the idea of a ‘cultural patrimony’; the marbles do not belong to Greece but to humanity at large. Appiah also acknowledges ‘the connection of art through identity’, where a work of art was ‘produced from within a world of meaning created by [one’s] ancestors’.87 But again, though both values are acknowledged, the universal ends up taking priority. He wants the museums of Europe to be able to ‘show the riches of the society they plundered in the years when [his] grandfather was a young man’.88 But the need for a world repository does not overcome the poignant sense of wrongful absence, for example in the museum in Athens where the marbles would go if returned, and it is therefore important that technology has made virtual and reproduced marbles widely available and has diminished the need for such a world repository in the first place. Appiah would not want us to settle the clash of values by our personal preferences for being wanderers rather than rooters. But he is sceptical about the power

83  Hebrews 11: 9–10 and 2 Chronicles 30: 19. 84 Appiah, CEWS 113. 85  See Section 4:8 of the present chapter, and see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 6, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) (NE). 86 Appiah, CEWS 130. 87 Appiah, CEWS 135. 88 Appiah, CEWS 133.

122  Love of Country of reason or principle to settle the sorts of disputes we are considering here. He is strongly influenced by Jonathan Haidt, and the idea that ‘the elephant controls the rider’ (where emotion or intuition is the elephant and reason is the rider).89 Haidt is here championing Hume against Kant; reason is (contra Kant) the slave of the passions. This leads Haidt to underplay the role of universal principle in the world’s great religions. Religion is for him a ‘hive switch’, a group-­level adaptation that gives us cohesion within the group together with competition against those outside it. There is a better picture. The world’s great religions contain both local and universal values, to use Appiah’s terms. In the Abrahamic faiths, for example, God both includes us within a group and sends us out beyond it. This gives us the prospect of a more generous option, one which does not give default precedence to either local or universal value. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to guide us both into community and beyond it. This is the topic of the final two sections of the chapter. But in the absence of a religious answer to the question of how to adjudicate the rival claims of universal and local values, Appiah seems to be left with just the elephant; the personal emotion or preference for wandering or rooting will prevail or will be manipulated by social or economic influences beyond the scope of reason.

4.7  Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity The last two sections of this chapter contain a positive proposal for how to reconcile patriotism (sometimes derided on the political left) and cosmopolitanism (sometimes derided on the political right). Section  4.7 will discuss this the­or­et­ic­al­ly and section 4.8 for our practical lives. Section 4.7 proposes a way to look at the relation between love of country and love of humanity that derives from the distinction mentioned in section 4.1 between our individual and our common essence. Scotus suggests that our individual essence, our ‘haecceity’, is a perfection of the common essence of our species, namely humanity, in the same way that humanity is a perfection of the common essence of the genus, animality. Countries probably do not have individual essences in the way that individual humans do, so that the analogy here is defective. But the point is that we do not have, when patriotism and cosmopolitanism are properly understood, two competing objects of love. In the same way my love for another human being in her particularity does not compete with my love for her humanity.

89  I have discussed Jonathan Haidt in God’s Command, 267–72. The key text is Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).

Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity  123 There are particularist sources other than Scotus. Kierkegaard says, Humanity’s superiority over animals is not only the one most often mentioned, the universally human, but is also what is most often forgotten, that within the species each individual is the essentially different or distinctive. This superiority is in a very real sense the human superiority; the former is the su­per­ior­ity of the race over the animal species. Indeed, if it were not so that one human being, honest, upright, respectable, God-­fearing, can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does who is also honest, upright, respectable, God-­fearing, then the God-­relationship would not essentially exist, would not exist in its deepest meaning.90

Two things about this passage deserve emphasis. First, Kierkegaard is not saying that our distinctiveness is something different from our humanity; he is saying, rather, that our human greatness resides in our capacity for distinctiveness. Second, he locates this distinctiveness in the unique relation each of us has to God. George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, is about a man who discovers as an adult that he has Jewish ancestry.91 It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry—­his judgement no longer wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with the noble partiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical—­exchanging that bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance.

Again, there are two points to emphasize. The first is that Eliot is calling the partiality that connects us with each other the ‘best strength’ of human beings, what we might call a ‘perfection’. The second is that both the bird’s eye (wandering) view and the shoulder to shoulder view are described as forms of reasonableness. We do not need to leave reason behind in order to identify with our particular ancestry. We can get more clarity about what loving a country is like by thinking about what it is like to leave one country and move to a different one. Writing personally, I have a sense of ambiguous loss, as an emigrant from Britain to the United States where I am now a citizen. Is it possible to love two countries at the same time? Or is patriotism like monogamy, just one at a time? It is relevant here that 90  Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230. 91  The case is discussed in Appiah, CEWS xvii‒xviii. The quotation is from George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1995), 745.

124  Love of Country the British authorities informed me that I would not lose British citizenship by becoming American unless I then committed treason. The American authorities noted that Winston Churchill was a dual citizen. There is a hypothetical question, to be sure: What would I do if Britain declared war and invaded, as in 1812? But that does not seem very likely, and neither does the reverse, an invasion of the UK by the US. It is true that the interests of the two countries can and do sometimes diverge. But then one’s attitude as a dual citizen can be like that of a parent of two quarrelsome but equally loved children. This analogy reveals an important point. To love one of my children does not require putting that child first. Lincoln’s mother famously said that she loved most whichever of her children needed her most at the time. The danger of this is that it discriminates against the more self-­ sufficient, but the saying works well for situations where the need rotates more or less equally. The point is that I can have a preferential love that is compound. Transition between countries can, however, result in a sense of not being at home anywhere, or belonging so to speak in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. One gets irritated equally in both countries, but by different things; by trying to find parking in the UK, and by billboards in the US, for example. This kind of experience is, however, strongly affected by what the conditions were like at the leaving of one’s first country. My experience is not typical of emigrants. If a person is escaping persecution or starvation, there will be much less ambivalence. There are many differences between national transition and gender transition, as described in Chapter  3, but there are also similarities. Both can result in improvement, though they do not always do so. Both can result in a certain kind of fluidity. One can slip into and out of certain habits of behaviour depending on where one is and with whom. And there is no necessity in either case that one discover what one already was, as though one was already a crypto-­American before the transition, without being aware of it. Sometimes this is the case with gender transition, as in the case of the trans male we have been thinking about. But sometimes it is not. Loving one’s country is more than just giving preference to fellow-­citizens. In order to illustrate this we will look at four vignettes drawn from the author’s ex­peri­ence or the experience of someone closely related. In each case there are dangers attendant on these different kinds of love and corruptions to which they are liable. Take, first, the aesthetic style that is characteristic of a particular country’s music at its best periods, for example the Tudor and Jacobean writing of vocal and consort music (for example, Byrd, Gibbons, and Tomkins). I love this music in preference to any other, and this is undoubtedly due in part to my having grown up in a boys’ choir from the age of 6. There is nothing irrational about such a preference. This is truly great music, and I do not have to be shaken in my love by the recognition that the attachment derives from my upbringing. Perhaps, if I had grown up in New Orleans, I would have loved the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s in just this way. There is a kind of attachment here that requires a person’s early

Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity  125 contact, so that the music is, so to speak, in the bones. This makes transition between countries a loss, because the bones cannot be retrained. But I can recognize the good fortune that there is an excellent manifestation of the human spirit to which I have been given special access by the accident of my birth and early training. Second, I can love a particular piece of land, perhaps the downs above the Chiltern village where I grew up, and where I know by name all the species of flowers that grow there. Wendell Berry writes in his novels and essays about this kind of love, that is of the land and, indissolubly mixed with this, of the people who have made that land what it is over the generations.92 I think this is possible also in a city; one could love Greenwich Village in this sort of way. But if Wendell Berry is right, it is harder because this sort of value requires stability across the generations, and the city is constantly in flux. Love of a national musical style (as in the first example) or of a piece of land (as in the second example) are not the same as love of one’s country in the narrower sense of giving preference to fellow-­ citizens. What is the relation? Seyla Benhabib distinguishes between demos and ethnos, as discussed earlier. These first two vignettes have more to do with the ethnos. A generous love of the demos does not deny the value of these culturally or topographically particular attachments, but it can still have a sense of loyalty to and solidarity with some other part of the demos that does not share them. A third example is the loyalty that a soldier might have to her sovereign. My father was a gunner in the Second World War, captured by the Japanese in Singapore, and he worked on the Burma-­Siam railroad as a prisoner of war. When he returned to England, he received a letter from King George thanking him and acknowledging the suffering that he and his comrades had endured. Every Christmas he raised a toast to ‘Our Commanding Officer’, meaning Queen Elizabeth. His love of his country had been part of what prompted him to volunteer, and it was focused in his loyalty to his sovereign. He had been a pacifist before the war, but he did not think he could justify letting his fellow-­citizens put themselves in harm’s way while he stayed at home. A fourth example is the solidarity one feels when one’s country is attacked. I remember being surprised by the intensity of my feeling when the United States was attacked on 9/11. Or one can watch in a pub a football match in the World Cup, where one’s national team has won a surprising victory, and the communal elation can be overwhelming, hugs and cheers all round, with nothing mean-­ spirited left to spoil it. Sometimes something larger than ourselves to be proud of enables us to be at our best. These last two vignettes describe a love that can be, in

92  For example, Wendell Berry, Remembering (Grand Rapids, MI: North Point Press, 1988). In my home village, the descendants of the families who came to build the church and almshouses and school in 1480 are still living in the village.

126  Love of Country Benhabib’s term, for the demos, made concrete under the symbol of a monarch or a football team. These are four pictures of different kinds of love of one’s country, and in each of them we can see how things could easily go wrong. Section  4.2 distinguished ­different ways we might love our country. We might love it in itself, either because of universal properties that some other country might have, such as tall mountains and fertile plains, or for its unique properties such as its history that could not be possessed by any other country. Or we might love it because it is our country. In the case where I love the country for a unique non-­shareable property, there is standardly a universal love that accompanies the particular practical love, in the same way that my helping Elizabeth get rid of the bat is also a recognition of my obligation to any friend whose house has been invaded by a terrifying creature. It is a false dichotomy to allow moral value only to judgements that exclude singular reference (thus ruling out the particular love) and a false rigourism to deny moral permission to any preference for oneself or those to whom one has special relations. Now we can return to the case of the Jacobean motet (perhaps Thomas Tomkins’s ‘When David Heard’), which I love because it is great music, and we can make another distinction. It may be that the object of my love is valuable at least in part for its universal properties, but the quality of my love may depend upon my history with this piece.93 I may love the motet because I sang it as a boy, and it has a certain resonance for me because of the people I sang it with who also loved it. This fact about the quality of my love does not make my love irrational, and does not in any way pollute it. The value of the motet is a human value. This means that it is a manifestation of a particular excellence that humans have, of making music together. The scholastic language of a ‘perfection’ fits well here. Music is a human excellence, and this motet does spectacularly well what that excellence enables us to do. The fact that I get access to that perfection because of my personal history does not make my preference suspect. But now suppose the choir master who loves Tudor and Jacobean vocal and consort music refuses to allow the choir to sing anything else. There is other equally great music with the same universal properties, for example of complexity of counterpoint and expressiveness in the dissonances and their resolution. Perhaps it is even from roughly the same period, but from Tomás Luis de Victoria, for example, from the Spanish Counter-­Reformation. But he cannot enjoy it or allow the choir to enjoy it. Those universal musical values are really in both composers, but he just cannot hear them in the Spaniard.94 Now something has gone wrong with his love. It has become blind and bigoted. There is a practical contradiction between his love for the Tomkins and his refusal to allow value to the 93  My history with the piece also adds the value of shared enjoyment integrated into a narrative in the way described in Chapter 3. 94  If he can hear them and still prefers the Tomkins, that is a slightly different case.

Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity  127 Victoria. A practical contradiction is generated between two maxims when the first maxim prescribes an action or attitude that acknowledges some value and the second prescribes an action or attitude that denies that same value. The values here that are contradicted are universal musical values (for example, complexity of counterpoint and expressiveness of harmony), and particular practical love usually has love of a universal that accompanies it, even though it is not reducible to this. It would be a practical contradiction to help Elizabeth and then not help some other friend in the same sort of need, and this is true even though my obligation to Elizabeth is not reducible to the universal obligation. We can see the same kind of possible shift in the other three vignettes. Perhaps I love some particular piece of land. Again, it may be beautiful, if it is farmed land, because it manifests a human excellence, but here there will be a large admixture (in the folds of the hills, for example) of a natural beauty beyond merely human production. If this is in a city, the human excellence will pre­dom­in­ate. My love for this land is not made somehow morally suspect by the fact that I grew up there. But there are people who cannot see this beauty anywhere else (in Burgundy, for example), and again there is a practical contradiction in their refusal. In terms of the third example, this is not the right place to discuss the moral issues involved in monarchy or warfare. The point is just to illustrate a certain kind of practical contradiction. Suppose a soldier sees loyalty to her sovereign as a value, expressed in her willingness to fight and suffer. If she refuses to see value in her enemy’s loyalty to his sovereign, she is contradicting herself. In terms of the fourth ex­ample, if I find myself moved by love for my country when it is attacked, and I endorse that morally as an initial response before going on to evaluate whether the attack was unprovoked, etc., I should (for the sake of consistency) recognize that when my country attacks another, I should endorse the similar initial response of that country’s citizens. There is a universal human value here, a solidarity that manifests the human excellence of our associating with each other into national units, and this solidarity is a value wherever on the globe it occurs. To say this is consistent with saying that the initial response needs to be subsequently evaluated in terms of difficult moral categories like ‘unprovoked attack’. We can now propose one criterion for when a local love does become il­legit­im­ ate. It becomes illegitimate when it involves a practical contradiction with a human value that is internally attached to that love. Suppose, for example, that I say ‘America first’, and I propose that this means closing the national borders, making it almost impossible for refugees to pass the initial standards for ‘credible fear’, and separating children of families from their parents who cross the border whether they are applying for asylum or not, so as to discourage such application.95 Why should I think that America is at least potentially great and deserves this 95  See Miriam Jordan’s article in The New York Times for Wednesday, 8 August 2018, ‘Big Jump in Rejections at the Border as Asylum Seekers Face New Hurdles’.

128  Love of Country kind of preference I am giving to it? This might be because America manifests a human excellence which can be stated as a universal property (like the complexity and expressiveness of the motet). Perhaps America has this kind of at least potential greatness because it aspires to a high degree of external freedom, where external freedom (in Kant’s sense) means the freedom to express in outward behaviour the internal freedom of the will.96 But now we can see the prac­tical contradiction. There are two maxims here and the first maxim prescribes an action or attitude that expresses concretely a love of some value (external freedom) and the second (closing the border and separating the families) prescribes an action or attitude that denies that same value. Perhaps the first maxim is ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.’97 Kant himself, as discussed earl­ ier, parses closed borders as a failure of hospitality. There are indeed international laws that guarantee the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries, and these make concrete the right to hospitality in Kant’s sense.98 The right to seek sanctuary very plausibly includes the right to have one’s story of persecution listened to carefully, and the right not to be forcibly sep­ar­ated from one’s family in the process. It might be helpful to make explicit the structure of the situations we have been looking at. I can love Elizabeth, the Tomkins motet, and America with a particular practical love that is not reducible in any of these cases to love for universal properties they possess. But in each case the particular love is accompanied by a love for something universal: for friends with invasive animals in their houses, for musical complexity and expressiveness, for the aspiration to external freedom. In all three cases there is a practical contradiction in endorsing the particular prac­ tical love and refusing to acknowledge the demand for similar treatment outside the confines of that love. There are less complicated examples of practical contradiction, and we will come back to this in Chapter 6 with the idea that there are characteristic and distinctive aspirations of different countries, and that they are often far from facts on the ground. We will give four examples of such aspirations that are characteristic of the United States, namely the aspirations to freedom, hospitality, mobility, and courtesy, and we will connect these with the idea of a covenant. All of them need to be compared with easily observable failures to live up to them in practice. The gap between these aspirations and the way a country actually conducts its affairs is a set of practical contradictions.

96  On the Common Saying 8: 290. 97 On the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed., ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 1068. 98  See Benhabib, AC 46f.

The Holy Spirit  129

4.8  The Holy Spirit How can we avoid practical contradiction? Even if the idea of patriotism as a ­perfection of love of humanity gives us a theoretical solution to our initial difficulty, there is still the problem of how to achieve this consistency in practice, given the multiple and pervasive ways in which practical contradictions can be generated. The picture of the moral gap outlined in chapter 1 draws on the possibility of divine assistance, and this means the discussion will not be ‘practical’ in the sense that it directly prescribes what we should do, though we still have to ask for and receive and cooperate with the assistance.99 We need to return finally to moral theology. Kant does not think, and he is right not to think, that merely pointing out a contradiction is sufficient to change behaviour or policy. We are born, he says, under the evil maxim that prefers our happiness to our duty. This is the basis for the American political realists’ pessimism about politics in general and inter­nation­al politics in particular, as discussed in section 4.3. The pessimism lies in the expectation that because we are under the evil maxim, if we find that some practice that gives precedence to our own group is inconsistent with the moral demand, then we will simply reject the moral demand for that case. Kant himself, however, is not pessimistic about the prospects of a pacific union. The basis for his optimism is his belief in providence. Moral theology can help us understand that patriotism, so far from ‘sluicing into nationalism’ as Niebuhr says, can in fact fit a moderate cosmopolitanism. These points start from Kant’s moral theology but go beyond it. The background here is the Reformed conception of common grace. Richard Muller defines common grace as follows: ‘Gratia Communis—­a non-­saving universal grace according to which God in his goodness bestows his favor upon all creation in the general blessings of physical sustenance and moral influence for the good.’100 The term ‘grace’ and its cognates are usually used in Scripture for God’s attitude and action with respect to salvation, but can also be used for God’s more general benevolence and beneficence.101 And there are other terms such as ‘goodness’, ‘mercy’, ‘kindness’, and ‘love’, where this extension is more common.102 We can see the work of the Spirit in bringing about justice and peace at the 99 Kant, Rel 6: 53, comments that effects of grace do not, for this reason, belong in the domain of the practical use of reason. 100  Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1995), 130. My wife Terry and I belonged for years to a congregation of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids which split in the 1930s over the doctrine of common grace, and those who left formed the Protestant Reformed Church, which still holds the position that neither the Bible not the Reformers teach any such doctrine. 101  Matthew 5: 44–8, Luke 7: 21, 7: 41–2, ‘He canceled the debts of both’ (literally ‘graced’), and 2 Corinthians 6: 1 ‘not to accept the grace of God in vain’. See Isaiah 26: 10, ‘If favor is shown to the wicked, they do not learn righteousness.’ 102  Luke 6: 27–36, ‘You will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful’.

130  Love of Country pol­it­ical level as part of this common grace. Jesus tells his disciples in his farewell discourse that the Spirit will show the world it is wrong (elenxei ton kosmon) about sin, righteousness, and judgement.103 This passage means at least that the Spirit confronts the world with the standard of Christ’s life that is no longer available in the flesh.104 We can see the Spirit as carrying out this work in part by convicting those involved in political life (which all citizens are to some degree, even by inertia) that current policies are not heading towards the peace and justice that characterize the kingdom of God. We are told that the day of God is coming when we do not expect it, and this has implications for how we should now live, so as to ‘speed its coming’.105 The passage continues: ‘In keeping with [God’s] promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.’ How does the Spirit carry out this work? The God of the great monotheisms both includes us within community and then sends us out beyond it. In Christian theology, this divine work is especially associated with the Holy Spirit. We can see this in the special work of the Spirit within the church, but the inclusion and mission is also characteristic of the Spirit’s general work in the world. Chapter 6 will discuss the role of the Spirit in sending Paul to the Gentiles, as described in Acts, and this is already prefigured when Jesus extends the blessings of the covenant beyond the covenant people to the Canaanite woman whom he meets in the region of Tyre and Sidon.106 But the mission of the church is not only evangelism; it is the promotion of justice and peace in the world. Much contemporary evolutionary psychology has emphasized the role of religion as what Jonathan Haidt describes as the crucial social practice that enables group formation: ‘If religion is a group-­level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism.’107 It is true that Judaism and Christianity and Islam emphasize duties within the group, but they also emphasize that God commands us to love or show mercy to the enemy and stranger and they promise resources, because of the nature of the commander, for doing so. The same is true beyond the Abrahamic faiths in Hinduism and theistic forms of Buddhism, though this claim goes beyond the present author’s competence to defend. Within Judaism, for example, we should look at the thirty-­six times in the Torah that care for the stranger is commanded, within Christianity at the parable of the Good Samaritan, and within Islam at the 103  John 16: 8. The term ‘elenxei’ is cognate with the standard term (‘elenchos’) for Socrates’s refutation of his interlocutors. 104  I am influenced here by Stephen Verney, Water into Wine (Collins: Glasgow, 1985), 165–73. The purpose, as stated earlier in John 3: 16, is not to condemn the world but to save the world through Christ. See Hebrews 12: 6, which says (quoting Proverbs 3: 12) that God disciplines the one God loves. We can see the Spirit as working with common grace to show the world what it means to live the life Christ commands and what it means to refuse to live that life. 105  2 Peter 3: 11–13. 106  Matthew 15: 21–8. 107 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 308. I have discussed this work in God’s Command, 267–72.

The Holy Spirit  131 Mu’tazilite position on duties to the stranger.108 The point is that it is the very same God who does both the including and the sending out, so that the devotion that is encouraged by the group identity of believers itself sends them beyond the group. The Good Samaritan is being a good Samaritan. This inclusion and mission also has implications for how we should think about love of one’s country. We should recognize, Kant says, God as our law-­giver, ruler, and judge, and we should recognize our duties as God’s commands.109 We have such commands both to enter into political community and then to go beyond it. God’s Command defended the principle of providential proximity.110 The principle is that God puts us next to the people that God wants us to help, and a paradigm example is the Samaritan who found himself next to the wounded traveller by the side of the road (the Latin for ‘neighbour’ is proximus). This providential proximity can both include us within community and then send us out beyond it. We can find ourselves placed as citizens of a country. For Christians there is reason to think the political order is divinely ordained, given that ‘there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.’111 Section 4.3 discussed a possible reason that God might have for placing us in political communities, namely unity under law.112 The picture in the last book of the Bible of our final destination is not a garden, like the picture of our origin in Genesis, but a city, a polis, the new Jerusalem. And the description of this city is that the glory of the Lord gives it light (Revelation 21: 24–6) and ‘the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. . . . People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.’ The picture is that the nations (and presumably the tribes and peoples and languages) retain something of significance for the new city. This does not mean that we remain British or American in the next life. But Chapter 6 will claim that there can be distinctive aspirations of different political entities with their different histories,

108  I have discussed all of these in God’s Command, chapters 5, 6, and 7, and 305f. See Deuteronomy 10: 18–19 and Luke 10: 25f. The system of ‘Abd al-­Jabbar is described in George Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ‘Abd al-­Jabbar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 109 See M 8: 257 for God’s three roles as law-­giver, ruler, and judge. See also KpV 5: 129, Lectures on Ethics 27: 274, Rel 6: 154. 110 Hare, God’s Command, 52f and 173–83. 111  Romans 13: 1. Irenaeus gives us the first Christian interpretation of this passage as requiring our submission to government but also the accountability of government to divine justice, Against the Heretics 5.24. 1–3, in The Anti-­Nicene Fathers vol 1, trans. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975, 552–3. I owe this reference to Awet Andemichael. 112  This claim is not dependent on the authority being a godly person or persons, and in Paul’s case he is writing in the context of a Roman empire maintained against his own people by military force. In the same way Kant follows Luther’s endorsement of our duties to our political sovereign, even if that sovereign is not a dutiful person. I am not here trying to enter into the discussion of our obligations if the political authority commands us to do something against God, though I am inclined to think we then have an obligation to resistance and finally to civil disobedience.

132  Love of Country and we can see these as included in the treasures or glories that are brought into the new Jerusalem. This thought has to be disciplined, however, by the opposite thought that allegiance to these political entities can be and often is idolatrous. Moreover, Christian symbols have been appropriated by groups whose ideology is in fact hostile to the Gospel, and it is not safe to assume that their aspirations will be brought into the New Jerusalem just because they have these symbols attached to them. In the US, in the attack on the Capitol in Washington on 6 January 2021, one of the signs being carried was the Christian fish with a US flag inside it, and another was a large wooden cross. Providential proximity can also send us outside the community. The Good Samaritan was put next to the wounded traveller on the road who was not Samaritan, and in fact belonged to a people who were traditional enemies. The Spirit takes us beyond our own political community to the needs of the world outside. A difficult discernment is necessary to tell whom we are being put next to, since this is not merely a matter of geographical proximity. If my son goes to Zambia to a village in the bush to help with AIDS education, this becomes my village to help, even though there are other adjacent villages with just the same needs. The principle of providential proximity, understood in this way, is some help for an individual facing with her own limited resources the bottomless pit of need in the rest of the world. We can ask for the guidance of the Spirit about which needs we are being put next to, but also we have to be open to visiting the people with those needs in order to see if we are being called to help them. Geographical proximity, and more particularly being a fellow-­citizen, is one way we are put next to other people; the neighbour may well be the fellow-­citizen. But we are not restricted to our own polis in our discernment. And the needs of the rest of the world have to discipline our love of our own country, so that we do not fall prey to the practical contradictions discussed above. This mission beyond community is not connected to the inclusion within community by accident. If we think it is good that we have been placed in community, and we assume the responsibilities of that membership, that very commitment will have the at­tend­ ant tendency to take us beyond the community. This will be true where the community is aspiring to values that are not themselves limited to that community in their reach. One way the Spirit works to coordinate our efforts at promoting justice and peace is by putting us next to the people whom we can help, or with whom we can help others. We can listen for guidance about this. And sometimes, when we do this, we find that we are in just the right place, because of the people we happen to be, to be of significant help to the people we happen to be with. Another way the Spirit works is to guide those in authority, as ‘God turned the heart of the king of Assyria’, and we can and should pray for our leaders that when such guidance is

The Holy Spirit  133 offered, they listen to it.113 A third way is that the Spirit convicts us of sin in our political lives, so that we come to see that our collective pattern of life is in fact not consistent with the justice and peace we think we are committed to. We can return, in conclusion, to two Kantian points about political attachment. The first is that the tension between happiness and duty that lies behind the pol­it­ ical realists’ pessimism is surmounted in principle if Kant is right about the real possibility of the highest good, which is the union of the two. This is why Kant says, in the preface to Religion, ‘morality inevitably leads to religion’.114 Real possibility is different, for Kant, from merely logical possibility, and in this case he thinks the real possibility of the highest good is grounded in the existence of the ‘supersensible author of nature’ whose providence brings our attempts to follow the moral demand and our happiness together. This means that we can rationally believe that we do not have to do what immorally privileges ourselves or our national or political group in order to be happy. The realists identified patriotism as better than gross self-­interest but still ‘from an absolute perspective’ a form of selfishness, and they identified love as requiring a sacrifice of self-­attachment. If Kant’s moral theology is right (with the amendments made in sections 4.1 and 4.2 of this chapter), we can hope that under providence our attachment to our own country can be a form of practical love that is consistent with our happiness. We can now add that the political attachment can itself produce mission beyond the community as well as inclusion within it. The second point is that God coordinates our individual attempts to do good so that ‘the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.’115 We need to be modest here in our claims to understand divine working. Kant says in Perpetual Peace that from a morally practical point of view (which is thus directed entirely to the supersensible), as e.g. in the belief that God, by means incomprehensible to us, will make up for the lack of our own righteousness if only our disposition is genuine, so that we should never slacken in our striving towards the good, the concept of a divine concursus is quite appropriate and even necessary.116

Concursus (concurrence) is where we and God work together, though this kind of cooperation goes beyond the limits of our understanding. Sometimes in political life (speaking here from my own brief experience working for Congress), it is possible to feel that one is working together with a power beyond oneself and beyond the merely human, towards a more just and peaceful country and world. The

113  Ezra 6: 22.

114  Rel 6: 6.

115  Rel 6: 98.

116  PP 8: 362.

134  Love of Country danger of idolatry here does not license denying that we can ever be cooperating with the Spirit’s work; as Psalm 103: 6 puts it, ‘The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.’ We can also sometimes be aware of the opposite, a power beyond ourselves working towards disunity, towards the destruction of justice and peace. Jesus talks about ‘the ruler of this world’ in the passage quoted earlier in this section (John 16: 11), and Revelation talks not only about Jerusalem but about Babylon. The political realists discussed in section  4.3, in their dark view of domestic and international politics, were responding to the very real horrors of the twentieth century. But the conviction of all the Abrahamic faiths is that the good is more fundamental than the evil, and will in the end prevail. Our political attachments are to relative goods, not absolute goods. To think of my polis as an absolute good would be idolatry, even though love of country can be a perfection of love of humanity in the way we have been discussing. But the love of human beings can be mediated through the love of a particular political grouping, so long as there is no practical contradiction of the types described earl­ier. The point in this final part of the chapter has been that patriotism and  moderate cosmopolitanism do not need to be seen as competing loves ­(section 4.7) and that we can believe in the assistance of the Holy Spirit to bring these loves together (section 4.8). Thinking about loving our country in this way gives us more insight about the work of the Spirit. It tells us more about what the Spirit wants, and so what the Spirit is like. God is working towards justice and peace, and one of the ways God does this is through the actions of political units like countries and the actions of their citizens as citizens. We should want to ­discern when and where the Spirit is moving in this way and cooperate with this movement.

5 Contemplation Introduction The chapters so far in this book have all been about different kinds of unity and have illustrated these kinds by focusing on single examples. Chapter 2 was about unity between oneself and the world, and gave the example of aesthetic beauty and sublimity with particular reference to Beethoven. Chapter 3 was about unity in oneself, and gave the example of transgender identity. Chapter  4 was about unity between oneself and other people, and gave the example of the love of one’s own country and the relation of this love to the ideal of cosmopolitanism. This fifth chapter is about unity between oneself and God, and how we should think about this unity in relation to the practice of contemplation. All four of these chapters have a theological as well a philosophical focus. The theological focus has been an exploration of the role of the Holy Spirit, and the goal has been that we might see the character of the Holy Spirit more clearly by looking at these kinds of unity that the Holy Spirit works to bring about.

5.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I and X A chapter about contemplation engaging the Abrahamic faiths naturally starts with Aristotle. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all in different ways tried to integrate Aristotle’s thoughts about contemplation into their various philo­soph­ ic­al theologies. For Aristotle, a life focused on contemplation is the best human life. His word for contemplation, theoria, is cognate with the verb theasthai, which originally means ‘to look upon’; he is using a visual metaphor. But when we ask about the nature of this contemplation, we are led to texts in Aristotle whose interpretation is now deeply disputed between scholars, and has been deeply dis­ puted for centuries. We are not going to enter far into this scholarly literature.1 The goal in the present section of this chapter is to defend the thesis that there is a tension in Aristotle’s texts that he does not resolve; but this tension is in a way a virtue rather than a defect, because both of the things he wants to say are im­port­ ant and plausible. They are in tension with each other, but that is a tension with 1  I have written about it in other places, for example, John  E.  Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), chapter 1.

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0005

136 Contemplation which we are still faced and with which we still need to wrestle. The project is to connect this tension with different thoughts we can find within the Abrahamic faiths about what our unity with God looks like. One way to start presenting the tension in Aristotle is to compare the begin­ ning and the end of Nicomachean Ethics in the text as we have it.2 The strain here has been felt by generations of readers, and there is no originality in the following description of it. The first sentence states: ‘Every skill and every inquiry, and simi­ larly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.’3 Aristotle then explains that the ends of these two pairs differ; the ends of action are activities in accordance with excellence, while the ends of skill are products (like a bridle) which are aimed at by the artist (for example, the bridle-­maker) and exist sep­ar­ ate­ly after the practice has produced them. Goods, he says, can come in a nested hierarchy, as for example a good bridle is properly judged by a horseman who uses it, and a good horseman is properly judged by the general who commands the cavalry in battle, and so on, until we reach the end judged by the highest mas­ ter science. This is political science, the knowledge possessed by those in charge of the polis. Since political science employs the other sciences, and also lays down laws about what we should do and refrain from, its end will include the ends of others, and will therefore be the human good. For even if the good is the same for an indi­ vidual as for a city, that of the city is obviously a greater and more complete thing to obtain and preserve. For while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and more god-­like thing. Our enquiry, then, is a kind of political science, since these are the ends it is aiming at.4

It is a surprise, therefore, to read at the end of the work: So among actions performed in accordance with virtue, those in politics and war are distinguished by their nobility and extent, but they involve exertion, aim at some end, and are not worthy of choice for their own sake. The activity of

2  The work may not have been intended by Aristotle to take its present form. For one thing, books V, VI, and VII are the same as Eudemian Ethics IV, V, and VI. I have been persuaded by Sir Anthony Kenny that they originally belonged in the Eudemian. See A. Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, 1, 1094a1f, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) (henceforth NE). Crisp translates ‘skill’ and ‘inquiry’, but the Greek (techne and methodos) may mean the art and master art, related as the builder (tekton) and architect (architekton). See René Antoine Gauthier and Jean Yves Jolif, L’Ethique à Nicomache, Louvain: Pubications Universitaires, 1970, ad loc. 4 Aristotle, NE I, 2, 1094b4‒11.

Aristotle ’ s Nicomachean Ethics I and X  137 intellect (in Greek, nous), on the other hand, in so far as it involves contemplation, seems superior in its seriousness, to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its own proper pleasure, which augments the activity; it seems also to possess ­self-­sufficiency, time for leisure, and freedom from fatigue, as far as these are humanly possible. And clearly this activity also involves whatever else is attrib­ uted to the blessed person. Thus it will be complete happiness for a human being—­if it consumes a complete span of life, because there is nothing incom­ plete in matters of happiness. Such a life is superior to one that is simply human, because someone lives thus, not in so far as he is human being, but in so far as there is some divine thing within him.5

There are many claims in this last passage that need to be unpacked. We can start by observing that political science seems to have been demoted somewhere in the transition. The knowledge-­base of a ruler was, in book one, the highest master science, with the good of the city as its fine and god-­like object, valuable in itself. In book ten theoretical contemplation is the highest activity, it is strictly useless, and politics is one of those inferior activities that aims at some end. Contemplation is now what is god-­like and politics has become second rate by comparison. It is not just Nicomachean Ethics that ends like this. At the end of Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle says that ‘the finest boundary marker’ for the human good is ‘the contemplation of [the] god.’6 At the end of Nicomachean Ethics he says that the objects of contemplation are the highest objects of knowledge, things noble and divine.7 But the object of contemplation cannot only be the god in either Ethics, because Aristotle says in book six of Nicomachean Ethics (which is also book five of Eudemian Ethics) that we contemplate those things whose first principles can­ not be otherwise, and in this class he includes the essences of things, for example the essence of humanity; for Aristotle the species of all living things have essences that cannot be otherwise.8 One possible reading is that these essences are in the divine mind, so that thinking of the god will include thinking about the essences

5 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177b16‒28. I have replaced Crisp’s ‘some divine element’ by ‘some divine thing’ in this sentence and in the other sentences in this chapter, because ‘element’ implies that the divine thing is a part of the human who is contemplating, and this is exactly what seems to me unclear. Oxygen is an element in a water molecule. But a virus is not an element of the host which it invades, even though it is in the host. There is in a sense something ‘put together’ (suntheton), of which the virus is an element, but the ‘put together thing’ is not the host but the host-­plus-­virus. 6 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, VIII, 3, 1249b16‒23, using the translation of Matthew Walker in Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 162. I have spelled the word ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ in order to avoid begging the question about whether this is the same being as the ‘God’ of the great Abrahamic monotheisms. 7 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177a15‒21. 8 Aristotle, NE VI, 1, 1139a6‒8.

138 Contemplation as well. But this reading has to deal with the difficulty that Aristotle also says in Metaphysics that the god does not think of anything less than the god.9 There are, to be sure, signs already in book one and book six of Nicomachean Ethics that the transition to the primacy of contemplation is going to take place. For example, in book one chapter 5, Aristotle uses a version of the Pythagorean picture of the three lives: the life of physical pleasure, the political life, and the life of contemplation. He gives reasons for dismissing the first two as the best human life, and then says he will examine the third life later.10 In book six, he starts by making a division within the part of the soul that reasons, continuing his division in book one of the parts of the soul. He divides within the part that reasons between a part with which we contemplate those things whose first principles cannot be otherwise and the part with which we contemplate those things that can be otherwise.11 He tells us that the virtue of the first is theoretical wisdom (sophia) and the virtue of the second is practical wisdom (phronesis). Then later in the book he discusses the relation between these two wisdoms, and he says that theoretical wisdom produces happiness, not as medicine produces health, but as health itself does.12 This means that activity in accordance with theoretical wis­ dom, which is contemplation, produces happiness as its formal cause; it is what makes happiness happy. But activity in accordance with practical wisdom is only useful towards happiness, giving us what we need in order to be happy. Scholars have tried in various ways to overcome the tension described here between what look like two very different conceptions in Aristotle of the human good. We can distinguish three of these ways in the literature and then add a fourth. None of them is altogether successful. The first way is to deny that contemplation or the activity of theoretical wis­ dom belongs in mature Aristotelian thought as the chief human good. Martha Nussbaum is a proponent of this view.13 She holds that the passage quoted from book ten and the surrounding material does not belong in Nicomachean Ethics at all, but is a fragment added to the text from some Platonizing source; it might, for example, be Aristotle’s own work but from an earlier part of his career when he was closer to Plato. But there are strong objections to this story. The most im­port­ ant is the general principle that we should not excise some portion of a work, particularly the conclusion of a work, unless we absolutely have to. The develop­ mental story that has Aristotle moving progressively away from Plato is highly questionable. Moreover, as indicated earlier, there are signs earlier in the work, in 9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates  G.  Apostle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), XII, 9, 1074b30f. 10 Aristotle, NE I, 5, 1096a5. 11 Aristotle, NE VI, 1, 1139a10. Crisp translates the end of this sentence ‘those things whose first principles can be otherwise’ but there is no Greek for ‘whose first principles’. 12 Aristotle, NE VI, 12, 1144a3. 13  Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 373–7, discussed in Hare, God and Morality, 19 and 32n.

Aristotle ’ s Nicomachean Ethics I and X  139 books one and six, that Aristotle is going to reach the conclusion that he does. This first strategy is motivated by the desire (held especially by scholars who are not theists and admire Aristotle) to detach Aristotle from the project of making theology central to philosophy, and this requires scepticism about the claim that he makes theoretical contemplation central. But even in Nicomachean Ethics, he mentions god and the god-­like roughly twice as often as he mentions happiness and the happy.14 And the centrality of theology is even clearer in Metaphysics.15 A second way is the opposite. If the first way deemphasizes the part the god plays in ethics, the second not only makes it central but marginalizes the active political life as a consequence. The ‘intellectualism’ of Thomas Nagel is an ex­ample of this strategy.16 He suggests that Aristotle takes seriously the idea that the nous that contemplates is something divine in us, something not merely human. Aristotle says that ‘[the life of contemplation] is superior to one that is simply human, because someone lives thus, not in so far as he is a human being, but in so far as there is some divine thing within him.’17 Contemplation thus enables us ‘to take on immortality as much as possible’.18 Politics then, the art of the statesman, is excluded from contemplative activity and is of secondary value. Nagel puts the point epigrammatically: ‘Aristotle believes, in short, that human life is not im­port­ ant enough for humans to spend their lives on.’19 Aristotle’s linking of contemplation to the activity of the divine has made many commentators think of what he says about the active intellect in On the Soul III, 5, ‘Thought in this sense of it is separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity (for always the active is superior to the passive factor, the originating force to the matter).’20 The present chapter is not the right place to get deeply into the interpretation of this most obscure but also most intriguing pas­ sage. Of the three main classical interpretations, Alexander of Aphrodisias holds that this active intellect is the god described in Metaphysics XII; Averroes and much of the Muslim tradition of commentary holds that it is something inter­ medi­ate between this god and us, for example the intelligence of the sphere within which our earth is immediately located; and Aquinas holds that it is something in us, a proper part of us, that has an eternal destiny. Aristotle says that the active intellect is separate, and all three of these classical interpretations hold that the active intellect is something existentially and not merely analytically separate; it 14  See Hare, God and Morality, 20–1. 15  See Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, 1,1026a10f, and XII, 7, 1072b2f. 16  Thomas Nagel, ‘Aristotle on Eudaimonia’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 7–14. 17 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177b27‒8. 18 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1177b33. 19  Nagel, ‘Aristotle on Eudaimonia’, 12. See also Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 392, ‘[Contemplation] can make no practical contribution to anything at all, not even its own maintenance.’ 20 Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 5, 430a115f, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 684.

140 Contemplation can be separated from the body in fact and not merely in account. We will return to the active intellect in section 5.5. A third way to try to overcome the tension is Matthew Walker’s attempt to bring together the two conceptions of the highest human good without sac­ri­ficing either one.21 His chief reconciling move is to suppose that Aristotle holds that contemplation and theoretical wisdom are indeed useful because they give us boundary markers for practical wisdom. Walker takes the first of the views of the active intellect described above (that it is the god), and holds therefore that human intellect is passive and not active. The god is accordingly, as Plato’s Alcibiades puts it, outside the human soul, and exceeds it in pureness and bright­ ness; but like a mirror it reflects the soul to itself, so that ‘the way we can best see and know ourselves is to use the finest mirror available and look at God.’22 The uselessness that Aristotle attributes to contemplation means merely, on Walker’s interpretation, that contemplation lacks instrumental value for the sake of a higher end.23 Any highest end will usually be, in this sense, useless. A key text for Walker’s interpretation is Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which we know only in frag­ ments, where Aristotle says that by looking ‘toward nature and toward the divine’ contemplators can derive ‘certain boundary markers from nature itself and truth.’24 Walker takes it that the boundaries marked here are the boundaries of human nature, its highest and lowest points, where we border on the divine and the bestial, and that knowing these limits is indeed a profound guide in practical life.25 A person living in this way will be living, as Protrepticus puts it, in accord­ ance with himself.26 There are some difficulties with this third way. Walker stresses the similarity between humans and other animals and plants, in that all life resembles the divine, for Aristotle. But this downplays the essential difference, which is that for humans Aristotle seems to be envisaging something not merely human present in them in an activity which is separate from merely human activity. He elsewhere envisages the possibility of humans becoming gods.27 Walker denies this, but Aristotle’s point is that we would not want a friend to become a god, even though this is possible, because then the distance between us would destroy the special relationship with him. Cultures influenced by centuries of Christian and Muslim

21 Walker, Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation. 22 Plato, Alcibiades 133c8‒17, in the translation by D. S. Hutchinson, in Plato: Collected Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997). The Alcibiades is not universally ac­know­ ledged to be by Plato, and this passage in particular is suspect, because it is not in the best manu­ scripts. Some think it is a Christian interpolation. 23 Walker, Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation, 40. 24  Protrepticus 55.26–7/B50 and 55.1. The translation is by D. S. Hutchinson and M. R. Johnson, in ‘Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 29 (2005), 193–294. 25 Walker, Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation, 159. 26 Aristotle, Protrepticus 56.2. 27 Aristotle, NE VIII.4. It is true that Aristotle also seems to deny that one would want to become a god, in NE IX. 4, 1166a20, because one would cease to be oneself. But the text here is corrupt.

Aristotle ’ s Nicomachean Ethics I and X  141 theology are not used to this degree of permeability in the divine/human divide, but it is a characteristic feature of Greek religion. Moreover, Aristotle claims that the gods’ central activity is contemplation (for, he asks, what else would it be appropriate for them to do?), and they are likely to reward humans who are the most like them in this respect.28 That is one reason contemplators are the most likely to be happy. But the largest difficulty with Walker’s account is that even though there may be the feedback loop he claims between contemplation and the rest of human life, Aristotle does not seem to be claiming that this is the point of contemplation. If it were the point, he would not say, as he does, that the political life is a second best.29 So we are left with the tension we started with. There is a fourth way which tries to make intelligible why there should be such a tension, without eliminating it.30 We can make the comparison with another notorious tension in Aristotle’s thought. In Aristotle’s teachings about substance, we seem to have incompatible claims. In Categories we are told that primary substance is individuals like Socrates, and their humanity and their animality are secondary substance.31 In Metaphysics, by contrast, primary substance seems to be form, which is the humanity that Socrates and Callias share; they differ in matter.32 One way to understand what has happened here is that Aristotle has moved in the transition from Categories to Metaphysics to a different question, and the different questions produce these different answers.33 In Categories he is asking, ‘What is the best way to sort out the world into its basic components at a single time?’. But then, in Physics he introduces the investigation of change across time, which does not get discussed in Categories at all, and then the question naturally arises, ‘What is it that makes a thing able to persist across change?’. The answer is form. Callias can stay the same individual across change, whereas there is no good answer to the question whether a mere heap (such as a heap of sand) is the same heap when the wind has blown away a few grains. The form is here the complex internal organ­ izing life-­structure that humans have and heaps of sand do not. Now we can make the comparison. At the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is asking what is the chief human good, and the answer is that it is what a ruler knows who knows how to run the city with all its parts working together for the common good. It will be a kind of thinking, since this is what ruling cities involves. To achieve a good for an individual is indeed good, but for a city it is

28 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1179a24‒9. 29 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1178a9‒14. 30 Hare, God and Morality, 45–51. See also John E. Hare, ‘Aristotle and the Definition of Natural Things’, Phronesis, 24/2 (1979), 68–79. 31 Ásta, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, & Other Social Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2a11f. 32 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 8, 1034a6‒9. 33 I am following here the analysis of Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form and Psyche: An Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

142 Contemplation nobler and more divine.34 But then Aristotle asks himself, ‘What is it that makes some kind of thinking able to sustain the best human life?’. And the answer is the purity of its objects, since in thinking we become one with the objects of our thought. And this in turn leads to a different answer about the chief human good. Contemplation of the purest objects requires separation from the humdrum activities of political life. Even if the transition here is intelligible, this does not eliminate the tension. We are still left with two different ideals of the human life. In later thought, they are given labels: the active life (vita activa) and the contemplative life (vita contemplativa). We are better off as exegetes if we acknowledge that there are traces of both ideals in Aristotle. We are better off because we do not then have to try to force any passage out of its natural meaning, or delete it as not properly included in the text. The rest of this chapter will claim that the resulting tension is in fact fruitful. The chapter will raise three questions, and they will structure the remain­ ing sections (after section 5.2) which are not about Aristotle at all. Sections 5.3 and 5.4 are about the first question, sections 5.5 and 5.6 are about the second, and sections 5.7 and 5.8 are about the third. The three questions arise out of the ten­ sion just described, and they can be found to have resonance in the theological traditions that try to reconcile the Greek philosophers with the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The chapter will treat mainly of Christianity, but will make references to the other two, without attempting to claim that they are saying just the same thing.35 The point is that when we see intelligent people within different faiths wrestling with the same sorts of difficulties, this suggests that these problems are real and that we can learn from each other’s wrestling with them.

5.2  Three Questions Here are the three questions that derive from the tension outlined in section 5.1: First, what is the role of desire in contemplation (since contemplation, as Aristotle says, aims at no end)? Second, is it we who contemplate, or the god who contem­ plates in us (since contemplation, as Aristotle says, is done by some divine thing within us)? Third, what is the relation between contemplation and the rest of human life (since contemplation is, as Aristotle says, useless)? Most of the rest of this chapter is not about Aristotle, but nonetheless his relation to each of these questions needs a brief preliminary discussion. The thesis of the chapter is that these same tensions emerge in later religious accounts of contemplation, and that 34 Aristotle, NE I, 2, 1094b10. 35  I have written about the relations between the three in John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapters 5, 6, and 7.

Three Questions  143 it is helpful to think about these tensions in the light of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. First, we can start thinking about the role Aristotle gives to desire in contem­ plation by looking at his account of desire (in Greek, orexis) in book VI, 2.36 He distinguishes between contemplative thought (here dianoia) and thought that is either practical or productive. The good states for contemplative thought are truth and falsity, and for practical or productive thought the good state is truth in agreement with right desire.37 Thought by itself moves nothing, he says, but it only moves something if it is goal-­directed and practical. There is an implication in this passage that pure contemplative thought is not conjoined with desire, and such conjunction is only to be looked for in practical and productive thought. If we then move to book X, 7, we find a similar distinction between contemplation and action. ‘Again, contemplation alone seems to be liked (agapasthai) for its own sake, since nothing arises from it apart from the fact that one has contemplated, whereas from the practical virtues, to a greater or lesser extent, we gain some­ thing beyond the action.’38 Similarly a few sentences later, Aristotle says that vir­ tuous actions in politics aim at some end, whereas the activity of intellect aims at no end [that is] outside itself.39 It is easy to misread this as saying that contempla­ tion does aim at an end, namely itself. But Aristotle’s statement here is merely negative (no aiming); it does not, by implication, affirm the positive (aiming at itself); rather, he says that the whole business of ‘aiming at an end’ or being ‘goal-­ directed’ is foreign to contemplation and fits with desire and practice. On this picture contemplation is, in Aristotle’s technical term, an activity rather than a movement or process; like seeing, it is complete at every time, and does not aim at an end at all.40 The linguistic sign of this is that with an activity, like seeing, if I can say ‘I am seeing’ it is at the same time true to say ‘I have seen’; with a move­ ment, like walking to Larissa, if I am walking to Larissa it is not at the same time true to say ‘I have walked to Larissa.’ On the other hand, in the following chapter, Aristotle says that the person who cultivates (therapeuon) the intellect is likely to be dearest to the gods, since it is reasonable for them to reward a person who is most like them in liking (agapontas) and honouring intellect the most.41 Looking after or tending the activity of intel­ lect sounds more like a process. The word translated ‘cultivates’ is the word for doctors’ care of patients or shepherds’ of sheep. There is a tension here because Aristotle does not seem sure about whether our best available, god-­rewarded,

36  I am using Roger Crisp’s translation, and he prefers ‘desire’ for the Greek orexis, but there is no good translation for this term. ‘Desire’ is better as a translation of epithumia. Philosophers use the term ‘desire’ to cover the wanting of all the things we want, but the term in ordinary usage is more restrictive. 37 Aristotle, NE VI, 2, 1139b35‒7. 38 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177b1. 39 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177b18‒20. 40 Aristotle, NE X, 4, 1174a14‒21. 41 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1179a22‒9.

144 Contemplation state is one of aiming at something or already, so to speak, being there. In book twelve of Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the god moves all things by being loved.42 The question is whether the contemplator is envisaged as one of the things being moved by this quasi-­magnet, and not merely moved to reproduce (like other forms of life) or rotate (like the spheres), but moved to think. If so, is not this being moved a kind of desire? Aristotle’s view in both texts might be that there are first movement and then pure activity. In relation to the second question, about who is doing the contemplating, there is tension in these same chapters at the end of book ten. Aristotle says that the life of the contemplator ‘is superior to one that is simply human, because someone lives thus, not in so far as he is a human being, but in so far as there is some divine thing within him.’43 He goes on, If the intellect, then, is something divine compared with the human being, the life in accordance with it will also be divine compared with the human life. But we ought not to listen to those who exhort us, because we are human, to think of human things, or because we are mortal, think of mortal things. We ought rather to take on immortality (athanatizein) as much as possible.

But there are different ways to take this passage. It could be that Aristotle is saying there is a part of us which is still human but not merely human; it has an activity like divine activity, and because it is the best part of us, our best life will be the one that privileges its activity. Or Aristotle might be saying that there is an activ­ ity in us which is not a human activity at all, but the activity of some non-­human thing in us, a divine thing. The exegete has the task of relating this passage to the passage already men­ tioned about the active intellect in On the Soul III, 5. One way to take this second passage is that there is something active in us which is not human, but divine. This was the interpretation of the great Muslim commentators, and it was picked up by Maimonides. They are not saying that it is God who is directly active in this way, but that it is some intermediate intelligence, the intelligence governing the sphere in which we are immediately located. The interpretation that it is God directly has also been defended both in the ancient world (by Alexander) and by contemporary exegetes.44 The relation to the end of Nicomachean Ethics is tan­tal­ iz­ing, because the active intellect is said to be immortal in the way the Ethics says we should be ‘as much as possible’. But the extent to which this divine activity in us is our activity is not settled by this text on the active intellect. It is true that Aristotle says, in the very next sentence of the Ethics, ‘[The intellect] would seem, 42 Aristotle, Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072b3‒4. 43 Aristotle, NE X, 7, 1177b26‒8. See the note on this passage in section 5.1. 44  See V. Caston, ‘Aristotle’s Two Intellects: A Modest Proposal’, Phronesis, 44/3 (1999), 199–227.

Three Questions  145 too, to constitute (einai, to be) each person, since it is the authoritative and better thing; it would be odd, then, if he were to choose not his own life, but something else’s.’45 But there are different ways to take this sentence as well, and they follow on from the different ways of taking what has come before. Aristotle might be saying that the intellect whose activity he is talking about is a proper part of us, and the best part, so that we should identify ourselves as constituted by its activ­ ity. Or he might mean that there is something higher than us with which we should identify, in that its activity in us is what constitutes us. This is, alas, how Aristotle thinks of the relation between a master and a natural slave, because it is the master’s thought that controls the slave’s activity; and it is how Aristotle thinks of the relation between a husband and a wife, because an authoritatively rational, good husband deliberates on behalf of his wife.46 In general, Aristotle’s view is that if we have a ruling relation, the ruler, by authoritatively guiding the subject, can be said to be an end for the subject, or ‘that for the sake of which’ the subject has its existence, and so to constitute the subject.47 The third question is about the relation of contemplation to the rest of human life, and we can again find two different views of this in Aristotle. One view integrates contemplation into the rest of a person’s life and the other view separates it. An example of an integrationist view is that of Matthew Walker discussed earlier. This view acknowledges that Aristotle describes the activity of contemplation as useless, but proposes that he means merely that it is not directed at a further end.48 Aristotle has an aristocratic conception of a good human life in accordance with which the gentleman (the ‘noble-­and-­good man’) is at leisure, and does not have to work for a living. The work of the gentleman’s household is done by slaves. The virtue that is misleadingly translated as ‘generosity’ (eleutherioties) is in fact the virtue characteristic of a free man (eleutheros) as opposed to a slave.49 But Aristotle is also in dispute with Isocrates about the value of contemplation, which Isocrates regards as useless in a different and pejorative sense. Isocrates says, Most men see in such studies nothing but empty talk and hair-­splitting, for none of these disciplines has any useful application either to private or to public affairs; nay, they are not even remembered for any length of time after they are

45  Crisp translates in a question-­begging way, as ‘since it is his authoritative and better element’. But the Greek contains no word for ‘his’ and no word for ‘element’. 46  On slaves, see Politics I, 5, 1245b4‒5, in The Complete Works of Aristotle II, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1975; and see Aristotle, NE V, 6, 1134b9‒12, where Aristotle says that the slave (as property) is ‘as if ’ (hosper) part of the master. On husbands and wives, see Politics I, 13, 1260a12‒14. 47 Aristotle, NE IX, 8, 1168b31‒2; and Aristotle, Politics III, 17, 1288a26‒8. 48  See Walker, Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation, 13–41. 49  See John E. Hare, ‘Eleutheriotes in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Ancient Philosophy, 8 (1988), 19–32.

146 Contemplation learned because they do not attend us through life nor do they lend aid in what we do, but are wholly divorced from our necessities.50

Uselessness here means being of no practical use, and on the integrationist view Aristotle means to deny that contemplation is useless in this sense; he affirms that contemplation gives us the ‘boundary markers’ by which we can make practical decisions, and thus serves as a good steersman on the ship of life.51 Within the alternative view that separates contemplation from the rest of life we can distinguish various degrees of separation. The highest degree would be where humans do not do the relevant kind of contemplation at all, but some divine thing does it in them. But if we assume that humans contemplate, there is still the question about whether all humans do this, or only some separated group of them. And even if we think contemplation is the work of a special group, there is the question whether the times they contemplate have to be separated from the rest of their lives. Each of these degrees of separation gives a stronger sense to the ‘uselessness’ of contemplation than the straight integrationist does. For example, if we think of a separated group such as philosophers doing the contemplation for all human beings, and then giving the boundary markers to people with practical excellence such as statesmen, there will not be a feedback loop within the prac­ tical life, but this life will take its direction from outside itself. Aristotle’s own position is not clear. We have already discussed whether he thinks the relevant contemplation is done by humans at all.52 In Protrepticus he does not distinguish between theoretical and practical wisdom, and he also does not seem to distin­ guish between thinkers (philosophers) and rulers. His picture here seems more like Plato’s Republic with Philosopher-­ Kings (though there is no sign of Philosopher-­Queens). But at the end of Nicomachean Ethics his picture seems to have a division of labour, with a hierarchy attached. He says that life in accord­ ance with intellect is best and pleasantest, lived in leisure and free from fatigue. But ‘the life in accordance with the other kind of virtue [presumably, practical virtue] is happy in a secondary way, since the activities in accordance with it are human.’53 These lesser activities require all sorts of external equipment, whereas ‘a person who is contemplating needs none of these, for that activity at any rate; indeed, one might say that they are even obstacles, to contemplation at least.’54 One natural way (though not the only way) to take these passages is to suppose

50 Isocrates, Antidosis 285, in Isocrates, ed. and trans. G.  Norlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). 51 Aristotle, Protrepticus 10, 55.26–56.2/B50. I have used the text prepared by D. S. Hutchinson and M. R. Johnson (2008), http://www.protrepticus.info, accessed 20 December 2020. 52  I say ‘the relevant contemplation’ because Aristotle sometimes uses the term ‘contemplate’ (theorein) to cover a different sort of looking, namely looking at material things. 53 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1178a9‒10. 54 Aristotle, NE X, 8. 1178b3‒5.

What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation?  147 that different people are living these two different kinds of life, and the lives of the first set are happier.

5.3  What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation? Augustine, Bonaventure, and Scotus What happens when Aristotle is brought into contact with the Scriptures that the Abrahamic faiths regard as divinely inspired? We will focus in this section on three figures within Christian intellectual history; there is an enormous variety of views about contemplation within this history and we will look at just one partial trajectory. The first figure is Augustine, and in particular his work On Free Choice (De Libero Arbitrio), and the second and third are the Franciscan philosophers Bonaventure and Scotus. The focus will be on what happens to the notion of con­ templation in the texts we will be looking at. In section 5.4 we will look at some contemporary accounts of how to analyse thinking about the good, and at the Christian doctrine of justification, and we will end with a discussion of Iris Murdoch’s idea of being pulled towards the good as by a central magnet. The name of the work by Augustine just mentioned is often translated as On Free Choice of the Will.55 But there is no word in the Latin of the title for ‘Will’, and the work is better left as ‘On Free Choice’. Nonetheless, Augustine does have a word for ‘will’, namely voluntas. There is no word in Plato and Aristotle that cor­ responds to this.56 Augustine is giving a philosophical version of the biblical idea of the heart. He is often portrayed in the iconography as holding his heart in his hand, and Calvin took from Augustine his personal motto, ‘My heart I offer to you, Lord, promptly and sincerely’. Augustine’s Confessions begins by saying to God, ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’ The biblical notion of heart is pervasive and here is just one example, from the closing exhortation of Moses to the people of Israel: See I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God . . . the Lord your God will bless you. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow  down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you will perish. . . . Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.57

55 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993). 56  I say this even though my tutor at Oxford, Sir Anthony Kenny, wrote a book called Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (London: Duckworth, 1979). Aristotle does have the notion of a rational wish (boulesis), but this is different. I can wish for something I cannot bring about, for example the victory of my favourite sports team, but I cannot usually will this. 57  Deuteronomy 30: 15–19.

148 Contemplation The heart is what responds to God by saying either yes or no. In On Free Choice Augustine is led to talk about the heart or will because he is trying to answer the question put to him by Evodius, ‘Is God the source of evil?’. Augustine’s answer is, ‘No, but we are’, and the source of this evil in us is the choice in our heart or will to say no to God. Why then did God give us the freedom to choose in this way? Because, says Augustine, God wants us to act rightly and it is only possible to act rightly if we act freely. The introduction of the will into this discussion shifts the conception of our happiness. For Augustine in On Free Choice our happiness is to contemplate the eternity of Truth and fully enjoy and cleave to it.58 In that seeing and enjoying, the soul finds its unity and its beauty.59 Sometimes in this text Augustine makes the contemplating introductory to the cleaving, and sometimes he simply says that our happiness is where ‘the will cleaves to the common and unchangeable good’ and sin is where the will turns away from this.60 The notion of wisdom (sapientia) follows this conjunction of seeing and willing. Augustine says that wisdom is ‘dis­ cerning and acquiring’ the highest good.61 The discerning is a kind of seeing and the acquiring is by loving, which is the activity of the will. It is one thing, he says, to be rational and another to be wise; the rational nature grasps the command­ ment about what is to be loved and the will obeys it, placing all inordinate desires under the control of the mind.62 The difference from Aristotle is that the loving is a turning towards or a pursuing; it is what Aristotle would call a process rather than an activity, since he at least sometimes denies that contemplation (the activ­ ity of theoretical wisdom) involves aiming at any end. For Augustine those are wise ‘who devote all of their energy to searching for the truth so that they might come to know themselves and God.’63 Augustine is closer here to Plato than to Aristotle, for Plato too emphasizes that reason has its own eros, and this love is consummated in a kind of union. Augustine says that happiness is to enjoy and embrace the Truth, and he teaches, like Plato in the Symposium, an ascent of love to its summit in union.64 Bonaventure goes further than Augustine, though he depends heavily on his authority. One relevant text is the Second Collation of Hexaemeron (on the six days of creation), entitled ‘On the Fullness of Wisdom in which Speech must End, that is: On the Door of Wisdom and its Beauty’.65 Bonaventure divides up the consideration of wisdom into four parts: 58 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, III. 21. 59 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, III. 23. 60 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, II. 19. 61 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, II. 13. 62 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, III. 24, and I. 9. 63 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, II.9. 64 Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, II.13. 65 Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure V: Collations on the Six Days, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 21ff (henceforth Collations). See also Bonaventure, The

What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation?  149 Light clothes itself in four different ways. For it is seen as uniform in the rules of divine Law, as manifold in the mysteries of divine Scriptures, as assuming every form in the traces (vestigia) of the divine works, and as without any form in the elevations of divine raptures.66

In the first part his primary example is the first table of the Ten Commandments (prescribing our duty to God), ‘which are so certain that they could not be other­ wise.’ The second part is a description of the different ways in which Scripture illuminates us. The third part is an account of the traces of God’s work in the forms and proportions of the material world which reveal immaterial forms and proportions. But the fourth part, or wisdom’s fourth face, is the most relevant to the present chapter. Bonaventure appeals here to the Song of Solomon and also to Dionysius the Areopagite, who supposedly actually heard the teaching from Paul in Athens.67 The teaching concerns a kind of contemplation that is a form of love.68 Bonaventure says, The one I want to love is above any substance or knowledge. And here is an operation that transcends every intellect: a most secret action, which no one knows unless he experiences it. For in the soul there are several apprehensive powers: the sensitive, the imaginative, the estimative, the intellective: and all must be rejected, and at the summit there is union of love which transcends them all. . . . Now this contemplation comes about through grace.69

Triple Way, in The Works of Bonaventure I: Mystical Opuscula, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960), 87, ‘Since the love of the spouse is strong, close intimacy must weld you to Him, so that you may exclaim: For me to be near God is my good; and also: Who shall sep­ar­ate us from the love of Christ? These steps follow a definite order. There is no stopping before the last one; and the last one cannot be reached except through those intermediate, which are intimately correlated. At the third step, reason is at work; at all the following, the affections of the will dominate. Whereas, indeed, watchfulness reasons how fitting, enriching, and delightful it is to love God, trust, as if born of it, gives rise to desire, and this, to rapture, until a state of union, tenderness, and embrace is attained; to which may God lead us . . . Amen.’ 66 Bonaventure, Collations II. 8. 67  The work Bonaventure appeals to, Mystical Theology, is actually a much later work, probably from the fourth or fifth century. 68 Bonaventure, Collations II. 29–32. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Blackfriars, 1969) (henceforth ST), I–­IIae 3, 6, ‘Happiness consists in the activity of the speculative intellect rather than the practical. This is evident for three reasons. First, if man’s happiness is an activity, it must be man’s highest activity; his highest activity is that of his highest power with respect to its highest object; his highest power is his intellect and its highest object is the divine good, which is an object of the speculative, not the practical, intellect. Hence happiness consists in such an activity, that is, in the contemplation of divine things principally. And since “each man seems to be what is best in him [quoting Aristotle]”, such an activity is more proper and satisfying to man than any other.’ But see also Aquinas, ST suppl. 92, 1, ad 6, ‘in this sense [the sense in which matter is propor­ tionate to its form] nothing hinders our intellect, although finite, being described as proportionate to the vision of the Divine essence, but not to the comprehension thereof, on account of its immensity’ (emphasis added). 69 Bonaventure, Collations II. 30, emphasis added. I am going to use the term ‘apprehension’ more broadly below, in distinction from ‘comprehension’, to include the awareness internal to loving.

150 Contemplation This state, Bonaventure continues, cannot express itself to other people in words. He is in ecstasy and hears secret words that man may not repeat, because they are only in the heart. [In this union of love] the power of the soul is recollected, and it becomes more unified, and enters in its intimate self, and consequently it rises up to its summit: for according to Augustine, the intimate self and the sum­ mit are the same. . . . For Christ goes away when the mind attempts to behold this wisdom through intellectual eyes, since it is not the intellect that can go in there, but the heart.

There are two features of this account of contemplation that are important for this chapter. The first is the emphasis on love, which makes Bonaventure say that we are in the territory of the heart and not that of the intellect. In the same way, four centuries later, Jonathan Edwards calls contemplation the exercise of the heart. He says, ‘[The exercises of grace within the soul] are what the saints often have in contemplation when the exercise is within the heart alone.’70 The second feature is the emphasis on unity, which Bonaventure takes from Augustine. In the ‘operation’ of contemplation the soul becomes one with itself through recollec­ tion, and thereby rises to its summit; it becomes most itself. Scotus is in the next generation of Franciscan theologians after Bonaventure. He defends the view that theology is a practical science, because it apprehends God as one to be loved.71 This is a departure from the Aristotelian view according to which ‘theology’ is the name for a theoretical study, the highest part of Metaphysics.72 For Scotus a science is called practical with reference to its object, and the object of theology is God as ‘one who should be loved and according to rules from which praxis can be elicited [chosen].’73 He replies to the objection that a person’s love of God is contingent, and therefore cannot strictly (by Aristotelian standards) be the object of a science. His reply is that there can be necessary truths about contingent things, and it is a necessary truth that God is to be loved by us. His position about the first table of the law (of the two tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai) is like Bonaventure’s; these prescriptions about our duties to God are self-­evident, known from the terms (ex vi terminorum).74 But because the object of theology extends to practice, it exercises the will whose characteristic activity is loving.

70 Edwards, Jonathan Religious Affections, ed. James Houston (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany, 1984), 177. 71  John Duns Scotus, Lectura, prol., pars 4, qq.1–2, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 127–35. 72 Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, 1, 1026a24. 73 Scotus, Lectura, 132. 74 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III, suppl. dist. 37, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 199–207, especially 202. He hesitates, however, about the periodicity of the Sabbath law.

What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation?  151 In Scotus, the will differs from the intellect in that the proper object of the intellect is something universal and the proper object of the will is something particular; the universal (e.g. humanity) is contracted by a ‘thisness’ (for example, Socrateity, a ‘haecceity’) which makes its bearer unique. As discussed in Chapters  1 and  4, his view is that the haecceity is a perfection of the common nature which is universal, shared between all the individuals who belong to it. Again, this is a departure from the Aristotelian picture where two individual humans, say Callias and Socrates, have the same essence, namely humanity, but differ in matter.75 The haecceity of Socrates is, for Scotus, a perfection of the com­ mon nature, and therefore the loving of it has a higher object than the under­ standing of the humanity shared with Callias. The greater perfection of the individual is a greater unity, and unity requires that there be some entity, the haec­ce­ity or individual essence, that confers this unity. The individual essence makes an individual ‘that to which division into subjective parts is repugnant and [that] to which not being this designated thing is repugnant.’76 We may not understand the haecceity, but we can love what we do not yet understand. This is true with our love of ourselves, with our love of other people, and with our love of God. This point does not deny that what is willed or loved must be previously cognized, but it is possible to love something cognized for some character (its essence) that has not yet been understood.77 We could use the distinction here between apprehension and comprehension. I can apprehend (be aware of) your essence without comprehending (understanding) it. Scotus holds that we love our own happiness, not only in general but in particular, and this particular happiness is ‘a fruition of the divine essence shared by the three divine persons’.78 Our goal is to enter, that is to say, into the love that the three persons of the Trinity have for each other; to become co-­lovers (condiligentes). This love is not, like happiness in general, something universal which is the proper object of the intellect; it is some­ thing particular which is the proper object of the will.79 We have here the same 75 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 8, 1034a6‒9. But the meaning of this passage is much disputed. 76  John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 3, q. 6, in ‘Ordinatio II d.1–3 Volume Seven of the Critical Edition. On Creation, and the Angels’, in Scotus Ordinatio, trans. Peter L. P. Simpson (2014) (https:// aristotelophile.com/current.htm/), accessed 20 December 2020, 391–2. 77  Nihil volitum quin praecognitum. See John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl. dist. 49, q. 9, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 158, ‘The will requires apprehension in the intellect for its own act of willing.’ See Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, III.25, ‘Only something that is seen can incite the will to act.’ But I can love a person for her ‘thisness’ without yet understanding what this ‘thisness’ is. Scotus also sometimes says that we have an intuitive intellectual access to an individual, not by abstracting the universal from sense impressions, but directly. See Robert Pasnau, ‘Cognition’, The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 285–311. But the interpretation is disputed. 78 Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl. dist. 49, q. 9, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 159. See Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, III.21. 79 Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl. dist. 49, q. 9, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 157, ‘That it seeks happiness in particular in this fashion, is evident, because this appetite is directed towards a perfection in which the will is really perfected; but real perfection is not something general or univer­ sal, but something singular. . . . But the universal is only an object of the intellect or something

152 Contemplation structure as we saw in Bonaventure, in which love transcends understanding. For all the scholastics our final end involves both seeing (a beatific vision) and loving. But for Bonaventure and Scotus the seeing (the act of the intellect) is introductory to the loving (the act of the will), and this view needs to be distinguished from the view that what is primary is the seeing and the loving is a consequence of this. For Scotus there is a further distinction. Our loving of God for God’s self is to be distinguished from our love of God that involves essential reference to our union with God, and from the delight resulting from this union. The first of these three forms of our love of God is wanting God to have everything good, and we could want this even if ‘everything good’ did not include our union. This distinc­ tion comes from the prior distinction Scotus takes from Anselm between two affections of the will: the affection for justice and the affection for advantage. The affection for advantage is a drive towards our own happiness and perfection, and the affection for justice is a drive towards what is good in itself, independently of our own happiness and perfection. So the first form of our love of God is the operation of the affection for justice, and the other two are different operations of the affection for advantage. There are two ways in which Scotus adds to Bonaventure here, first the doc­ trine of thisness or haecceity, and second the doctrine of the two affections.80 Scotus does not, like Bonaventure, describe the ecstatic union as a kind of con­ templation. But he does emphasize, like his predecessor, that the destination is not primarily understanding in the intellect but loving in the will.

5.4  Belief, Desire, and Justification In response to this point we might become sceptical about the very distinction between understanding and loving, or between belief and desire. Does it not seem as though the destination involves both, so intimately tied to each other that the attempt to disentangle them is a foolish and misguided aiming at precision? Jonathan Edwards makes this point, Nor can there be a clear distinction made between the two faculties of under­ standing and will as acting distinctly and separately but when the mind is aware of the sweet beauty and amiableness of something, this sensitivity of its loveli­ ness and delightful character gives one a taste, or inclination, or will for it.81 consequent upon an action of the intellect; therefore, this appetite in the will refers to happiness in particular.’ 80  I have argued in favour of both of these doctrines. One place is the final chapter of God and Morality, in which I try to combine what I see as the merits of all four of the preceding systems dis­ cussed in the book (the systems of Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, and R. M. Hare). 81 Edwards, Religious Affections, 108.

Belief, Desire, and Justification  153 Edwards is not saying here that there is understanding of beauty and then ­sep­ar­ate­ly love of it, but that the first is already the second. Philosophers have coined the word ‘besire’ for something that is both a belief and a desire.82 One might have a belief that it is good to do something and a desire to do that thing, and it is a hard question how to analyse the relation between these two. It is tempt­ ing to say they are different ways to describe the very same thing. A better view is prescriptive realism, the view that when I judge that something is good I am both attributing a real property to it (namely goodness) and expressing my motivation towards it (for example, my motivation to do it, if the thing is an action). To put this the other way round, I am both expressing my motivation towards it and say­ ing that it deserves to motivate me in that way because the property is really there. This is a kind of ‘judgement internalism’, that holds the motivation internal to the judgement if the judgement is full-­fledged.83 But it does not reduce the judge­ ment to the expression of a motivational state; rather, it holds that there is a prop­ erty attribution that is independent of that motivational state, in the sense that the thing would deserve to motivate me even if it in fact does not. Prescriptive realism holds that we have the speech act of evaluative judgement in our language because we want to be able to combine both these features. We want to be able both to express our own commitment (so that when we say ‘this is right’, we are implying ‘If I were you I would do it’), but also we want to be claiming that some value property outside us is properly eliciting this response. It is worth sorting out the ‘prescriptive’ part of this from the ‘realist’ part because they are different even though in normal value judgements they are conjoined. Prescriptive realism also helps us understand one prominent version of the Christian doctrine of justification. The doctrine of justification by faith, which was central to the disputes between Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation, includes in one of its forms the view that a person’s faith is her assent to the proposition that God has saved her or that Christ’s right­ eousness has been imputed to her.84 If we examine this proposition and what assent to it requires, we will find that we are dealing with something like a ‘besire’. One guide to what is going on here is the famous analysis of faith by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Truth, or faith (which he says is equivalent), is ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of

82  See, for example, Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). I have discussed some of the forms of internalism and defended what I call ‘prescriptive realism’ in God’s Command, chapter 4; and God’s Call (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), chapter 1. 83  There is a way to make this claim trivial, by stipulating that ‘full-­fledged’ means ‘accompanied by the motivation’. By contrast, my point is substantive, that we in fact operate under this norm for evalu­ ative judgement, for the reasons given later in the text. 84  I am describing here the view attributed to Melanchthon in Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 118–41.

154 Contemplation the most passionate inwardness.’85 Faith (or truth) is here called ‘an objective uncertainty’, and Climacus is contrasting Christian faith with belief in the truth of a scientific proposition, that for example a water molecule is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or the truth of a historical proposition, that for example William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings in 1066. The scientist, like the historian, is aiming at affirming a proposition that does not require her to  be living a kind of life or being a kind of person. But the person coming to Christian faith has personally recognized that she is a sinner, that Christ is right­ eous, and that Christ’s righteousness has been imputed to her. To appropriate this composite truth requires passionate inwardness. In Augustine’s term, it requires the heart. We can put this point in terms of prescriptive realism. If she makes the judgement that she is a sinner, she is expressing her motivation to change. If she makes the judgement that Christ is righteous, she is expressing her motivation to change so as to be more like him. But she is not merely expressing these mo­tiv­ ations. She is also acknowledging that she has offended against, and Christ has kept, standards of holiness that are there whether she has those motivations or not. This view of justification by faith is very different from what is described in a well-­known critique of the doctrine, which is part of a larger ‘decline of the West’ narrative that traces the sources of the rot to the Franciscans, and especially to Duns Scotus.86 The particular targets in Scotus of this critique are what is claimed to be an anti-­realism in his view of universals and what is alleged to be a denial of the fundamental distinction between God and the creation that results from Scotus’s view about the univocity of ‘being’. On the latter point, Scotus’s view is that there is sufficient sameness of meaning between the ‘being’ of God and the ‘being’ of creatures to allow valid inferences like the cosmological argument (of which he has the most elaborate version in the whole of scholastic theology) which moves from the second to the first. On the former point, Scotus is in fact a realist about what he calls ‘natures’ and also about the individual essences that perfect them. Also, his view about God and creation is that God’s being is infinite and ours is finite, and this is a fundamental divide that does not allow any mixing of natures. But for our present purpose the key is something the critique says is derived from these two supposed errors. What is supposedly derived from the ‘nominalist univocal metaphysics’ is the view that justification is a ‘legal fiction’— Christ’s righteousness is ‘imputed’ and not ‘imparted’ to us—­a purely legal or ‘forensic’ declaration by God that clothes us externally in Christ’s righteousness. 85 S.  Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. and ed. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 203. 86  I have in mind the critique by John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 79f. I have myself talked with Milbank about this critique, and he was prepared to allow that there might be two ways to read Scotus, one of which locates him as the source of the rot and the other reads him as the last of the traditional­ ists whose words were taken in heterodox ways by his followers.

Belief, Desire, and Justification  155 This view of justification is supposed to be anti-­realist, because it makes a ‘real, inward reworking of our nature’ unnecessary. It makes faith a purely intellectual assent to ‘a neat set of propositions about [Christ’s] saving significance’, and this ‘was often deemed . . . to make no essential experiential difference to the human subject.’87 The derivation from Scotus’s view of the univocity of ‘being’ is sup­ posed to be that ‘the space [that connects God and human beings] is philo­soph­ic­ al­ly pre-­determined as a space of facts or empirical propositions,’ and this rules out an account of salvation in terms of real participation.88 The Reformers, however, talked in a different way about imputation, and pre­ scriptive realism is a good way to analyse one of their central themes. In Melanchthon’s Apology, for example, we find the view that in justification by faith ‘we are not talking about an idle knowledge, such as is also to be found in the devils, but about a faith that resists the terrors of conscience and which uplifts and consoles terrified hearts.’89 ‘Faith . . . is conceived in the terrors of the con­ science that experiences the wrath of God against our sin and seeks forgiveness of sins and deliverance from sin.’90 This theme of consolation is found repeatedly in his writing, and it makes manifest that he does not see the faith that justifies as ‘bare assent’ to some proposition in the intellect, but as ‘an assent to God’s every word . . . through God’s Spirit renewing and illuminating our hearts’.91 The con­ nection of this consolation with the work of the Holy Spirit is the topic of the fol­ lowing sections of the present chapter. But the present point is that saving faith, on this account, is experienced affectively in trust. To use the phrase of Johannes Climacus, there is ‘passionate inwardness’. John Wesley recorded in his journal his experience after hearing someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, While he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.92

87 Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 226. 88 Catherine Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance’, Modern Theology, 21/4 (2005), 554. 89  Philip Melanchthon, Apology 4. 249, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. and trans. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), p. 158. I am following the analysis of Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, 126. 90 Melanchthon, Apology 4. 142, Book of Concord, 142. 91  Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, trans. Christian Preus (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 119, emphasis added. I am grateful to James Dunn for dis­ cussion of this point. 92  John Wesley, The Journal of John Wesley, ed. Hugh Price Hughes (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1957), chapter 2, Wednesday, 24 May 1738.

156 Contemplation ‘Justification by faith’ was a doctrine that Wesley had accepted with his mind, and the content was rehearsed to him by the reading of Luther, but the actual trusting was a gift to his heart. Melanchthon’s account of justification by faith gives expression to a theme he found in Augustine. This theme is present in On Free Choice, but it becomes more conspicuous in Augustine’s later anti-­Pelagian writings. In On the Spirit and the Letter Augustine repeats an emphasis in Romans 5: 5, where Paul says that ‘hope does not disappoint because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.’ Augustine says, [Human beings] receive the Holy Spirit so that there arises in their minds a delight in and a love for that highest and immutable good that is God. . . . By this [love] given to them like the pledge of a gratuitous gift, they are set afire with the desire to cling to the creator and burn to come to a participation in that true light. So that they have their well-­being from him from whom they have their being.93

He continues that the Holy Spirit transforms us by ‘substituting good desires for evil desire, that is, pouring out love in our hearts.’ This passage illustrates how the account of the work of the Spirit has room for the language of ‘participation’, and we will come back to this. What does this discussion of justification by faith have to do with contempla­ tion? We could arbitrarily confine the term ‘contemplate’ to a cognitive as opposed to an affective activity. But this does not fit the experience of many Christian con­ templators. It would be better, if we had the term, to say that contemplation is the activity of a ‘besire’, both a belief and a desire. But prescriptive realism gives us a way to say the same thing without the neologism. When we make the judgement that something we are contemplating is good or bad, we both express our mo­tiv­ ation towards or away from it and we claim access to some value that justifies this motivation but is independent of it. We might contemplate in this complex way our sin, and Christ’s passion. Putting the point this way gives us an explanation for why evaluative judgement is both prescriptive and realist. The judgement is both of these because the goodness and badness (which is the object of the judge­ ment) is both there in the world and motivating the person making the judge­ ment. Seeing the goodness is also being drawn by it, as by a magnet. The point is that the contemplation of our sin and Christ’s passion will usually have both cog­ nitive and affective dimensions; we will find our sins bad, indeed in Melanchthon’s description ‘terrifying’, and we will find Christ’s suffering both wrenching and then, as Melanchthon describes it ‘consoling’. We can go back to Teresa’s 93 Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (New York: New City Press, 1990), 1, 123: 145f.

Belief, Desire, and Justification  157 description of her contemplation of the passion and its results that was quoted in Sir Tobie Matthew’s translation in Chapter 3, though this is not specific to justifi­ cation. She says, The pain of it was so excessive, that it forced me to utter those groanes; and the suavitie, which that extremitie of paine gave, was also so very excessive, that there was no desiring at all, to be ridd of it; nor can the Soule then, receave anie contentment at all, in lesse, then God Almightie himself.

The cognitive and the affective elements in this experience are mixed together; but the extreme pain and the sweetness that resulted came from an encounter with nothing less than God Almighty, and this encounter forced groans, we might say, too deep for words.94 To end this section of this chapter we can bring in one more writer, who is Platonist but not Christian, and whose imagery is helpful. Iris Murdoch, in her works The Fire and the Sun and The Sovereignty of Good, draws on Plato’s picture in Republic VII of the cave and our ascent up into the light of the sun.95 The image that Murdoch adds is the image of the magnetic centre. Plato also uses the image of a magnet, but in a different context. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, Socrates describes Ion the rhapsode (a performer of songs written by others) as being connected with the Muse in the same kind of way that a chain of iron rings is connected with a magnet; the Muse draws the poet who draws the rhapsode who draws the audi­ ence.96 Murdoch uses the image of the magnetic centre to explain further Plato’s image in Republic VI of the sun, which is in turn his picture of the Form of the Good. Murdoch says: ‘A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the idea of goodness and the Good.’97 One aspect of this mystery is that ‘we are largely mechanical creatures, the slaves of relentlessly strong selfish forces the nature of which we scarcely comprehend.’ How is it that such creatures can attain virtue? The answer is that we are drawn by the good, as by a magnet. But the second aspect of the analogy is that, as Plato says about the sun, the centre is difficult to look at: ‘We somehow retain the idea, and art both expresses and symbolizes it, that the lines really do converge. There is a magnetic centre. But it is easier to look at the con­ verging edges than to look at the centre itself.’ If an iron filing is drawn by mag­ netic force, its ‘apprehension’ of the force and its being drawn by the force are not separated. In Plato’s vocabulary, the apprehension of this force is love (eros), and each of the three parts of the soul has its own characteristic eros. Plato does not 94 See Romans 8: 26. 95  Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), and The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 96 Plato, Ion 533–4, trans. Lane Cooper, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 97 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 99f.

158 Contemplation hold that reason is a higher part and love a lower, though one kind of desire ­(epithumia) is lower. The good, for him, is the sort of thing that when you ‘see’ it, you are drawn to it, and you want to instantiate it, whether in yourself or in the world outside. This is one reason the philosophers want to go back into the cave after seeing the sun.98 But the second point of the analogy is that the ‘seeing’ is actually very difficult, just as it is difficult to look up at the sun. We apprehend more easily what is itself drawn to the magnetic centre rather than the centre itself. Moreover, we are distracted by false images. Murdoch has much to say about the power of art to give us self-­gratifying phantasy and illusion that obscure the real source of value. She is repeating the reasons Plato banished most artists from the Republic, though she also holds that art can have power for uncovering these illusions. She herself thinks that any attempt to personify the good (which Plato himself some­ times does) is one of the comfortable illusions that we have to unmask.99 But for the purposes of the present chapter the important point is that we can be drawn by something we do not yet understand and are in fact blocked from understand­ ing by our own defects. That is why the term ‘apprehend’ is appropriate for our relation to the good, and not ‘comprehend’, though Plato holds out the hope for full comprehension when our souls are separated from our bodies. There is a third aspect of the analogy. One might think that the movement of the iron filing is only to the point of its touching the magnet, and then it is at rest. But actually it has to go on being attracted if it is to stay at that place. If we return, finally, to Aristotle, we can see a way in which Plato is closer to the view of Augustine and Bonaventure and Scotus than Aristotle is. This is not at all surpris­ ing. Bonaventure holds that whereas both princes of philosophy are in error, the error of Aristotle is greater, and Augustine gets the balance right. Section 5.2 of this chapter did use the picture of a magnet to describe Aristotle’s view that the god moves everything by being loved, but claimed that this was a view in tension with his prevailing view that contemplation is an activity in his technical sense, not a movement, and that contemplation therefore does not aim at anything. The claim that love is central in contemplation is at odds with Aristotle’s usual view. Some theologians have proposed that while loving may have (as in I Corinthians 13: 13) priority down here on earth, that is because we have not yet attained the beatific vision; when we reach heaven our happiness will consist in the seeing and the loving will simply follow as an after-­effect.100 The picture in this chapter, by contrast, is that there is a contemplation even in the next life that is centrally though 98  I learnt this interpretation of Plato from Gregory Vlastos. But there are other reasons the philo­ sophers go back. They have obligations to the city like their obligations to their parents. 99  In the Republic Plato describes the Form of the Good as king (509d), as having children (508b), and (most remarkably) as happy (526e), trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 100  See Aquinas’s Commentary on I Corinthians 13: 13, in Gerald Bray and Thomas C. Oden (eds.), 1–2 Corinthians: Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture NT, vol. vii (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006). But see also Aquinas, ST II, IIae, q.23, art. 6.

Who Is Doing the Contemplating?   159 not exclusively the activity of the heart. Perhaps even then we do not see the essence of God as it is in itself, though we see more, because we would have to be infinite in the same way God is infinite in order to do so. Perhaps being em­bodied, albeit with resurrection bodies, imposes limits on us that are not limits on God. But even then we can love what we do not comprehend.

5.5  Who Is Doing the Contemplating? Ibn Tufayl, Maimonides, and Eckhart There is a second tension in Aristotle, different from that between contemplation as activity and as movement or process. This is the tension between thinking of contemplation as something we do and thinking of it as something the divinity does in us. We looked in sections 5.1 and 5.2 of the chapter at various in­ter­pret­ ations of Aristotle’s difficult texts on this topic. The present section of the chapter is going to proceed by looking at three theologian-­philosophers from different Abrahamic faiths: Ibn Tufayl, Maimonides, and Meister Eckhart. The aim will be to show a continuity in the difficulty that all three thinkers have experienced in writing about this question. The section will attempt to defend the view that we remain as subjects in the contemplating, and the Holy Spirit helps us to do so. This view will relate to the previous section of the chapter, because we need to preserve the sense that in contemplation we are being moved as well as being, sometimes, at rest. We can start with Ibn Tufayl, since his work is chronologically first of the three texts. He was born shortly after the beginning of the twelfth century about 50 miles northeast of Granada, and had a distinguished career serving the Almohad sultan. We will focus on his work Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, which tells the tale of a man growing up on an island where he is the sole human inhabitant. The details of how he got there are fascinating, but not germane to our present purposes. He works out all by himself that God exists and that his own task is to imitate God. There are many stages of this imitation, but what is relevant for us is the final stage. Ibn Tufayl had been asked by the sultan to unfold ‘the secrets of the oriental philosophy mentioned by the prince of philosophers, Avicenna.’101 In particular, Ibn Tufayl quotes Avicenna’s description of the gradual progress of the devotee which culminates when his inmost being becomes a polished mirror facing toward the truth. . . . At this level he sees both himself and the Truth. He still hesitates between them; but then, becoming oblivious to self, he is aware only of the Sacred Presence—­or if 101  Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, ed. and trans. Lenn Evan Goodman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4.

160 Contemplation he is at all aware of himself, it is only as one who gazes on the Truth. At this point communion is achieved.

Ibn Tufayl describes at the climax of his tale how Hayy experiences this kind of communion. He has been moving through the various stages of imitation of ‘the necessarily existent’. He realizes that all the positive attributes of this being ‘reduce to His identity, . . . and that His self-­awareness was not distinct from Himself, but His identity was Self-­consciousness and His Self-­knowledge was Himself.’102 Hayy comes to think ‘that if he himself could learn to know Him, then his knowledge of Him too would not be distinct from His essence, but would be identical with Him.’ This achievement would require, however, the disappearance of Hayy’s own subjecthood; it would require him to die to himself. When he enters this state of death, from memory and mind all disappeared, ‘heaven and earth and all that is between them’ [quoting from Quran V, 20‒1], all forms of the spirit and powers of the body, even the disembodied powers that know the Truly Existent. And with the rest vanished the identity that was himself. Everything melted away, dissolved, ‘scattered into fine dust’ [quoting from Quran LVI, 6]. All that remained was the One.

This is, however, not the end of the story. Hayy comes to see that there is an error in thinking of all those disembodied beings who know Him merging into one entity. The error lies in thinking of ‘many’ and ‘one’ outside the domain of physical things. What is free of matter ‘need not be said to be either one or many’. Ibn Tufayl here imagines that Hayy is interrupted by an opponent, a bat blinded by the sun, crying out, ‘This time your hair-­splitting has gone too far. You have shed what the intelligent know by instinct and abandoned the rule of reason. It is an axiom of reason that a thing must be either one or many.’103 The image of the bat blinded by the sun comes from Aristotle, ‘For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.’104 Ibn Tufayl’s point against the bat is that our reason has its limits in our ordinary understanding, and these limits are the limits of the sensible world (as in Kant, though Kant does not put these limits on reason). When think­ ing beyond these limits, we should therefore abstain from using the terms ‘one’ and ‘many’ as though we understood them in the ordinary sense. The bat tried to use an axiom that we are not in fact entitled to when we are talking about the divine world. Hayy does, however, give us hints about the divine world. He talks of the heavenly spheres and their intelligences as a series of mirrors where the 102  Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 118f. 104 Aristotle, Metaphysics a1, 993a30f.

103  Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 125.

Who Is Doing the Contemplating?   161 first reflects the Source, and the next reflects the image in the first, and so on, with the series ending downwards in the active intellect governing the world under the moon, which has 70,000 faces, and every face has 70,000 mouths, and every mouth has 70,000 tongues. But gradually Hayy comes back to his usual con­ sciousness, and ‘as the world of the senses loomed back into view, the divine world vanished, for the two cannot be joined in one state of being—­like two wives: if you make one happy, you make the other miserable.’105 In this tale we find a tension similar to the one we found in Aristotle. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan initially wants to affirm both of two propositions, but ends up conceding that neither of them can be right in any ordinary sense. The first is that in the act of contemplation he disappears into God or the One. The second is that he is a separate disembodied spirit amongst an enormous plurality. The truth of the mat­ ter is something ineffable, but beyond ‘one’ and ‘many’. Hayy does not take the step of saying that the world of the senses is unreal and any axiom of reason derived from reflection upon it needs to be renounced. He remains wedded, as it were, to both wives. Ibn Tufayl feels the need at the end of the work to explain that Hayy’s specula­ tions are not appropriate for the ordinary faithful Muslim. He tells how Hayy ends up visiting a populated island and tries and fails to communicate what he has seen.106 In Moses Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, we again find a tension. Maimonides was Ibn Tufayl’s contemporary, born also in Andalusia, but in 1135.107 He was exiled when the regime became less tolerant of the non-­Muslim population, and at the end of his life he was chief rabbi in Alexandria. The in­ter­ pret­ation of this work is full of difficulty, and we will rely on some secondary sources, but the tension is well known. Guide for the Perplexed occupies an ambiguous position in regards to Jewish orthodoxy, and is deliberately marked by its author as an esoteric work, not meant for the ordinary faithful member of the community but for the highly educated minority who are having trouble with the Greek philosophical texts (especially Aristotle). It is unlike in this way Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, which has authoritative status as a codification of Rabbinic law; they say: ‘From Moses to Moses there is none like Moses.’ The tension in Guide for the Perplexed is similar in many ways to the tension in Nicomachean Ethics, but is presented, as it were, the opposite way round. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle starts with a focus on practice and ends with a con­ clusion that privileges theoretical contemplation. In Guide for the Perplexed Maimonides starts with an intellectualist view of the human being,

105  Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 153. 106  Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 163. 107  I have given a fuller treatment of this tension in Maimonides in God’s Command, chapter 7.

162 Contemplation as man’s distinction consists in a property which no other creature on earth ­possesses, viz. intellectual perception, in the exercise of which he does not employ his senses, nor move his hand or his foot, this perception has been compared—­though only apparently, not in truth—­to the Divine perception, which requires no corporeal organ. On this account, i.e., on account of the Divine Intellect with which man has been endowed, he is said to have been made in the form and likeness of the Almighty.108

On the other hand at the very end of the work, he says, ‘The way of life of [a perfect] individual, after he has achieved his apprehension [of God], will always have in view loving-­kindness [hesed], righteousness [tsedeqah] and judgment [mishpat], through assimilation to His actions.’109 Hermann Cohen takes the emphatic placement of this declaration, at the very end of the whole work, to mean that Maimonides is taking what Cohen thinks is a fundamentally Kantian line about the primacy of practical reason.110 In the first of these passages, from book one, Maimonides is analysing the teaching from Genesis 1 that humans are made in the image (tzelem) and likeness (demut) of God. How can it be, however, that God can be said to have an image at all?111 Isaiah 40: 18 asks, ‘To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness [demut] will ye compare unto Him?’. Maimonides himself repeats this thought: ‘One must likewise deny, with reference to Him, His being similar to any existing thing.’112 The solution to this difficulty, at least as Marvin Fox interprets Maimonides, is to say that a human can be absorbed into the divine being, when the purified intellect so to speak breaks out of its bodily housing and is united with the divine agent intellect: Some reflection will reveal that this is the same as saying that man is similar to God only at the point where he stops being fully man and is, instead, conjoined with the divine being. At that stage, we are no longer comparing man to God or God to man, but only God to himself. . . . When we are told that man is created in the image and likeness of God, we are being informed of the remarkable poten­ tial that man has for self-­transcendence. He can, so to speak, leave his human

108 Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M.  Friedländer, (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), i, 1, p. 14 (henceforth Guide). 109 Maimonides, Guide, iii. 54, 397. 110  See Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan (New York: Ungar, 1972), 240–1. I am not claiming here that Cohen represents a consensus of scholarly opinion. 111  When I was lecturing in Lahore, Pakistan, and I ventured to say that humans are in the image of God, a Muslim cleric in the audience was deeply offended by the idea that God would have an image; that thought was, to him, idolatry. 112 Maimonides, Guide, i. 55, 78.

Who Is Doing the Contemplating?   163 form and elevate himself to the point where he is absorbed into the divine being.113

There is a similarity between this suggestion of Maimonides (if Fox is right) and the suggestion of Avicenna and its initial endorsement by Ibn Tufayl about dis­ solving into the divine. Like Ibn Tufayl, also, the doctrine is intellectualist, in that what is active in this highest state is intellect. Maimonides talks of a double per­ fection for human beings: The second [and higher] perfection of man consists in his becoming an actually intelligent being; i.e., he knows about the things in existence all that a person perfectly developed is capable of knowing. This second perfection certainly does not include any action or good conduct, but only knowledge, which is arrived at by speculation, or established by research.114

But as in his Muslim contemporary, there is also an ambivalence about this sug­ gestion. This ambivalence is manifest in the emphasis on loving-­kindness, right­ eousness, and judgement at the end of the work. One key is to discern what Maimonides means by saying that knowledge of God is followed by imitating God’s ways. One natural reading (Cohen’s reading), though not the only one, is that the life of following God’s ways is not merely consequent on the knowledge but gives the knowledge its telos; when God gives us the knowledge, God’s aim is that we should live a certain way (that imitates God). Our perfection would then result in our knowing not just God and God’s providence, but ‘the manner in which it influences His creatures in their production and continued existence.’ And this will determine us ‘always to seek loving-­kindness, judgment, and right­ eousness, and thus to imitate the ways of God.’115 If this is right, then we have a tension similar to that in Ibn Tufayl. In both cases the author is attracted to the idea that we are ‘absorbed into the divine being’. But in both cases there is also resistance to this idea, deriving from the thought that we are to remain centrally committed to a life of well-­ doing. Contrary to Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics X, our perfection and our likeness (demut) to God lies not just in our thinking well but in our doing or acting well.116 113 Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990), 171. Again, I am not claiming that this exe­ gesis represents any scholarly consensus. 114 Maimonides, Guide, iii. 27, 313, emphasis added. 115 Maimonides, Guide, iii. 54, 397. Another interpretation is that for the sufficiently advanced con­ templator the practical life, though really present, is like a kind of sleep-­walking, and the contempla­ tion is continuous. See Guide, iii. 51. 386f. 116 Aristotle, NE X 8, 1178b5f, ‘We assume the gods to be supremely blessed and happy; but what sort of actions should we attribute to them? . . . If we were to run through them all [all the ethical vir­ tues], anything to do with actions would appear petty and unworthy of the gods.’

164 Contemplation The third figure we will consider is Meister Eckhart, and especially his reflections in his Sermons on the story of Jesus’s dealings with Martha and Mary. Eckhart was born some time before 1260 in either Saxony or Thuringia. He was a Dominican and taught at the University of Paris, becoming head of the Order at Strasbourg in  1312. His originality lies partly in the fact that he taught in the vernacular, in  German, but also in the content of his teaching, which was condemned as heretical two years after his death, in 1329. The story is told in Luke’s gospel (10: 38f) how Jesus visited the home in Bethany of Martha and Mary (and Lazarus, though he is not mentioned), who were his friends. The home is described as Martha’s, and so she is presumably the older sister. While Martha is busy making the preparations for their meal, her sister Mary sits at Jesus’s feet, drinking in his words. Martha says to Jesus, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me.’ Jesus replies, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset by many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’ Eckhart deals with this story several times. Sometimes he agrees with the con­ ventional interpretation, which is that Mary represents the interior life and Martha the exterior, and the interior is intrinsically better. Thus in Sermon 101 he says, ‘This rest of the inner man in the divine wonder born of vision and divine love, transcends in its perfection and its sweetness any activity of the outward man, and for nine reasons.’117 The fifth and the ninth reasons are relevant to us. In the fifth reason, Eckhart asks why Mary did not answer Martha’s request for help. He replies, ‘She did not hear, because she was with her inner man in the Word whose word she was attending to. For the soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving natural life.’ In the ninth reason, he partially defends Martha. Jesus says that Mary has chosen the better part, but Eckhart quotes Augustine saying, ‘Martha had no bad one; hers was a good one, too, though Mary had the best.’ The outward life of works of mercy has value, and may even take precedence in this world where we are faced with poverty and woe. Eckhart appeals to Augustine’s teaching that if I see a man in need and I fail to help, I am guilty towards him and I ought to lend him aid. Eckart concludes, ‘In cases then of real necessity, to use the works of the outward man for the relief of one’s own self or neighbor is better than to settle down to the interior man’s spiritual idleness of mind and will.’ We might note that getting Jesus’ dinner ready on time is not clearly a case of ‘real necessity’ or ‘poverty and woe’. In this situation Mary is still given the prize on this interpretation. In two Sermons, however, Eckhart takes a different approach. Before we get to that, it is worth exploring just why contemplation is given the prize. This is an 117  Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, ed. Franz Pfeiffer and trans. C. de B. Evans (London: John Watkins, 1924), 255.

Who Is Doing the Contemplating?   165 area of Eckhart’s doctrine that partly explains his posthumous excommunication under John XXII in 1329. Meister Eckhart holds that when I contemplate, I can achieve perfect rest, which is the absolute freedom from motion.118 The soul is ‘freest of all when she transcends her selfhood and flows with all she is into the bottomless abyss of her primordial mold, into God himself.’ In this union the soul is dead, not only to all outward but also to all inward ghostly acts. God operates unhindered, and the soul bears his godly operation to which she yields obediently enough for God to bring to birth his only Son in her no less than in himself. . . . Man rising to the summit of his mind is exalted God.119

In two Sermons, as just mentioned, Eckhart gives a different picture of the rela­ tion between the two sisters. In the first, he starts by ‘translating’ the opening line of the passage from Luke as follows: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a certain fastness and was received by a certain virgin who was a wife.’120 There is in fact nothing in the Greek or the Latin Vulgate that corresponds to ‘a virgin who was a wife’; there is simply ‘a woman named Martha’. But Eckhart is giving us what he thinks is the spiritual meaning of the passage. A virgin is ‘a person void of alien images, free as he was when he existed not’. This is a person who is ‘dead not only to all outward but also to all inward ghostly acts’, as described above. But, Eckhart says, this virgin (Martha) is also, like a wife, fruitful. For a man to receive God within him is good and in receiving he is virgin. But for God to be fruitful in him is still better: the fruits of his gift being gratitude therefor, and in this newborn thankfulness the spirit [or ‘Spirit’?] is the spouse bearing Jesus back into his Father’s heart.

Here again is the idea that the Son is born within us, but now Jesus is carried back to the Father, and this is the fruit which the virgin bears a hundred and a thou­ sandfold, ‘nay, numberless her labours and her fruits in that most noble ground.’ And this fruitfulness is contrasted with ‘those whose hearts are wedded to pray­ ing, fasting, vigils or other outward discipline and mortifications of the flesh’. The

118 Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, Sermon 12, 45. Note the parallel with Aristotle’s view on contempla­ tion and motion discussed in section 5.2. 119  Eckhart is intellectualist in the same sense as Maimonides and Ibn Tufayl. He thinks of the contemplation described here as an activity of intellect. But he is not always consistent about this. In Sermon 87 he asks (Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, 219), ‘Now the question is, Wherein does happiness lie most of all? Some masters say it lies in love. Others, it lies in knowledge and in love, and these come nearer to the mark. We, again, contend it neither lies in knowledge nor in love, but there is in the soul one thing from which both knowledge and love flow and which itself does neither know nor love like the powers of the soul. Who knows this knows the seat of happiness.’ The language about ‘rising to the summit’ is found in Bonaventure, as quoted earlier, and traced there back to Augustine. 120 Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, 8, 35f.

166 Contemplation contemplator who has reached this higher stage ‘has motion taken from him and all things stand intrinsic in him’, and this is because he has entered the eternal now, in which there is no past or future, just as there is no past or future for God. But this does not mean there is no activity, but that there is no process (in terms of Aristotle’s dichotomy, though Eckhart does not use these terms). In a second Sermon on this text, Eckhart talks more directly about the detail of  the passage, and is more explicit about his reversal of the conventional ­in­ter­pret­ation.121 On his new interpretation, when Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to get up, this is because Martha, being older than Mary and understanding life ­better, sees that her sister is in danger of ‘dallying in this joy’ of sitting at Jesus’ feet. Actually, Martha knows the best thing is to be as Martha is, ‘with things but  not in things’. Martha is at rest, ‘untroubled’, though she knows she would be troubled if she were to allow herself to be in the things she is dealing with.122 She is ‘transported to the circle of eternity’, ‘united [with God] in joyous eternity’. She is ‘led into God by the light of His Word and embraced by them both in the Holy Spirit.’ She receives ‘an eternal will’. When Jesus says Mary has chosen the  better path, he means that Mary has chosen to be like Martha, and is now beginning her schooling that will lead her there. ‘The best thing that can befall a creature shall be hers: she shall be blessed like you.’123

5.6  God and Creature Eckhart’s interpretation is not plausibly defensible as exegesis, but it is richly sug­ gestive as philosophical theology. What is wrong about all three of these medieval treatments of the question whether we are contemplating or whether God is self-­ contemplating in us? A good place to begin is with eternity. In the classic state­ ment of Boethius, only God has eternity strictly speaking, and it is ‘that which grasps and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending life.’124 Boethius is here attacking both Aristotle and Plato, who think (he says) that the universe is unending. They mistakenly make the created world co-­eternal with its creator. Actually, Boethius thinks, ‘it is another thing to grasp simultaneously the whole of unending life in the present; this is plainly a peculiar property of the mind of God.’ All three of the authors we have been looking at caused significant suspicion to the orthodox. They blurred the line between the eternal and the

121  Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009), Sermon Nine, 83f. 122  There is a contrary passage that describes Martha as actually troubled (Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, 87), but the text is probably corrupt. 123 Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, 88. 124 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. W.  V.  Cooper (London: J.  M.  Dent, 1902), V, prose 6, 161–2.

God and Creature  167 everlasting and so between God and us. Aristotle lived in a culture in which the dividing line between the divine and the human was permeable, and it was not hard to think of a human becoming a god. But the Abrahamic faiths have tended to insist on the divide. So we can find in all three authors an ambivalence about their own views. Thus, Eckhart, immediately before saying that man rising to the summit of his mind is exalted God, says that the soul, be she never so far gone from self, goes on being creature.125 It is not only philosophical theologians who blur this boundary. More humble devotional poetry does the same. George MacDonald, now best known for his children’s stories like The Princess and Curdie, also published much poetry, and here is the penultimate stanza from ‘Rest’ published in 1872.126 Who dwelleth in the secret place, Where tumult enters not, Is never cold with terror base, Never with anger hot, For if an evil host should dare His very heart invest, God is his deeper heart, and there He enters in to rest.

Someone insisting on the boundary between creator and creation would not say ‘God is his deeper heart’. Union between the believer and Christ is one thing, but identity is another. A distinction can be made here between those who, like Bonaventure and Scotus, emphasize the heart as the place of the union, and those, like the three authors we have been looking at, who emphasize the intellect. In the Aristotelian tradition there is indeed an identity between the thinker and the object of thought. God is thought thinking itself and there are not two items here but one. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan starts to think that because God’s Self-­knowledge is Himself, if Hayy could learn to know God, then his knowledge of Him too would not be distinct from His essence, but would be identical with Him. Maimonides, on the in­ter­ pret­ation by Fox, holds that a human can ‘elevate himself to the point where he is absorbed into the divine being’. Eckhart can say that man is exalted God. Intellectualists do not have to blur the distinction between creator and creature, but it is easier for them to do so. For the thinker who wants to insist on the distinction between creator and creature, and who wants to make love rather than understanding primary in the 125 Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, Sermon 12, 46–7. 126  George MacDonald, ‘Rest’, in A Hidden Life and Other Poems (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co, 1872), 249–51.

168 Contemplation account of our destination, there is an additional point. What draws our love is a person loving us. We experience this with love between human beings, but we experience it also in relation to God. The following two claims seem truthful. First, we do experience love from beyond ourselves and from beyond all human beings, though sometimes we experience the love from other human beings as also love from beyond human beings. Second, we experience in ourselves a responding love that also seems from beyond ourselves. The Scriptures associate this second responding love with the work of the Holy Spirit. A key text is Romans 8: 26‒7, In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

This passage tells us that there is an activity of God inside us. When we run out of our own resources, God the Spirit intercedes for us, and the groans that are too deep for words seem to be our groans (as in verse 23, three verses earlier, though the parallel can be disputed). The passage seems to say that the one who searches our hearts, namely God, knows the mind of the Spirit in those hearts of ours, because that is where God is searching. There is an extraordinarily close union implied here. The Spirit intercedes for me in my heart because the Spirit knows, as I do not, what I should pray for. This praying in me by the Spirit causes in me groans too deep for words. Then God who searches my heart knows what I am praying through the intercession of the Spirit. The union is intimate, but the important point for present purposes is that I do not lose my agency or self-­hood in this. The Spirit knows, as I do not, what I should pray for, and when the Spirit intercedes, the Spirit is still presenting me and my heart to the Godhead. The pas­ sage needs to be understood in the light of what comes just before, in verse 23: ‘We ourselves, who have the first-­fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children (huiothesian), the redemption of our bodies.’ Again it is we who groan, and it is the Spirit who deposits in us the down-­ payment, as it were, of what we are going to be in our final state. This final state we do not yet know, but the awareness of the seed of this state and the longing for its fulfilment cause us to groan, again because we cannot express it in words. In this verse, then, as in verse 26, there is something we love or yearn for already, even though we do not yet understand it and cannot articulate it in words. The lesson of this section of the chapter is that if we think of contemplation as including the activity of loving what is not yet understood, there is no need to think of it as static. It does not have to be an activity in the Aristotelian sense of what is already complete. Contemplation can be a process, not an activity, but it is not thereby condemned to second-­rate status. It is not defective just because it

How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life?  169 has not arrived at some destination. Maybe walking to Larissa is better than being at Larissa. But this is a misleading analogy, because it suggests that there is a des­ tin­ation different from the process. Perhaps life with God is motion, not just arrival. This is not to say there is no rest. But perhaps times of rest are best under­ stood not as the destination but as part of the process. In this way, perhaps, we are different from God, though the Process Theologians may disagree.127 For Boethius eternity is uniquely a property of God, strictly speaking, and God gathers together endless life into a simultaneous ‘now’.128 But perhaps even in the next life we do not do this; we are still in motion, still coming to understand better and love better, but not arrived. This would mean that only God is strictly eternal, as Boethius says, but around God are the blessed in heaven and the faithful angels and there will be the new heaven and the new earth, all of which we can speculate are in a new time, one not measured by our sun.129 If this is right, it has large implications for how we should think about what we do and what God does in our contemplation here in this life. If I agree that God is active in my contemplation through the work of the Holy Spirit, it is tempting to think that this divine activity is already the best thing in me and that I will end up with just this best activity in my final state. This might seem to license the conclusion that my des­tin­ation is to ‘go into God’, as Eckhart puts it. But if my contemplation is part of an ongoing and ever deepening union of will, there is no need to think of the process part of this as dispensable, like a husk that needs to be winnowed, so that I can be left in pure activity. The process can be the main point.

5.7  How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life? Scotus and Kierkegaard The third question from Aristotle we started with is about the relation of contem­ plation to the other parts of human life, and in particular about whether contem­ plation is to be integrated into those parts or separated from them. In Aristotle

127  Alfred North Whitehead divides God up in Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 345, ‘God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent.’ 128 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, V prose 6, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1962), 115. The Latin for ‘endless’ is interminabilis, and the translation ‘everlasting’ is misleading because it suggests the sense that philosophers have indeed given it, namely ‘being present at all times’. Boethius’ term has specific reference to the absence of an end, not the absence of a beginning. 129  Something like this is required by Kant’s picture of the next life as one of unending progress towards holiness. There will be noumenal change, but not in time, which is conceived as one of the two forms of intuition. Kant thinks of God as someone ‘to whom the temporal condition is nothing’, but of us as beings who continue to move towards holiness. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary  J.  Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (KpV), 5: 123. In Chapter 6 we will indulge in some speculation about what this picture might mean for the doctrine of a final judgement.

170 Contemplation there is a tension between different theses he wants to maintain. At the end of Nicomachean Ethics it looks as though there is a best human life focused on con­ templation, the activity of nous in accordance with theoretical wisdom (sophia), and a second-­best life which is focused on action in accordance with the practical virtues, exemplified by the life of politics. At the beginning of the work it looked as though we were headed to a different destination, to an account of the life of the statesman as the best life, organized by practical wisdom (phronesis). In sec­ tion 5.1 of this chapter we looked at various strategies for resolving the tension, and did not find any of them satisfactory. Can we make any further progress in thinking about the role of contemplation in a good human life after the discus­ sion in sections 5.3 to 5.6? This chapter has argued that contemplation should be seen as including the loving of what is contemplated, but it has so far ignored the demands this places upon our attention. How much time should be set aside? In the case of loving other human beings, especially those we are called to care for, large amounts of time are required, and not just time but good time, in the sense of focused time where we are not at the same trying to do other things. Are we not supposed to love God with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength?130 Scotus has much to say about what this requirement means.131 He is writing about the infused virtue of charity, and asking whether we are required to love God ‘above all’ in this way, or whether (as he says that Augustine and Anselm and Lombard say) this is not ‘a precept that one is obliged to fulfill’, but rather ‘an ideal towards which we ought to strive.’ Scotus starts by disagreeing with this, holding that since God is the greatest good, we can love God above all even with the natural will. But he ends up agreeing with his predecessors if we include under ‘loving above all’ the requirement ‘that the will exert the sort of effort it could if our powers were all united and recollected and all impediments were removed.’ He is here repeating the language of Bonaventure about the union of love in which ‘the power of the soul is recollected and it becomes more unified.’132 Scotus is realistic about the fact that ‘the propensity of the inferior powers in the present state impedes the superior powers from acting perfectly.’ For example, a perfect loving with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength would require that we always be thinking about God; but in the present state we cannot do this. He dis­ tinguishes between loving ‘above all’ extensively and intensively. The first we can do in this life, by preferring ‘more readily that all else should cease to be rather than that God not exist.’ The second needs another distinction, between how strong or firm a love is and how fervent or tender it is. Scotus holds (like Kant) that the will is more important here than the feeling in the sense appetite. 130  Mark 12: 28–30. 131 Scotus, Ordinatio III, suppl. dist. 27, art. 3, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 279f. 132 Bonaventure, Collations II. 31.

How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life?  171 The sense of sweetness in our loving is ‘a certain rewarding feeling associated with the will-­act whereby God nourishes his little ones and draws them to himself lest they fall by the way.’ But both are good, and when we add both kinds of intensity to the extension of the love, it becomes clear that Scotus is talking about a love where maximum time and attention and concentration are called for, and this is only possible by approximation in our present circumstances. It is very natural to think that if this is what loving God above all looks like, the life of a monk or friar is an excellent way to practice it, and something like that life is required. The respect in which such a life is excellent is that it allows a good deal of separation from the activity of the ‘inferior powers’ and it allows a greater ‘unity and recol­ lection of the faculties’. There is however, an opposing point of view. Kierkegaard in Either/Or con­ structs an inside picture of two lives, and the hint of a third. We discussed these pictures in chapter 3 in relation to the notion of a life-­story. Kierkegaard’s genius is to make these lives plausible through the pseudonyms under which he writes, so that one can see in oneself the potential to lead such lives. It is hard to dip one’s toes into this elaborate construction, because what makes it plausible are the details and especially the vivid imagery. For our purposes the most important part is the description of the ethical life as manifest in volume II, which consists of two enormous letters (like the two tables of the law) that Judge William writes to an aesthete, named as ‘A’ in volume I (which is an artistically arranged series of his papers). The judge is concerned that A is on the path to self-­destruction, and he writes in the second letter about how A can save himself by entering into the ethical life. The aesthete’s life is focused on how to find his own life interesting and how to avoid boredom. Judge William thinks that all A’s strategies to achieve this are going to fail; he is headed for depression and despair. But this, says the judge, is A’s opportunity. If he will collect together all his failures to sustain inter­ est in his life, and recognize that he has failed and will fail, then he can choose this despair.133 And in this choice he will find his eternal dignity, his freedom. Since this position of freedom is what essentially characterizes human beings as such, he will also discover the ethical life in which all humans have the same eternal dignity. There are some fatal side-­roads, however, that the judge warns A against, some aberrations that would prevent this transition. One of them is what Judge William calls ‘the mystical’, and its central activity is contemplation.134 The paradigm example of this mistaken way is to enter the monastery, but the judge comments that ‘in our day the market value of the monastery has fallen.’135 The central error

133  Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 211. 134 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 231. 135 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 328.

172 Contemplation of this way is to choose oneself abstractly. As the judge pictures entering into the ethical life, it requires repenting of one’s life as a whole, ‘choosing oneself as guilty’, but then repenting back into oneself, so that one stays in the life and chooses for each of its components either ‘to annul it or to bear it’.136 It is only if the repent­ ance is in this way concrete that it can be, in the judge’s view, free. Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on him­ self, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself—­not until then has a person chosen himself ethically, not until then has he repented himself, not until then is he concrete, not until then is he in his total isolation in absolute continuity with the actuality to which he belongs.

We can condense Judge William’s critique of the mystical under three ­headings, at the same time replacing the male with female pronouns as we have indicated by square brackets in what follows, because the critique applies also to female mystics. The first is that the mystic ‘cannot be absolved of a certain obtrusiveness in [her] relationship to God.’137 Either this is because she rejects the existence, the actual­ ity, in which God has placed her, or because she thinks she is, because of some accidental characteristic, ‘a favorite in God’s court’. The second heading is that the judge has observed a kind of softness in the mystic, who ‘wishes always to be convinced in [her] innermost heart that [she] loves God in truth and honesty’. The problem is that the mystic is continually assailed by ‘flat moments’, and longs for the repetition of the ‘luminous moments’ that she remembers. ‘Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer [she] can, as it were, creep into God.’ The judge thinks we need, by contrast, a ‘cheerful boldness’ to believe not just in God’s love for us but in our love for God. The third heading is that the mystic’s life is ‘a decep­ tion of the world in which [she] lives, a deception of the persons to whom [she] is bound or with whom [she] could establish a relationship if it had not pleased [her] to become a mystic.’ The judge considers that the mystic is on a trajectory that leads in the end to alienation, so that ‘every relationship, even the tenderest and most intimate, becomes a matter of indifference to [her].’ So far the critique. But Kierkegaard is extraordinary because this critique is itself positioned in a series that mounts its own critique of the critique. In this way Kierkegaard is Hegelian in strategy, though he has many harsh criticisms of

136 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 248–9. This passage is typical of the judge’s bloated self-­repetition, very different from A’s lapidary style. 137 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 242–4.

How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life?  173 Hegel and can fruitfully be seen as returning from Hegel to Kant.138 We should reject the view of Kierkegaard in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which pre­ sents Either/Or as making no judgement between the ethical and the aesthetic lives described.139 This ‘no judgement’ view is indeed the view of the pseud­onym­ ous editor of the two volumes, Victor Eremita. But it is not Kierkegaard’s view, and this is illustrated by the final section of volume II, which is a sermon that the judge appends to his second letter to A, as well as by what Kierkegaard says when he ‘comes out’ as the author of the pseudonymous works. The sermon is written by a pastor from Jylland, and its theme is that ‘before God we are always in the wrong.’140 Kierkegaard intends us to see a directionality to the stages. Just as the aesthetic life deconstructs into the ethical, so the ethical life deconstructs into the religious. And the key moment in this second deconstruction is that the judge starts to see at the end of his second letter (as the sermon makes explicit) that we do not in fact find our ‘eternal dignity’ when we go inside ourselves; we find sin. It is telling that in the main body of the second letter, before the judge reaches this partial recognition, he describes the ethical life as a ‘kingdom of gods’, rather than what Kant describes as a ‘kingdom of ends’.141 Kierkegaard in his work under his own name rejects the ‘immanent’ view he associates with Hegel that ‘the divine’ is within the universe and not beyond it, or transcending it.142 Anticlimacus, a pseudonym who describes the life of faith from inside it, says that this life ‘rests transparently in the being who establishes it’, namely God, but this is a transcend­ ent God.143 We need to ask, therefore, whether the transition into the life of faith requires any change in the ethical critique of the mystical. The answer to this is not going to be straight-­forward, because the ethical life is not simply superseded in the life of faith; there is a ‘second ethics’, so that ethics is repeated in a new ver­ sion, just as the aesthetic life is repeated in a new version within the ethical.

138  The case for a strong relation to Kant has been made by Ronald Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992). But the claim that Kierkegaard is plagiarizing seems to me overdrawn. We do know that Kierkegaard had Kant’s Religion in his library, and there is internal evidence in his own work that he used it extensively. 139  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2007). 140 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 339. 141 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 292. See Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (Gl) 4: 433. Unlike Adorno’s caricature of Kant described in chapter 2, Kant does not think we are gods, and Kierkegaard does not think so either. 142  See Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 250, ‘the divine in him’; and Works of Love, 19. 143  Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14. This work is also pseudonymous, being written by Anticlimacus. But Anticlimacus is as far ahead of where Kierkegaard thinks he himself is as Johannes Climacus is behind it. The religious life is in many ways more like the aesthetic life than the ethical. For example, in Works of Love Kierkegaard embraces a kind of Scotist particularism that con­ trasts deliberately with Judge William’s universalism. See Works of Love, 230f, ‘that within the species each individual is the essentially different or distinctive.’

174 Contemplation All three headings of the critique are in fact softened within the new life, but they do not simply disappear; they become pointers to possible dangers.144 We can see this by looking at Works of Love, written under Kierkegaard’s own name. The first heading was that the mystic only repents ‘abstractly’, and therefore not freely. This needs to be revised within the life of faith by the acknowledgement that what we find when we go deeply inside ourselves is what Kant calls ‘radical evil’.145 We need help from the source of goodness outside ourselves. But there is still a real danger of the mystic remaining in the ‘abstract’ rejecting position, and not entering back into her concrete agency. And there is a real danger of a kind of spiritual elitism that holds that only the mystic’s kind of separation from the world allows a real loving of God above all.146 This critique would not apply to people who have chosen the monastic life or its equivalent not because they think they have superior gifts but because they think they do not have the capacity to live well a less separated life. The central point comes pervasively in Works of Love and is expressed in the work’s title. One image Kierkegaard gives is that our love of God is always given a forwarding address. God does not have a share in existence in such a way that he asks for his share for himself; he asks for everything, but as you bring it to him you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, a notice designating where it should be delivered further.147

The most dangerous side path is ‘wanting to love only the unseen’, when a person defrauds herself out of actually loving God and the love ‘is turned into a vapor’. But this critique would not apply to someone whose monastic life was a life of service, whether in prayer or in more tangible ways. The other two headings of the critique can be dealt with more quickly, in both cases by appealing again to Works of Love. The second heading of the critique was that the judge objected to a kind of ‘weakness’ in the mystic, constantly trying to reassure herself that she really does love God, and oscillating between moments of flatness and luminosity. Works of Love, written from within the life of faith, remains wary of any centrality of feeling in a Christian’s life. Like Kant, Kierkegaard emphasizes that love is commanded, and so is an exercise of will or the heart, and he thinks we should recognize the centrality of decision, and this 144  I am ignoring for present purposes the complications raised by the distinction in Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 555–61, between Religiousness A and Religiousness B. 145  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (henceforth Rel), 6: 32. 146  See Kant’s objection to some of his pietist contemporaries at the end of Religion, ‘the supposed favorites of heaven’; Rel 6: 201. 147 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 161–3. This is Kant’s objection to those who think they can honour God by devotion other than by doing God’s will; Rel 6: 201.

Contemplation and Haecceity  175 would make the mystic’s life less susceptible to swings of mood.148 ‘Why is it’, he asks, that spontaneous love is so inclined to, indeed so infatuated with, making a test of the love? . . . If a believer were to ask God to put his faith to the test, this would not be an expression of the believer’s having faith to an ‘extraordinary’ degree (to think this is a poetic misunderstanding, just as it is also a misunderstanding to have faith to an extraordinary degree, since the ordinary degree is the highest.)

But this is better seen as a warning against too much reliance on feeling than a denial of the value of the separated contemplative life as such. The third heading of the critique is that the mystic is practicing a ‘deception of those to whom he is bound or with whom he could establish a relationship’. Again, the critique is altered in Works of Love, but it does not disappear. The key notion here is that God should become the ‘middle term’ of our relationships. ‘Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—­God—­a person, that is, that God is the middle term’.149 We love others ‘in God’. There is still a danger, then, of our love of God getting stuck in a two-­way relation. But if the love of God is obedi­ent, it can cause us to care, both in the relationships we already have and in the ones we are deciding whether we should have, about the other person’s rela­ tionship with God.150 There need be nothing about relationship with God that is in itself alienating to relationships with other people.

5.8  Contemplation and Haecceity Suppose a Christian asks: ‘What is the relation of contemplation to the rest of human life, and is contemplation to be integrated into the rest of life or separated from it?’. The answer is going to depend on the answer to a previous question: ‘What was the place of contemplation in the life of Jesus?’. This answer will depend in turn on what we mean by ‘contemplation’, and in particular what we say about 148 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 32–4, ‘Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured. This security of eternity casts out all anxiety.’ Kant’s distinction is between what he calls ‘prac­ tical love’ and ‘pathological love’, by which he does not mean something diseased, but love that is a matter of pathos. Neither philosopher wants to deny a proper place to feeling or pathos in loving God, but they want to emphasize the role of decision. See John  E.  Hare, ‘Kant, the Passions, and the Structure of Moral Motivation’, Faith and Philosophy, 28/1 (2011), 54–70. 149 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 106–7. His idea is that we should relate to each other by putting first the other’s relation to God. 150  This is also how Scotus connects the love of God and the love of the neighbour, Ordinatio III, suppl. dist. 28, art. 1, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 289.

176 Contemplation the relation between contemplation and prayer.151 It is clear in the Gospels that Jesus regarded prayer as central to his life. But prayer, as Jesus practiced it and Christians try to practice it following his example, is very different from Aristotelian contemplation. The central difference is that prayer for a Christian is two-­way communication. This is strongly emphasized, for example, by Karl Barth: The God who is known as ‘Our Father’ in Jesus Christ is not this supreme being who is self-­enclosed, who cannot be codetermined from outside, who is con­ demned to work alone. He is a God who in overflowing grace has chosen and is free to have authentic and not just apparent dealings, intercourse, and exchange with his children.152

Barth goes on to quote the passage from Romans 8 that we already discussed about the Spirit praying in us ‘with sighs too deep for words’. And he comments that this does not mean that our prayer is simply God talking to Godself; we have to ‘correspond’ to what God wants of us. Barth’s point is that God’s self-­limitation is sometimes to include our agency in the production of the effects of the divine will. Suppose we grant that contemplation for a Christian standardly takes the form of prayer. The important point for present purposes is that no particular degree of separation from ordinary life is implied. There are many different forms of prayer. Jesus ‘would withdraw to deserted places and pray’ (Luke 5: 16). But he also heals in prayer: ‘Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened” ’ (Mark 7: 34). When Jesus heals the boy who is possessed by an evil spirit, whom the disciples have failed to heal, he says, ‘this kind can come out only through prayer’ (Mark 9: 29). This dependence of Jesus on communion with the Father is most explicit in John where Jesus says both that what he does is what the Father does and that what he says is what the Father tells him to say (John 5: 19, 12: 45). This kind of communion is not separated or apart from the rest of Jesus’s life. Now Jesus is by Christian doctrine both human and divine, and his communion with the Father will not be exactly what ours is. But there is also biblical teaching to us mere humans, and it is also of two different kinds. Sometimes our prayer is called to be separate. On the ordinary interpretation (not Eckhart’s interpretation described above), Jesus says that Mary’s way is better than Martha’s, and she is sitting at his feet and not preparing the meal (Luke 10: 42). But sometimes we are told to ‘pray without ceasing’ (I Thessalonians 5: 17, see Ephesians 6: 18), and this suggests an integration of prayer into the regular rhythm

151  Maimonides makes a distinction between contemplation and prayer, because he thinks women are capable of the second but not the first. I owe this point to Sarah Zager. 152 Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4; Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1981), 103f.

Contemplation and Haecceity  177 of life (like breathing). This continuous kind of praying should accompany and transform ordinary life, so that we do ‘before God’ the various mundane things we do. George Hebert writes about living before God, or living into the phrase ‘for thy sake’: A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine. Who sweeps a room as for thy laws Makes that and the action fine. This is the stone that turneth all to gold, For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be sold.153

In the language of Scotus, prayer is required in order to know and then will what God wills for our willing.154 But this does not yet tell us about what kind of sep­ar­ ation, if any, this kind of obedience requires. Here is a tentative and latitudinarian answer to the normative question about the proper place of contemplation or prayer in a life. If we make the distinction between the continuous kind and the kind that requires going apart, we can say that the first kind is desirable for all Christians, but the proper amount of the second kind is variable between one Christian and another.155 God knows for each person what manner of loving God is particular to her or his individual essence. There is no universal ranking of a contemplative life over an active life or vice versa. Instead, there is specialization, and different degrees of separation are appropriate to the different specializations. The softened warnings of Kierkegaard can be helpful in discerning which specialization fits which person. This picture is different from Eckhart’s picture of Martha who does it all; she is already complete in the interior life reached by separation and expresses it perfectly in the exterior life of action in the world. But surely different ones among us have different gifts, and they are all used for the well-­being of the body as a whole? We do not yet see our individual essences clearly, but we get glimpses of them, and we try to discern what paths we are thereby called to follow. Here is the need for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In John 16: 5‒15 Jesus describes to the disciples what it is going to be like when he leaves them. He is going to send the Counselor to them, which will be to their overall benefit: ‘When he, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.’ Here Jesus tells them one part of the truth 153  George Herbert, ‘The Elixir’, in The Temple, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: T. Buck and R. Daniel, 1633). The ‘that’ in line 4 is the swept room. See Charles Taylor, ‘God Loveth Adverbs’, in Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211ff. 154  See Scotus, Ordinatio I, dist. 48, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 181–2. 155  I am grateful to Ross McCullough for helping me see this way of putting it.

178 Contemplation into which the Spirit will guide them; it is truth about what is yet to come. Moreover, it includes truth about their lives and what they are to become. This whole farewell discourse is based on a complex set of interlocking themes. In the previous chapter (John 15: 15‒17) Jesus had said that he has not called us servants but friends. Servants do not know their masters’ business, but we are friends because ‘everything I have learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you to go and bear fruit—­fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my com­ mandment: Love each other.’ The fruit that will last is the fruit of a life of obedi­ ence to the love commandment, which is the Father’s business Jesus has made known to us, and the Spirit will guide us into the truth that is yet to come about what that love commandment will mean for the way we then live the lives we have been given. We do not yet know clearly what this particular way of loving is like for each of us, but the Spirit knows and can guide us on a path that leads to it. In Chapter 3 we discussed how this guidance can give us a narrative that will make intelligible which parts of our current desire profile we should endorse. It will thus be a train­ ing of what Augustine calls our ‘loves’. There is a huge and rich diversity of prac­ tices within Christian history for receiving this guidance. But perhaps there is a moderate degree of separation that could serve as an acceptable preliminary, requiring us to take time apart from mundane practical pursuits, but not our life apart from them. We can begin each day finding a quiet place, a place where we can be physically at ease, and quiet ourselves, thinking of God. We can lay out before God the tasks of the day, thinking through them one by one and what each will require. We can listen to see if there is any response from the source of good­ ness to whom we are addressing ourselves. Sometimes we may find our thinking guided. This does not mean that we hear a voice in our ear coming from the out­ side, though sometimes people do report hearing an ‘audition’ of that kind. But the thoughts inside can have a particular resonance that is hard to describe, but which becomes recognizable after a good deal of practice. This is the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that we ever become infallible about when we are being guided in this way, and Chapter  3 section  3.8 described some con­ straints on interpreting ourselves as recipients of guidance. There are also checks and balances from the sacred texts and from the community that we need to apply, because it is easy to find in Christian history examples of people who have thought themselves guided to do things that are in fact horrible, and there is also the possibility of mental illness.156 But even though we can be wrong about when we are being guided, we can also sometimes be right; and it is possible to get better at the exercise of the wisdom of discernment. If we can be guided in this 156  I have tried to describe some of these checks and balances in more detail in God’s Command, chapter 5.

Contemplation and Haecceity  179 way, then there is likely to be a coherence in our lives to the extent that we follow this guidance. This is because, by hypothesis, the source of the guidance is one, a magnetic ‘centre’. Sometimes we get glimpses of our lives as God sees them, on the Boethian view of eternity all at once; we see in a provisional way that they have a coherent shape, and our ordinary sense of time as sequence collapses. This is the state in which, as T. S. Eliot puts it in ‘East Coker’, ‘In my beginning is my end.’157 What we have become is already there in germ at the start, as Eliot describes it in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’158 This happens most eas­ ily in retrospect, when we see themes reappear from earlier in our lives, but it can also happen prospectively, when we get a sense of what we are becoming. In answer to the third question from Aristotle we started with, contemplation or prayer is going to be part of a Christian believer’s life. Our goal should be a continuous praying, or openness to God, in the way our lungs are open to the air. But there is another kind of prayer that requires separation from ordinary prac­ tical life, and how much of this we should do is variable with the individual and with the individual’s haecceity. Both kinds of contemplation or prayer involve centrally the movement of the heart.

157  T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 23. The idea is pre­ sent in each of the four poems that make up Four Quartets. 158  Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets, 58.

6 Unity Introduction This book has been about the Holy Spirit’s working towards unity, and each of the four chapters following the first has been about a different kind of unity that is aimed at. This final chapter will deal in section  6.1 with the senses of the term ‘unity’ itself, drawing upon Aristotle’s discussion in Metaphysics. It then devotes one section each to unity with the world, within a person, between people, and with God, using Scripture and other sources to link each with the Spirit. It ends by trying to answer the question, ‘Why would the Spirit aim at unity?’.

6.1 Unity What is unity? It is helpful to start by going back again to Aristotle, who lays out in Metaphysics the different senses in which a thing or things can be said to be ‘one’. Book five of that work is a list of terms that can be used in different senses, with one chapter for each term; chapter 6 is about the term ‘one’. Almost all the chapter is about how things (in the plural) can be said to be one, but there is a brief section on what makes a thing (in the singular) one.1 This will be different for each kind of thing, and Aristotle’s point is that we should not talk about ‘one’ something until we know what kind of thing we are talking about. In each case it is going to be something indivisible, but what kind of division is in question will depend upon the kind. For example, in music Aristotle’s contemporaries used the quarter-­tone as the unit, and measured intervals by the number of quarter-­tones they contained. In grammar, we use vowels and consonants as the unit, and build up words in terms of the number of these units. Metaphysics V, 6, is also full of illuminating distinctions about how two or more things can be one, and the following are the most important. The first distinction is that ‘one’ means (1) one by accident, and (2) one essentially.2 Thus Aristotle’s friend Coriscus and musicality are accidentally one, as are Coriscus and justice, and this is to say that Coriscus could be Coriscus and not be musical 1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), V, 6, 1016b25f. 2 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6, 1016a12.

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0006

Unity  181 or just. The second distinction is within what is one essentially, and there are three main headings; we get more unity as we progress up the series. (1) The first is a thing that is one by continuity. Pieces of wood glued or tied together (into a platform, for example, or a bundle of sticks) can be said to then form one thing in a weak sense. But Aristotle thinks that a thing that is continuous by nature is one to a higher degree than what is continuous by human fabrication. Also, within what is natural, a thing is one to a higher degree when it has its own principle of motion. So the thigh and the shin together form one leg, but the thigh and shin are each one to a higher degree than the leg because they can move independently, and so the leg does not move as one.3 Mere contiguity does not give continuity. If I place several pieces of wood next to each other, that does not by itself make them one thing. (2) The second main heading is a thing that is one because its underlying subject is the same in kind. This underlying subject might be the matter, so that the wine from the same amphora is one. Or the underlying subject might be the genus, so that a horse and a man and a dog are one, because they are all animals. (3) For our purposes, the most important heading is that things are called ‘one’ if ‘the formula which states their essence is indivisible into another formula which signifies the essence of [a] thing.’4 So a thing is one in the highest degree when the definition which gives its essence cannot be subdivided into parts which also give a definition of essence. Here we have the dispute with Scotus that has been the topic of discussion in earlier chapters. On one traditional reading of Aristotle, what differentiates Socrates and Callias is their matter; but for Scotus there are two individual essences that differentiate them, and this means that ‘humanity’ as an essence is divisible. But we can ignore that dispute for now. Aristotle gives us a helpful analysis of this highest degree of unity. In another sense we do not say [that a thing is one] unless the object is a whole of some kind, that is, unless it has one form: for example, we would not say that the parts of a shoe which are put together haphazardly are one (except in the sense that they are one because of continuity), unless they are so put together that they form a shoe and so have some one form.5

If I take a shoe heel and a pair of leather laces and the uppers and the sole and glue them all together haphazardly, I will have something (1) that is one by con­ tinu­ity, and (2) that may be one by matter (if they are all from the same hide) or genus (if they are all shoe parts). But it will not be one in the sense that it has an indivisible formula of its essence. It does not get that highest degree of unity until I put the parts together in such a way that I can wear them to protect my foot 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6, 1016a12. 5 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6, 1016b12f.

4 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6, 1016a34.

182 Unity securely when I walk. Aristotle here, as often, uses an artefact as his example, when his theory would be better suited by an organism. It is organisms that para­ dig­mat­ic­al­ly have form, and in Metaphysics this is the form of the species. This form is an internal source of change and development in the organism, whereas with an artefact the form comes from outside, from the artisan. The kind of change produced by the form depends on the kind of species. The form is what distinguishes an organism from a mere heap. Thus there is no good answer to the question, when the wind blows away some grains of sand from a heap of sand, ‘Is this the same heap?’. The soul or life (in Greek it is the same word, psuche) is the form of the organism and the body is the matter, and for Callias and Socrates (Aristotle thinks) this form is human soul. Can we use this conceptual equipment of Aristotle to help understand how the work of the Holy Spirit brings unity? Because of the connection of unity with form and form with life, we can see different ways in which the Spirit who brings unity is also, as the Nicene Creed puts it, the Lord and Giver of Life. In each of the four cases discussed in previous chapters the Spirit is communicating the Spirit’s own life (or breath) to the thing vivified. The key is to distinguish the unity of continuity and the unity of underlying subject from the unity or indivisibility of form and so of life. We will go through each of the individual topics in the previous four chapters (aesthetic pleasure, gender identity, love of country, and contemplation), in order to fill out this bald outline.

6.2  Unity with the World Chapter 2 was about aesthetic pleasure and discussed the particular case of some music by Beethoven. Aesthetic pleasure was used as an example of unity between us and the world. An important part of taking pleasure in a beautiful object, whether a work of art or something beautiful in nature, is that the object is outside us and we are in union with it. Kierkegaard has a description of this state within the aesthetic life: Every nerve delighted in itself and in the whole, while every heartbeat, the restlessness of the living being, only memorialized and declared the pleasure of the moment. . . . My being was transparent, like the depths of the sea. . . . All existence seemed to have fallen in love with me, and everything quivered in fateful rapport with my being.6

6  This passage is by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantin Constantius, Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 173.

Unity with the World  183 But then something begins to irritate one of his eyes, or (when listening to Don Giovanni) someone crinkles a candy-­wrapper in the seat behind, and all is lost. Kierkegaard uses this term ‘transparent’ as a kind of waymark through the stages of life, each of which can be described in terms of a different kind of transparency. Aesthetic transparency is momentary and fragile. We need it because so much of the world is not beautiful. Humans have constructed whole environments of asphalt and concrete in our cities, sometimes with small patches of decoration that make everything worse. It is possible to get thirsty or hungry for beauty, so that it feels like a deprivation that needs (as Plato puts it) a filling.7 Writing personally, I have a small stash of books of poetry and collected paintings and architectural photographs that I bring out when I am feeling thirsty or hungry in this way, and there is a particular lovely tree I go and sit beside. Thinkers who emphasize the internal aspects of aesthetic pleasure sometimes miss the point that it is a relief from the pattern of aesthetic despair and alienation from the world; in the pleasure we are brought into harmony with what is outside us.8 For Kant, there is an aesthetic argument for God that parallels the structure of his better-­known moral argument which concerns the experience of despair and alienation from the world morally. Already in the Psalms the writer sometimes complains that the world does not make sense; the wicked are prospering and the righteous are downtrodden. Kant’s moral argument is that in order to persevere rationally in the moral life we need to believe that the world is in fact providentially governed even though we do not currently see it. We need to believe in the real possibility of the highest good, which is the union of happiness (where we get what we are aiming at outside ourselves) and virtue (where we are able inside ourselves to aim at what is actually good). And real possibility (as opposed to merely logical possibility) needs to be grounded in something actual, in this case the work of the supersensible author of nature. Kant’s aesthetic argument is that the deep pleasure in the free play of imagination and understanding inside us when we see something beautiful outside us is grounded in an analogy with the highest good, and this is what grounds the claim to universality in our aesthetic judgement; both in the aesthetic and the moral case we should have faith in the  same supersensible author of nature who brings together the outside and the inside. Kant sees the beautiful object as a symbol of the highest good. What is the relation of this to the work of the Holy Spirit? To understand the Spirit as bringing unity and so form is to understand the Spirit as an artist creating beauty. When the Spirit works on us, then, one of the effects will be that we create beauty.

7 Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. D. Woodhead, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 494a. 8  See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987) on delight.

184 Unity This is the idea of artistic in-­spir-­ation. We find it in the account of the building of the Tabernacle (Exodus 31: 1‒6 and 36: 1–9). The Lord spoke to Moses, ‘See, I have called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with a divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge, and every kind of skill, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every kind of craft. Moreover, I have appointed with him Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, and I have given skill to all the skillful, so that they may make all that I have commanded you.’

The text goes on to detail the work that has to be done in the construction of the Tabernacle. And Moses does as the Lord commands, ‘Then Moses summoned Bezalel and Oholiab and every skilled person to whom the Lord had given ability and who was willing to come and do the work’.9 On this reading of the passage there are willing partners to this collaboration, and the Spirit is not the only agent. The idea of inspiration from a divine source is already in the first line of the Iliad, where Homer summons the Muse to sing through him the wrath of Achilles. Inspiration from one life to another happens also at the human level; we can say that a human being (often a woman) is an artist’s muse, when the quality of her life and his association with her inspires his work. It is also a commonplace that artists do not know how they get their ideas. Kant puts this point by saying that for a genius, nature gives the rule to art, but it is his standard practice to use the term ‘providence’ and not ‘nature’ where he is talking about purposive production such as the production of a beautiful work of art.10 It was also typical of some Romantics to think that the inspiration of the artist was the work of the Holy Spirit. Thus Coleridge says, ‘[The writer] uses and applies his existing gifts of power and knowledge under the predisposing, aiding, and directing actuation of God’s Holy Spirit.’11 He does not intend by this that the writer who is thus inspired produces work which is infallible in the same way as the biblical prophets who were also inspired by the Spirit. But he intends that the Spirit, by giving the artist ‘inner vision’, is using the artist to do God’s work. Returning this discussion to Aristotle’s list of the senses in which things can be said to be one, the sense of beauty just described from Kant is a relation between 9  Exodus 36: 2, emphasis added, but the interpretation of the phrase in italics is disputed. 10  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987) (KU), 5: 307. See Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (PP), 8: 362; and Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice, in Practical Philosophy, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8: 310. 11  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (Boston, MA: James Monroe and Co., 1841), 78, 120.

Unity with the World  185 our faculties in free play and a unified object outside us. What gives us such pleasure, he suggests, is that there is a whole or unity presented to us, for which all the parts are necessary, but which is not explained by the sum of the parts taken individually.12 He explores the analogy and also the differences between this unity and the unity of an organism; for example, the work of art does not literally reproduce. Similarly Aristotle thinks of the unity within a tragedy as natural, and so as like life 13 For Kant there is also life in our delighted reception of the work; there is a unity between the object and our faculties such that we can receive it with pleasure (which is a sense of life). The second chapter mentioned the case of Mondrian in his studio moving his grid of lines and blocks of colour until he has the sense ‘this is right’. Twentieth-­century aesthetic theory has seen a number of attempts to use the notion of vital form to explain what gives us aesthetic pleasure. Three names are Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.14 We will focus on Dewey, but a fuller treatment would explore the similarities and differences between all three. The picture given above is of two unities: a unity within the work of art and a unity between us and the work, which is then an example of unity between us and the world. This unity between us and the work is what enables Kant to talk about beauty as a symbol of morality, as discussed in Chapter 2. The first unity is what the three authors just mentioned want to understand in terms of form. All of them want, however, to tie form (or ‘figure’) to life outside the work of art, and we can focus on Dewey’s way of doing this, because it will take us closer to a sense of how the Spirit is connected with the experience of unity in the beautiful and the sublime. This is despite the fact that Dewey was not himself a proponent of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. For Dewey a central concept is that of rhythm in our experience of the work of art and also our experience of life outside the work. Rhythm was also central to Augustine in De Musica, and the concept may have been mediated to Dewey through Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality.15 Augustine discusses five 12  KU 5: 238. 13  See Aristotle, Poetics 1450b25f, ‘By “whole” I mean possessing a beginning, middle and end. By “beginning” I mean that which does not have a necessary connection with a preceding event, but which can itself give rise naturally to some further fact or occurrence’ (emphasis added). The translation is by Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 1987), 39. The key is the analogy between the work of art and the teleological view of nature. See also Aristotle, Metaphysics, V, 6, 1016b14. 14  Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) (based on lectures given in 1935–6). Dewey, Art as Experience; Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1984‒) (originally 1961‒). Heidegger replaces ‘form’ with ‘figure’ (gestalt) because he does not like the tie of the matter/form distinction to equipmentality. Also, because he thinks of the figure as the result of opposing forces, he talks about ‘counterplay’ rather than Kant’s ‘play’. Von Balthasar also sometimes uses the term ‘gestalt’, but more usually ‘form’. He has a wide range of meanings for the term, but one is a form of life, such as human life or married life (The Glory of the Lord, 24), and he wants the work of art to manifest form (or life) in the same sort of way. 15  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978) (originally the Gifford Lectures, 1927–8). My father’s first book, An Essay on Monism, which he wrote as a prisoner of

186 Unity relevant forms of rhythm as a hymn is sung (his example is Ambrose’s Deus Creator Omnium, written in iambic tetrameter): corporeal rhythm in the sound outside the hearer, occursive rhythm in the hearer’s sense organ, progressive rhythm in the performer, recordable rhythm in the hearer’s memory, perceptive rhythm in the hearer’s faculty that judges the occursive rhythm, and judicial rhythm in the hearer’s reason. Like Augustine, Dewey traces the movement of rhythm from outside us to inside us. His idea is that rhythm is established by our evolutionary position in our niche: If life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through rhythm. Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and because of, tension.16

Dewey then ties the rhythm of break and integration with the environment to human emotion, and he says that ‘through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-­seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock.’17 This is what corresponds to Kant’s idea of the highest good, of which the work of art is a reminder. For Dewey, the emotion experienced in the world is taken up by the artist and then, through disciplined pruning, formed into a new emotion and so a new aliveness uniquely expressed in the work of art. We do not need to follow all the details of this, or try to sort out the difficulties with the notions of ‘emotion’ and ‘expression’; but the important idea for our purposes is that it is form and so life in the work which allows us through the work to reach the ‘unity of experience’ which makes us ‘fully alive’.18 How does form do this? Dewey is influenced here by Dr. Barnes, whose extraordinary collection, most importantly of French Impressionists and Post-­ Impressionists, has now been removed from his house and reconstructed in central Philadelphia in a museum. The Barnes collection is famous for attempting to connect the work of art with ordinary life, hanging Modigliani, for example, next to a copper warming pan. Dr. Barnes defined form as ‘the synthesis or fusion of war of the Japanese and did not publish, is also based on the notion of rhythm. Whitehead’s volume was one of the few philosophy texts available in the library in Singapore before he was captured. An Essay on Monism is available in R. M. Hare’s archive at Balliol College, Oxford. 16 Dewey, Art as Experience, 13. 17 Dewey, Art as Experience, 16. 18 Dewey, Art as Experience, 17. It is important to see here that Dewey has a very particular notion of ‘an experience’ which is not merely our general encounter with the sensible manifold, but an encounter that has a definite shape—­a beginning and middle and end—­so that there is already a unity there that can be taken up by the artist.

Unity with the World  187 all plastic means . . . their harmonious merging.’19 And Dewey expands this ­def­in­ition: ‘Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the ex­peri­ence of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.’20 This makes form dynamic, ‘the operation of forces’ that enable through tension and resolution the achievement of a ‘unified perception’ first in the ‘event’ outside us and then in the work of art. Here are three examples that fit what Dewey is describing, from three different art forms. The first is the first movement of the Third Symphony of Beethoven, discussed in Chapter 2, where there is the extraordinary moment when the tension builds up to a climax, there is a sudden silence, and then the new theme appears ‘from the blue yonder’. This is a key moment in the ‘rhythm’ of the movement, and the suggestion of the chapter, building on Daniel Chua, was that it gives us a sound picture of the incursion of divine grace into human disaster. The form of the whole, seen as motivating all the details of the piece, gives us an ex­peri­ence of what was called in Chapter 2 ‘the hopeful sublime’. A second example is a poem that gives us what Kant calls an ‘aesthetic idea’. The example is ‘The Windhover: To Christ our Lord’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins.21 Kant says, about aesthetic ideas, [A poet] takes [things] that are indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, by means of an imagination that emulates the example of reason in reaching [for] a max­ imum, he ventures to give these sensible expression in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience, namely, with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature.

When Hopkins writes, ‘And blue-­bleak embers, Ah my dear, fall, gall themselves and gash gold vermilion’, there is a vivid sensory image of the charred logs at the end of a fire in the fireplace breaking open to reveal the fire at their heart. But when we think of the image, and remember the times we have sat at the end of a fire, we see and feel something about Christ’s passion and resurrection that we could not express in mere prose, and we also hear it because the sound is so perfectly married to the sense. The poet takes us to a completeness that neither sensory experience by itself unformed by the artist nor understanding by itself can reach. A third example is Dewey’s own use of Van Gogh’s ‘Bridge at Trinquetaille’. Van Gogh writes to his brother Theo,

19 Dewey, Art as Experience, 122. 20 Dewey, Art as Experience, 142. 21  KU, 5: 314. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. Kant’s own example is a less good poem by Frederick the Great about the sun setting at the end of a summer’s day, an image of cosmopolitan virtue.

188 Unity I have a view of the Rhone—­the iron bridge at Trinquetaille, in which sky and river are the color of absinthe, the quays a shade of lilac, the figures leaning on the parapet, blackish, the iron bridge an intense blue, with a note of vivid orange in the background, and a note of intense malachite. I am trying to get something utterly heart-­broken.22

The image in the painting is not a representation of heart-­brokenness in any literal sense. But there is nonetheless a continuity, in Dewey’s terms, between emotion in an experience outside the work and the new emotion inside it. The artist has distilled the experience and the work has an ‘integral fulfillment’ that the experience does not. What would it mean to talk about ‘form’ in these three cases, from a Deweyan perspective? We can reconstruct at least a preliminary account. He says: ‘Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Whenever there is this coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.’23 Three points are relevant here. The first is that there is a pattern, a rhythm, of changes outside the artwork which is continuous with the structure internal to the work, and it is a pattern, very broadly, of interruption and restoration. Second, the form transmutes this pattern into the structure of the work to produce something coherent. Third, this coherence makes the work endure, or sustain our interest. This is also Aristotle’s fundamental conception of form as soul or life organizing the material inputs to the organism. We can think of the work of art (the movement of the sonata and the poem and the painting) as having, by analogy, a kind of life in themselves which organizes the ‘interactions that energies bear to one another’. It is this kind of life that we, as recipients of the work, repeat in our own vitality as our faculties are in free play with each other. To relate these examples to the work of the Spirit, we can say that our ex­peri­ ence in the world is like a conversation with the Spirit, who is constantly leading us into truth that we constantly resist. We are muddled and unfocused much of the time. The artist can bring a clarity that clears the fog. Kant says that the genius is one who has ‘the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas’, but the process through which the genius arrives at these ideas cannot be understood, because ‘there is no concept of the way in which the product is possible’.24 Kant attributes the process to nature, but often (for example in Perpetual Peace, as we discussed in Chapter 4) he substitutes ‘providence’ when purposive production is involved. In the case of our experience of beauty, he argues explicitly that the same agency is the ground both of the beautiful thing and of our faculties that make and receive it. 22 Dewey, Art as Experience, 89. 24  KU 5: 344, 307, emphasis added.

23 Dewey, Art as Experience, 13.

Unity with the World  189 He is writing also about beauty in nature, but for our purposes the main point is that the Spirit is working with the artist to produce the work, even if the artist does not see the process that way. The idea of life in the work can help us see how the Spirit could be involved. The Spirit is alive and communicating life to the artist and then through the artist to us, and the Spirit’s life is one of creating. This was true from the beginning when the earth was formless and the Spirit moved over the face of the waters and created form by separating water from water.25 The three artists in the three examples given above would not have found this thought strange at all. We should not expect to be able to say much about just how the Spirit does this communication. The argument is not that the inspiration has to be by the Spirit because we do not know how it works (a ‘God of the gaps’), but that the process fits the rest of what we see of the Spirit’s work while giving us new insight about this. There could be all sorts of other explanations, but for a Christian this is a good one. This work of the Spirit can be experienced in artistic creativity. Writing personally, I have composed and published music for choir and organ. During the writing of this work and other works I received ideas that seemed to me from outside myself, and this happened when my own faculties were at full vitality. I make no claim to the greatness of these ideas; this experience of receiving ideas is part of the ordinary experience of artistic creativity even if the work that results is quite ordinary. But I can be grateful to the Spirit for working through me or with me, even if there is no world-­historical result. To say, like Kant, that beauty is a symbol of morality explains something else about the experience of beauty, that it calls us beyond itself. This is another merit of thinking of the work of art as having something like life in it; this ac­know­ ledges the sense of call, which is what living things do. Though there is a kind of completeness in the object (so that if you add anything or take away anything you spoil it), many people who care about beauty and sublimity also report that the experience is accompanied by a sense of incompleteness, of longing for something beyond the experience itself that the experience itself does not satisfy. This is Dewey’s ‘deep-­seated memory of an underlying harmony’. It does not have to be explicitly within a religious faith commitment. Baudelaire writes: I am beautiful, oh mortals, as a dream of stone, And my breast, whereon each dies in his turn, Is made to inspire in the poet a love As eternal and silent as the substance itself.26 25  Genesis 1: 1–8. 26  ‘Je suis belle, ô mortels, comme un rêve de pierre, / Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tout à tout, / Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour / Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.’, Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, illustrated by Auguste Rodin (London: Limited Editions Club, 1940), trans. Albert E. Elsen, in Rodin, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 62. The Rodin illustration is especially telling, because the female figure can be interpreted as escaping the male embrace.

190 Unity The term ‘beauty’ here is a placeholder for whatever gives us aesthetic pleasure, but it is an inadequate term for this purpose. In fact, Chapter 2 talked as much about what is sublime as about what is beautiful. The late quartets of Beethoven, just to take one example, are often not beautiful, but they nonetheless give extraordinary pleasure. The Holy Spirit’s palette, so to speak, does not contain only what is restful, but also what is terrifying. But we can follow Kant in seeing that the experience of what is sublime also leads to God, because the first moment is succeeded by the second (as in the experience of the feeling of moral respect). We could compare Elijah’s experience at Horeb, where God promised to pass before him.27 But this promise was not fulfilled in the mighty wind and the earthquake and the fire, even though these were terrifying manifestations of God’s power; it was not fulfilled until the ‘still small voice’. We have been following Kant, but now we need to criticize him. He puts too much focus on morality, and in particular his view of the next life is one of gradual and endless approximation to the morally good. But morality as a system of constraint will probably wither away even if something analogous survives, and we should ask in relation to the next life Aristotle’s question about the moral virtues and the gods: How can those standards be appropriate for them?28 One side-­ effect of this obsession with morality is that Kant thinks of beauty as most importantly a symbol of the highest good, and not a foretaste of beauty in the new heaven and the new earth. Bonaventure is better here, and he is relying on the patristic tradition. In this tradition there is something like but not the same as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling in the next life, but with the new spiritual bodies that we will have. Thus Bonaventure says, There all the faculties of sense will be exercised: the eye will see the most mar­ vel­ous beauty, the sense of taste will savour the sweetest taste, the sense of smell will smell the most lovely fragrance, the sense of touch will lay hold of the most precious object, the hearing will be refreshed by the most joyful sounds.29

At the transfiguration, he says that Christ revealed his glory to the disciples, ‘and in showing this brightness (claritas), he shows the disciples the Kingdom of God, because brightness is the principal attribute of those who rise again’.30 If God’s glory will dwell in the new heaven and the new earth, we can imagine something like the beauty we experience here, and a delight in this beauty something like the 27  I Kings 19: 4f, but the translation ‘still small voice’, though traditional, might better be ‘the sound of sheer silence’. 28 Aristotle, NE X, 8, 1178b5f. 29 Bonaventure, Soliloquies 4.20, Opera Omnia, VIII, 63A, Quaracchi: Ad Claras Aquas, 1882–1901, quoted in Fr. John Saward, ‘The Fresh Flowers Again: St. Bonaventure and the Aesthetics of the Resurrection’, The Downside Review, 110 (1992), 1f. 30 Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, trans. Robert J. Karris (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2001), vol. VII, 233.

Unity within a Person  191 aesthetic pleasure we receive here. Will there be something like the experience of the sublime? We should be modest in what we claim here, but we can imagine that God’s surpassing greatness as well as God’s surpassing goodness will be present to us, and since we will be in some new kind of time (if only God is eternal in the Boethian sense), we can imagine a succession of ‘moments’ by which we are first overwhelmed and then encouraged.31 But all of this is mere speculation. The point is that our experience of beauty and sublimity in this life may be a foretaste of something of the same kind of unity in the transformed aesthetic senses, and not merely a symbol of the moral highest good. Perhaps the Spirit is, like an artist, producing something analogous to the beautiful or sublime not just in us as individuals in the next life, but in the whole assembly that constitutes the new heaven and the new earth.

6.3  Unity within a Person Chapter 3 took gender identity, and in particular gender transition, as an example of how to think about unity within a person. It used the idea of a narrative unity that is normative and not merely descriptive and that makes intelligible the various shifts in a life in terms of closeness to or distance from this narrative. We started in that chapter to think of the Holy Spirit as a guide along this path, or as a counselor telling us this story. This work of the Spirit as counselor is very evident in The Acts of the Apostles, which describes the astonishing specificity of the Spirit’s engagement. Here are some examples from the life of Paul. There is his conversion on the road to Damascus (9: 3), where there was a blinding light and the Lord spoke to him and then spoke to Ananias telling him to go and baptize the erstwhile persecutor of the church. Then (13: 2), ‘The Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” ’, initiating the first missionary journey, and the two missionaries were ‘sent on their way by the Holy Spirit’. When the tension became acute between Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and those who wanted converts to keep the whole Jewish law, the Council of Jerusalem reached a compromise, and formalized it in a letter to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia (15: 28): ‘It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden.’ On the second missionary journey Paul, Silas, and Timothy (16: 6f) were ‘forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia’, and ‘when they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.’ At the end of the third missionary journey, Paul said goodbye to the elders from Ephesus and, like Jesus, set his face for 31  As we saw in Chapter 5, our final state can be seen as dynamic, as in Jonathan Edwards’s view of our destination.

192 Unity Jerusalem with the prospect of persecution there (20: 22‒3), ‘And now, as a captive to the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and persecution are waiting for me.’ In Jerusalem (22: 21), ‘Then [the Lord] said to me: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” ’ Finally, after an uproar caused in the temple in Jerusalem (23: 11), ‘That night the Lord stood near him and said: Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.’ And this is just what Paul then did. Some people think that this kind of specific counsel or direction happened only in the Apostolic age. But the testimony of Christians through the centuries is against this. The second chapter of God’s Command distinguished five different kinds of divine command, and gave contemporary examples which were specific in their details. Karl Barth says, more strongly, ‘This concrete aspect of the divine command derives, of course, from the fact that it is not a general truth, rule or precept but always has a historical character and is always a particular challenge to a specific individual.’32 This may be too strong; there is no reason to deny that God can give genuine commands addressed to a more general audience, such as the Ten Commandments. But Barth is right that God’s commands often do come with specificity to individuals in their particular circumstances. We can now add, after Chapter 5, another Barthian theme, that prayer is the standard way we have access to divine command. Barth focuses on the kind of prayer he calls ‘invocation’, and he says of it both that it is an action ‘for which man finds himself empowered only by the free grace of God’, and that it is ‘an authentically and specifically human action, willed and undertaken in a free human resolve.’33 God’s Command also discussed some of the dangers of taking oneself to be the recipient of specific divine command. Writing personally, I have a niece who cannot swim, and heard what she took to be the voice of Jesus telling her that if she trusted him, she would walk out into the sea; so she did this, and very nearly drowned. We need criteria for discerning when it is God’s command, and the discussion in Chapter 5 of that book tried to provide some (summarized in section 3.8 of the present book). We can now return to Aristotle’s remarks about the different kinds of unity. A life can have the unity of continuity simply by being the events happening to and in a biological individual, even if there is no coherence to that series. A life can also have the unambitious kind of unity in which the events happening to it and in it belong to the single genus of ‘human events’. But in neither case do we have

32  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. and trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (London: T & T Clark, 2009), III/4, 59 (385). 33  Karl Barth, The Christian Life, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1981), 42.

Unity within a Person  193 the unity of a ‘whole’ conferred by a form. What kind of form? One of the benefits of getting older is that one starts to be able to see the shape of one’s life as a whole, though it is not yet over. One can see it, and accept it, and be grateful for it, even if it contains things like the death of one’s spouse from cancer that do not seem good. One also sees themes from much earlier years that have returned unexpectedly (to use a musical metaphor); a life can have a shape or form analogous to that of the movement of a sonata that has brutal shifts in it like those we saw in Beethoven Op 2, No.2. And there is no longer the same compulsion to produce in order to prove oneself, though that does not mean ceasing to produce; rather, the production comes as it were from the overflow. But perhaps it is wrong to generalize in this way from personal experience, which may be the beneficiary of priv­ il­ege not widely shared. To the limited extent we are given a story of the whole, we are also given hope that the whole is an intelligible unity moving us already towards a destination we do not yet clearly see. The main topic of Chapter 3 was gender. Is there any way to relate the Holy Spirit to this topic? We should set aside two ways that seem problematic. The first is to say that there is something ‘quasi-­female’ in our relation to God just because we are passive (‘questing, longing, desiring’) in respect to the divine.34 Chapter 3 quoted from Richard Crashaw’s transgendering poem about Teresa of Avila, and urged that the association of this kind of passivity with the female is a social construct about which we should be sceptical. Second, we should not interpret Galatians 3: 28 (‘In Christ . . . not male and female’) to mean that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with our gender at all. This would ignore the experience of those like my son Thomas for whom questions of gender have been central to their lives. We should say, rather, that the encounter with gender may be a crucial passage in a life-­narrative, but then distinguish between centrality to the path and centrality to the destination. The importance of the work of the Holy Spirit can be seen if we return to Chapter 3’s analysis of gender identity as a three-­term relation: a set of preferences found inside, which is then matched at least roughly with something outside (a social picture of what a gender is like); and, third, the person’s heart or will, which has endorsed this match. In this three-­term relation the second term is a social construction, and Chapter 3 urged that these constructions are often pervaded by sin. In Acts, we can see all three of the socially constructed relations of Galatians 3: 28 (Jew or Greek, Slave or Free, Male and Female) in the process of transformation. All three of these cases are relations of power. In connection with the first, the context of Acts makes the relation between Jew and Gentile centre-­stage. When the gift of the Holy Spirit is given to the Gentiles, so that they have ‘received the 34 The reference is to Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 283–4.

194 Unity Holy Spirit just as we have’ (Acts 10: 47 and 15: 8), the apostles and brethren meet to discuss this and are initially hostile to Peter’s actions in baptizing Cornelius and his family. In Pisidian Antioch and then elsewhere Paul and Barnabas go first to the established synagogue and are rejected, sometimes violently, and only after this rejection ‘turn to the Gentiles’ (13: 46f); the Gentile converts are not then welcomed in the synagogues. In connection with slavery, Acts is mostly silent, though the slave girl is released from an evil spirit (16: 16). Paul does not, unfortunately, say anywhere that Christians should not hold slaves, and both pro-­ slavery and anti-­slavery preachers used biblical texts pervasively in the struggle that led to the American civil war. But Paul does say to Philemon, about his run­ away slave Onesimus (Philemon 16), that he hopes Philemon will take Onesimus back ‘no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother.’ We can see the seed here of the thought that brothers and sisters should not be slaves. For our purposes in this section, the most important relation of the three is that between male and female. In Acts there are several places where the traditional gender roles are put in question. One is the case of Lydia. We are told (16: 14‒15) that she was a business woman, dealing in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, and that she was a worshipper of God. We are told that the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message, and when she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited the missionaries to come and stay at her house, which they did. It is natural to suppose that she became the leader of the house church that met in her house after Paul left. Again, Priscilla and Aquila were a married couple who are mentioned together as equals (18: 18), and who had a leading role in the church in Corinth and then in Ephesus. We are told that Philip the Evangelist had four daughters who prophesied (21: 9). In all three cases (Gentile believers, slaves, and women), where there is power being exercised against a group, there is a movement of the Gospel towards a reversal of established structures. The second term of the three-­term relation is under guidance by the Spirit and the established hierarchies are being challenged. Perhaps (a tentative suggestion) the first term in the three-­term relation can also be Spirit-­guided. Chapter  3 focused on a trans male, and gave the example of a set of preferences discovered inside a person for what are often called ‘secondary’ sexual characteristics such as more body hair and larger musculature and a deeper voice. But we can now try to generalize beyond the male. In early religions, the figures of the gods that are worshipped sometimes have exaggerated sexual characteristics. This does not fit the Christian picture of the divine because God is conceived as spirit rather than body. But perhaps these early religions were not entirely wrong. There may be something about being male and something equally but differently about being female, or gendered but neither male nor female, that resembles God, even though God is neither female nor male nor gendered at all. God created humanity ‘male and female’ we are told (Genesis 1: 27). This is the passage that is being quoted and revisited in Galatians 3: 28. Some interpreters, like Karl Barth, have

Unity within a Person  195 focused on the relation between male and female as imaging God.35 But we should remain open to the possibility that the various possibilities here also image God separately, but that this is a feature of the path rather than of the destination. Chapter  3 remained agnostic about whether we are gendered in heaven. There may be something analogous to gender that remains after the death of this body, but we do not know this. The present suggestion is a bit different, though related. There may be something in this life that is God-­directed, even if we do not recognize this, in our preferences about what kind of body to occupy, but this applies to all genders and not just ‘male’. If there is, then we should allow the potential guidance of the Spirit even in this area of our life preferences. This suggestion is related to the previous one because if there is something in the way we love God in the next life (our ‘haecceity’ in Scotist language) which is analogous to gender, then gender in this life can be a foretaste of it (in Bonaventure’s term a ‘footprint’, vestigium). The suggestion is the opposite of any doctrine that would urge us that loving God in this life means leaving the body, as far as possible, behind. We should be tentative, however, because we should be hesitant about any proposed example of what the god-­likeness in this first term of the three-­term relation would be. Chapter 3 gave the example of a transitioned male who wanted to have the musculature to carry suitcases for elderly parents. But the difficulty lies in separating any such preference from socially constructed norms that are the second term of the three-­term relation. An area to investigate here is the aspirations one might have for maleness, and the possibility that they are the other side, so to speak, of the more familiar male vices such as promiscuity and violence.36 Behind this suggestion is an Aristotelian picture of the vices as excesses and defects of some affect that can also be had to a virtuous degree. Thus Aristotle thinks courage (andreia, literally ‘manliness’) is a virtue with two pairs of vices on either side of it, each pair organized around a different affect: too much and too little fear and too much and too little confidence.37 We should reject the restriction of courage to males. But, as suggested in Chapter 3, perhaps there is too much and too little attraction to the beauty of other bodies, and too much and too little anger at insult to one’s own and others’ dignity. Perhaps there is virtue in the mean. All of this is an agenda for a different book. What kind of unity does a good normative life-­story have? Chapter 3 suggested that it ‘makes sense’ of a life, and we can now add to that. It is helpful, when going through a life, to have the sense that it is already understood as a whole by God. If, for example, one is uncertain whether one’s spouse will live or die of cancer in 35  Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Creation: Church Dogmatics III/4, ed. G. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), 308–12. 36  This is material for a different study. I am relying on the discussion of sexual behaviour in John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), especially chapters 8 and 9, but this book is dichotomous about gender in a way I do not want to be. 37 Aristotle, NE III, 9, 1117a29f.

196 Unity the next six months, it is helpful to have the sense that she is in God’s hands and that what happens is already ordained in the end for her good.38 There is power in the Spirit’s work of telling us a story about our lives. The kind of unity that is in question here is intelligibility, but we need to make another Aristotelian distinction. There is a difference between intelligibility in itself and intelligibility to us.39 Our goal as seekers of knowledge is to progress from the second to the first. But what is intelligible in itself is what is intelligible to God, and we often do not have access to this except as God reveals it to us. The intelligibility in question is what can be understood to be good, and we would like to be able to see the good that God sees. The account in Chapter 3 was that the Spirit reveals to us enough of this good so that we can make enough sense of the story the Spirit is telling us so that we can persevere in the attempt to will what God wills for our willing.40 The Spirit gives us already an earnest or pledge of what we have not yet become (Ephesians 1: 13–14). One text that is helpful in thinking about this kind of unity in a life is Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, written under his own name as one of the edifying discourses.41 This book is actually a series of discourses written to prepare a person for the sacrament of Confession. It is explicitly about ‘being at one with oneself ’, and mentions gender only for the sake of illustration.42 The biblical text it starts from is the letter of James, which several times condemns being ‘double-­minded’; the opposite of being ‘double-­minded’ is to will one thing.43 There are two ways to think about this unity in a person: it could be unity at a time (synchronic unity) or unity across time (diachronic unity). For our purposes the more important is the second.44 Kierkegaard has the idea that each one of us has a unique eternal vocation; to be true to oneself in relation to this eternal vocation is the highest goal.45 He thinks it important that this vocation is for each of us as an individual, and is thus different from the universally human. In Works 38  My wife Terry used to read a daily devotional called ‘Our Daily Bread’, and she would write notes in it. A couple of months before she died she wrote this. ‘My fear of not knowing how and where my cancer is progressing. Relief just came because my Lord does know. He knows—­it’s not hidden from him.’ 39 Aristotle, Metaphysics II, 1, 993b10‒11, ‘For as the eyes of bats are to the light of day, so is the intellect of our soul to the objects which in their nature are most evident to all’, in translation by Hippocrates G. Apostle, 35. This is the passage referred to in reference to Ibn Tufayl in Chapter 5. 40  See John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, dist. 48, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 181–2. 41  Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas  V.  Steere (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956). 42  For example, Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 47. 43  James 4: 8, 1: 5–8. 44  For synchronic unity, Kierkegaard relies on the argument that we do, even when corrupt, still have a sense of the good, and so cannot be at unity with ourselves if we ignore it or suppress it, see Purity of Heart, 61. This is like Aristotle’s claim that only a good person can have the kind of unity inside that is characteristic of the best kind of friendship, see Aristotle, NE IX, 9. 1170b1f. Kierkegaard may be taking the point from Kant, who holds that the predisposition to good is essential to human beings and the propensity to evil, though pervasive, is not essential. 45 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 140.

Unity within a Person  197 of Love, also written under his own name, he says (as quoted in Chapter 4): ‘If it were not so that one human being, honest, upright, respectable, God-­fearing, can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does who is also honest, upright, respectable, God-­ fearing, then the God-­ relationship would not essentially exist, would not exist in its deepest meaning.’46 This emphasis on particularity is reminiscent of the call of our haecceity that we discussed earlier in relation to Scotus.47 Kierkegaard does not think that the vocation is always easy to see, and he does not think that God forces any of us to live by our vocation; we can reject it. Purity of Heart is often most powerful in its metaphors, and on this matter it compares God to a mother teaching her child to walk. This is a Lutheran comparison, but Kierkegaard puts a particular twist on it. The mother is far enough away from the child so that she cannot actually support the child, but she holds out her arms. She imitates the child’s movements. If it totters, she swiftly bends as if she would seize it—­so the child believes that it is not walking alone. The most loving mother can do no more, if it be truly intended that the child shall walk alone. And yet she does more; for her face, her face, yes, it is beckoning like the reward of the Good and like the encouragement of Eternal Blessedness. So the child walks alone, with eyes fixed upon the mother’s face, not on the difficulties of the way; supporting himself by the arms that do not hold on to him, striving after refuge in the mother’s embrace, hardly suspecting that in the same moment he is proving that he can do without her, for now the child is walking alone.48

Kierkegaard does not here mean that we can simply do without God, but that God’s work in our lives (which is indeed necessary) does not remove our own agency. We have to make the decision to follow the call. We do this by uniting our will with the Good in what he calls the ‘edifying contemplation’, and he stresses that this will very often mean separating ourselves from the crowd. This connects his discussion with Chapter 3’s discussion of gender transition, which analysed gender identity as a three-­term relation, and proposed that the third term in the relation (the heart or will) has to decide for a person’s own life whether to endorse or reject a social picture (a crowd picture) of what it is to be a man or a woman or some other gender. 46  Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230. 47  Barth has a similar point: ‘[Respect for life] must also be each man’s respect for the individuality in which he may “be alive” before and for God. It must be his willingness and readiness to live his life as his own, i.e., to live it in the way in which it is uniquely allotted and loaned to him by God, “according to the law of its beginning” ’, Church Dogmatics III/4, 59. 48 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 85. The original metaphor is at Hosea 11: 3, ‘It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arm’, but the translation of the last phrase is disputed.

198 Unity Kierkegaard is fiercely insistent on our responsibility before God to make decisions about our lives for ourselves. He thinks of the judgement day when the books are opened and the secrets of our hearts revealed. What will give unity to a life across time, when seen on that day, is the degree of transparency of that life to its eternal vocation. This transparency is not easily achieved. Our temporal order is not ‘a homogeneous transparent medium of the eternal’.49 But we aim at this and achieve it in part. Kierkegaard compares our life to the sea, which is transparent when it is deep and not full of sand and weed as it is near the shore; when it is transparent in this way it can more easily mirror heaven.50 Each person will be asked to give an account of how she has lived as an individual.51 This account is given, in Kierkegaard’s picture, to God. He also imagines giving such an account to a ‘transfigured one’ who is giving you a visit.52 This might be, for example, someone you love who has died, or it might be some valued figure from the past. Can you continue in what you are doing under this person’s ‘piercing gaze’? But there are two features that make this merely human alternative problematic. One is that the ‘transfigured one’ does not have God’s authority to forgive all offences, only the ones against her. On the Christian picture the final judgement is also a time of mercy, when we are covered by Christ’s atonement. The second feature is that the ‘transfigured one’ is not properly seen as the one giving us our eternal vocation; there is sometimes the danger of giving the dead beloved too much authority and confusing her with God. Purity of Heart emphasizes the requirement of unity in a life. This needs to be supplemented with an account of the supply of resources by the gift of the Spirit to meet this requirement. One such gift is the fruit of the Spirit. This is ‘fruit’ in the singular, rather than ‘fruits’ in the plural. In this way the fruit is different from what are called ‘the gifts of the Spirit’ (a topic of the following section of this chapter), which are plural and explicitly distributed to different people. The fruit by contrast is proposed as characteristic, all of it, of a mature Christian life. Chapter 3 ended with describing a transitioned male as showing in his life a caring for others and an enjoyment of beauty that was new to him. The fruit of the Spirit is listed (Galatians 5: 22‒5) as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-­control. These are given as marks of ‘those who belong to Jesus Christ’, but they are not given as an exhaustive list. The Spirit as counselor is guiding us into a life like that of Jesus, because ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ’ (Galatians 3: 27‒8). Paul goes on immediately to say that this means that ‘there is no longer Jew 49 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 135. 50 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 176–7. 51 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 215. Again, transparency is required, and one great enemy is ‘busyness’. ‘In the press of busyness, there is neither time nor quiet to win the transparency that is in­dis­ pens­able if a man is to come to understand himself in willing one thing or even for a preliminary understanding of himself in his confusion’, 108. 52 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 91, 198.

Unity within a Person  199 or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ We should take it that being beyond ‘male and female’ in the sense that one is beyond the power relations currently socially exemplified is another mark of belonging to Jesus Christ and so another part of the fruit of the Spirit. Many of these listed parts already point to this—­love, patience, kindness, faithfulness, and gentleness. The fruit is presented as a single package, and we can hope that even those not yet in Christ can be prepared for this fruit if they follow the story the Spirit is trying to tell them. One of Kierkegaard’s guiding ideas is that unity of will comes with transparency to the work of the Spirit. The story of the wedding at Cana in the Gospel of John gives us another picture of this.53 ‘On the third day’, John writes, making us think of the third day which is resurrection. There are six large stone jars there to hold the water of purification. When the wine runs out, facing the bride’s family with disgrace, Jesus tells the servants to fill these jars ‘to the brim’. The Greek is heos ano, literally ‘until the up’. Then in the next chapter, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again.54 The Greek is anothen, literally ‘from the up’. In chapter 8, Jesus tells the Pharisees that he is from the up and they are from the down; that they are of this world and he is not of this world.55 Nicodemus has to be born from the place where Jesus is from. The miracle at Cana is that the water is changed into wine, and this points forward to the resurrection as all seven signs in John do. But this miracle only happens when the jars are filled ‘to the up’, and then when the water is drawn out. John tells us that the steward of the wedding banquet did not know where the wine had come from ‘though the servants who had drawn the water knew’.56 This suggests that the water was still water in the jars until it was drawn out. We can think of a second filling that happens when it is drawn, a filling ‘from above’. Being filled ‘to the up’ makes it easier to be transparent to the Spirit who works in the second filling. Writing personally, when my wife Terry died I was filled ‘to the up’ with grief, and there was no air pocket, so to speak, of self-­reliance left. I did not hold anything back because I could not. I did not know whether I could go on at all. But this was a painful kind of unity, and it meant that it was easier to be drawn out without resistance when I was able to be useful again. The second filling is different from the first because in the first the water pushes out the air, but in the second the Spirit uses what is already there but reconfigures it. The oxygen and hydrogen remain when the water becomes wine, but there are new elements added. The Spirit uses one’s character and history, even one’s loss. The unity of willing one thing in a way transparent to the Spirit can be seen as a ‘oneness’ that does what Aristotle says oneness always does in a species; it is a life moving towards its destination. The difference from Aristotle

53  John 2: 1–11. I am drawing here from Stephen Verney, Water into Wine (Collins: Glasgow, 1985). 54  John 3: 3. 55  John 8: 23. 56  John 2: 9.

200 Unity lies in the specification of the goal of human life in general, and every particular human life. We have proposed that there is a normative narrative about a life, a story about a good path for it, and we can be closer to or further away from this path. This normative narrative can, we have argued, include a gender transition as an endorsed part. But we need to ask, ‘Who is telling this story?’. Since we can be wrong about our own story, it is not constituted simply by our preferences. But stories or narratives do not exist on their own, without someone telling them. Who would this person be in the case of the normative narrative about our lives? The Christian can say the teller is the Spirit, even for those who do not identify the teller as such.

6.4  Unity between People Chapter 4 was about love of our country, and used this as an example of the part of the good human life that consists in unity with other people. The thesis of the present chapter is that the Holy Spirit works to produce this unity between ­people. The destination of this work is a transformed world, a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness and peace kiss each other (Psalm 85: 10). The description of this destination in the book of Revelation, even though it remembers much of the description of the first creation in Genesis, gives us not a garden but a city, the new Jerusalem, and this city has a king. The citizens of this new city are drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language. But the text does not say that these new citizens lose all connection with their old nations and tribes and peoples and languages. Rather (Revelation 21: 24), ‘the nations [plural] will walk by the light [of the glory of the Lord] and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. . . . The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.’ The picture is that each nation (and presumably each tribe and people and language) has its own glory which it will bring into the new city. Each group has its own gifts to bring to the heavenly Jerusalem. We will return to this picture at the end of this section of the chapter and connect it with the work of the Holy Spirit. In the farewell discourse and prayer in the fourth gospel (John 14‒17) we can see the work of the Spirit in bringing unity between people. This whole passage is a transition from ‘many’ to ‘one’. It starts with an emphasis on ‘many’ (14: 2): ‘In my Father’s house are many rooms.’ We do not know just what Jesus means by ‘rooms’. In Greek, the term is monai, which is cognate with the verb meno, which means ‘remain’. Presumably, whatever these ‘rooms’ are, they are places where one stays at least for a while, and the term is sometimes translated ‘dwelling-­places’. Jesus is going to use this same verb for the different branches ‘abiding’ or ‘remaining’ in the same vine, and they abide when the same life is in all of them. But ­whatever the rooms are, the point is that they are many; we do not all go into the same ‘room’. He says that he is going to prepare a place for us, but Thomas (the

Unity between People  201 disciple) objects that he does not know where Jesus is going. Jesus responds: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’, and the connection with Thomas’s question is perhaps that wherever Jesus is going, and so wherever we are to go, he will be with us on the journey as well as at the destination. But how will he be with us on the journey if he is leaving us? The answer is that he is sending the Spirit, who will be with us and in us, and so it is to our benefit that Jesus goes away. Since it is the same Spirit in all of us, we can all be, as it were, different branches of the same vine. Here the emphasis shifts from the ‘many’ to the ‘one’. There are still many of us, asking different things of God (15: 7), giving different testimonies of God’s goodness (15: 16), giving birth, as it were, to different children (16: 21), and scattered each to his own home (16: 32). But the Spirit enables us to be one by bringing to mind Jesus’s command to love one another (15: 12). Loving is what produces the unity. Jesus’s final prayer is that his Father may protect his followers, and the protection is so that they may be one, as he and the Father are one (17: 11). He prays that they may be ‘perfected into unity’ (17: 23). And he prays this not just for those who have been his disciples, but for all those who come to faith through them, presumably through the generations. Indeed, he says that by en­ab­ ling them to be one as he and the Father are one, he has given them their glory (17: 22). The unity that Jesus and God the Father have is not exactly duplicable by us, because we mere humans do not have either the Trinitarian unity (three persons and one God) or the hypostatic union (between the human nature and the divine nature of Christ). But we can love one another and love God in a way that participates in how the persons of the Trinity love each other and love us. The way Scotus puts this is that we can become co-­lovers (condiligentes), entering into God’s love without becoming God. Perhaps an analogy for this is the way children can enter into their parents’ love without becoming their parents. I Corinthians has sustained teaching about the gifts of the Spirit. The important point for our present purposes is that they are given for the sake of the building up of the body (I Corinthians 12: 7): ‘To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.’ Paul emphasizes this because he does not want anyone puffed up by the thought of having elite gifts to manifest. The eye cannot say to the hand (12: 21) ‘I don’t need you!’ and the hand cannot say to the foot ‘I don’t need you!’. The kind of unity that the body has is that when one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it. Where does this unity come from? Paul’s idea is that the health of the body is given by the activation of the gifts given to individuals for the sake of the common good of the body. And because it is one Spirit who gives all the gifts, the activation of the gifts will produce a united functioning of the whole. An analogy might be the work of a community organizer, who has plans for the health of the whole community but produces this result by working with individuals in many different locations and settings; because the plans come from a single person, their realization does not produce chaos but harmony.

202 Unity We can go back to Aristotle’s discussion of the different senses in which a thing can be one. A set of people might be one just by being confined within the same borders (like the rope around the bundle of sticks). It might be one by genus, since they are all people. But the highest kind of unity is where there is a whole, and so a form, and Aristotle’s paradigm is the form of a living species. Aristotle then uses this paradigm to talk about both artworks, as we saw in section 6.2 of this chapter, and then political bodies. A well-­functioning city (polis) has an organic unity. There are dangers as well as strengths in this analogy. In Plato’s Republic the well-­being of the three classes that make up the city is subordinated to the good of the whole, and this means not only that the philosopher kings and queens have to go without personal property and personal family life, but that those in the lowest class have to allow their interests to be determined by those above them. To a modern sensibility, there is a crucial disanalogy between, say, a kidney and a labourer; the labourer has dignity and the kidney does not. The strength of the analogy is the insistence that the flourishing life of the whole requires the flourishing of the members. The upper room discourse and I Corinthians are not about political unity, which was the particular topic of Chapter  4. Even if it is comparatively easy to show that the Spirit works to build unity in the church, that does not show that the Spirit is concerned at all with politics. There is more in the Hebrew Scriptures about God guiding political units, and that is because the people of Israel are both God’s special people and a nation with a political history. But God’s guidance is not confined in those Scriptures to Israel. We are told that ‘the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord’ (Proverbs 21: 1). Does this apply only to a king in Israel? We are also told that ‘in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfil the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm’ (Ezra 1: 1). This is still, however, Israel-­related, since the proclamation of Cyrus was that the Lord, the God of heaven, had appointed him to build a temple for God at Jerusalem. The point is generalized beyond Israel by Paul in Romans 13: 1: ‘The authorities that exist have been established by God.’ There is a vexed question here about what the Christian is supposed to do when commanded by the authorities to do something contrary to the commands of God, and there is a strong case for civil disobedience. But the present point is that civil authority is regarded in this text as part of the providential order. The Spirit blesses us through our political rulers, even if they are not godly people themselves. Kant discusses one of the difficulties with this: The exalted epithets often bestowed on a ruler (‘the divinely anointed’, ‘the administrator of the divine will on earth and its representative’) have often been censured as gross and dizzying flattery, but, it seems to me, without grounds. Far from making the ruler of a country arrogant, they would rather have to humble

Unity between People  203 him in his soul if he is intelligent (as must be assumed) and make him reflect that he has taken on an office too great for a human being—­namely the most sacred office that God has on earth, that of trustee of the right of human beings—­ and that he must always be concerned about having in some way offended against this ‘apple of God’s eye’.57

His view is that our duties to obey these rulers, like all true duties, ‘must be represented as at the same time [God’s] commands.’58 Chapter 4 used the notion of providential proximity (in section 4.8) as giving us a perfection of love of humanity in love of country, and also used the idea (in section 4.2) that there are different levels of moral thinking, the critical and the intuitive. It used this second idea to support the claim that preference for oneself and for one’s own country could be morally permissible at the intuitive level. We can now ask how providential proximity and the intuitive level are connected. In R. M. Hare’s treatment of the levels of moral thinking, the archangel (or actually, God) is serving as a thought experiment, or, in Kant’s term, a regulative principle. No claim is yet made that such a being exists. But suppose we think such a being does exist, and exercises care for us through the providential work of the Holy Spirit. In Kant’s term, suppose God is a constitutive principle. This will make a difference to how we construe the levels. For R. M. Hare the special relations endorsed at the intuitive level are a second-­best, an approximation to the moral thinking we would do if, like the archangel, we had complete information and complete impartiality. But if God assigns each of us a particular place within cre­ ation and within humankind, because God knows our limits and capacities and puts us where we can contribute well, the obligations that arise out of the particular relations thus established will not be second-­best at all. They will be the recognition of the intrinsic and unique value of the individuals that God creates and puts us next to. There are dangers in this conception of ‘my station and its duties’, that it can lead to a kind of social conservatism that holds these stations as fixed, so that no movement is morally allowed from one station to another.59 But as argued in Chapter 3 (sections 3.8 and 3.9), the idea that God is guiding us on a path does not require that there be only one such path or that the path is unchangeable. Chapter 4 (section 4.7) discussed this question from the perspective of an emigrant from one country to another. If I live as a citizen in a particular country where God wants me to be at a particular time, and if I assume the obligations that accompany such a role, I am fulfilling or completing one of my functions as a human being. Chapter  4 speculated that one reason God might 57  PP 8: 353n. 58  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (Rel), 6: 99. 59  See F. H. Bradley, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, in Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927).

204 Unity have is the benefit of unity under law; I am fulfilling in a more complete way, when I pay my taxes, vote, stop at red lights, and get vaccinated, my love for my neighbour. But this is not to say that these obligations exhaust my love for the neighbour. As also argued in Chapter 4, the same God who includes us within a community then sends us out beyond it. The point is that the level of moral thinking at which I give preference to my country is best seen not as a defective approximation to the critical level where I love all humans impartially, but as a partial recognition of the special relation that God has to each person. God gives us tasks that coordinate the meeting of particular human needs by first including us within community and then sending us out beyond it. In the United States we are living through a period of polarization in which neither side has been able to see much, if any, good in the other. Writing personally, I mentioned in Chapter 1 that I worked for the U.S. Congress from 1981 to 1983, ending up on the staff of one of the subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The head of that subcommittee, Lee Hamilton, already foresaw that more and more of the political agenda was becoming like abortion, where Congress was paralysed because opinion was so bitterly divided in the districts represented by the members that any vote would tend to damage them at the next election. Forty years ago there was still, however, enough trust between members of both parties that on issues that were not like abortion in that way, decision could be delegated to the members who had most experience and knowledge of the issue. I remember watching the votes as they were recorded on a screen in the House, and members would wait until Hamilton voted on, say, US aid to Jordan, and then immediately twenty or so votes from both parties would line up with his. The members did not have time or staff to work out these issues for themselves, and they trusted each other. We had at that time a group of Christian staff members from both House and Senate and both Democrat and Republican, and we met to pray together regularly for our work and for America. This was possible because we had a shared sense of a prior loyalty to God. But one conviction most of us had, I think, is that the Spirit does work through the pol­it­ ical process, even though the process is morally messy; making law is in some ways like making sausage. The point for present purposes is that there is a power that we can sometimes feel beyond ourselves; that we are together with that power working towards a more just and peaceful world. There is always the danger of idolatry in identifying any particular party programme or political leader’s agenda with the work of the Spirit. But the presence of that danger does not license denying that we can be cooperating with the Spirit’s work; as Psalm 103: 6 puts it, ‘The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.’ But if in the conduct of politics we are sometimes aware of a power outside us working towards a more just and peaceful world, we are also sometimes aware of its opposite: a power beyond ourselves working towards disunity, towards the destruction of righteousness and peace. There is teaching in Scripture about spiritual warfare, about the

Unity between People  205 principalities and powers. Jesus talks about ‘the prince of this world’ (John 16: 11), and one way to read the teaching of Revelation about Babylon is that it refers to such an opposite power. One helpful term here is ‘covenant’, as in Philip Gorski’s book American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.60 The idea of an American covenant is the idea of a special relation between God and America that requires America to live a certain way. This is a discussion peculiar to the American context, but the idea of a special relation between God and a country is not peculiar to America. For example, William Blake writes of Jerusalem not yet built in England’s green and pleasant land.61 Zwingli thought in terms of a cov­en­ ant between God and the Swiss.62 The ancient world was full of tutelary deities, as in the relation of Athens and the goddess Athena. The Puritans who came to America to escape persecution in England thought of themselves as in a covenant with God in the way the people of Israel had been. Thus John Winthrop, probably before the Arbella embarked, wrote, Thus stands the cause between God and us, we are entered into a covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles [,] we have professed to enterprise these actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon besought him of favor and blessing: Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, [and] will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it, but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and dissembling with our God, shall fail to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us [and] be revenged of such a perjured people and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.63

Gorski distinguishes the idea of an American covenant sharply from what he calls ‘religious nationalism’ on the one hand, and on the other hand from what he calls ‘radical secularism’, recognizing that all three are ideal types and blended in 60  Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Gorski has further discussed the relation between evangelical Christianity and nationalism in American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump (New York: Routledge, 2020). 61  William Blake, ‘And Did Those Feet’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed., ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. (New York: W.  W.  Norton, 1996), 683. There is a sense in this poem of unrealized ­ideals, as in Gorski. 62  See Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 25, ‘Like the ancient Israelites—­a comparison Zwingli frequently made—­the Swiss were God’s chosen, who had sinned and were to be punished for their greed, lust and idolatry.’ 63 David  D.  Hall, Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 169. This passage is quoted and discussed in Gorski, American Covenant, 41.

206 Unity practice in different combinations. About the first of these he says, ‘The religious nationalist wishes to fuse religion and politics, to make citizenship in the one the mark of citizenship in the other, to purge all those who lack the mark, and to expand the borders of the kingdom as much as possible, by violent means if necessary.’64 He says that the basic formula for religious nationalism in American history has been ‘apocalyptic politics plus the conquest narrative.’65 By the first of these, he means a reading of the biblical texts about the end times that is pre­dict­ ive (giving a code that modern-­day prophets can decipher), literal (understanding the mythical creatures of the texts as identifiable political entities), pre-­millennial (putting Christ’s return before the thousand-­year kingdom), and vindictive (emphasizing the punishment of the godless). By the ‘conquest narrative’ he means the story of ‘the exploits of the ancient Israelites described in Joshua, Judges, and Kings’, and then extended to the treatment of America’s in­di­ gen­ous peoples and to ‘manifest destiny’. By contrast, the radical secularist ‘wishes to fortify the border [between the two citizenships]; to build a wall that is so high and so well guarded that no traffic, no money, no people, no ideas even, can pass through it; and to punish anyone who dares cross from one side to the other.’ Radical secularism, he says, ‘attacks religious faith from the vantage point of scientific reason, claiming that the one cannot be reconciled with the other, and demands that religion be ejected from public life, which should be a realm of pure reason.’66 The idea that God can enter a covenant with a nation, found pervasively in the Hebrew Scriptures, has also been strongly present in the history of America, which has seen itself as ‘the new Israel’. We should have qualms about thinking of such a modern covenant as just the same as the biblical covenants, and instead we should treat the idea as a strong analogy. There are not the same initiation events or the testimony of sacred text. But the analogy rightly suggests that God cares about nations as well as about individual persons and helps both nations and individuals in their difficulties. It also suggests that those nations are accountable to divinely sanctioned standards if they then fail to live by them. Gorski traces the idea not just in the Puritans, but then in the American Revolution, in both sides in the American Civil War, and beyond into the twentieth century. He denies that this is the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, which suggests that only Christians can be whole-­hearted citizens. That idea, he says, ‘is neither historically accurate nor politically harmless.’67 His point is not to deny the influence of a certain kind of Protestant Christianity, but to insist that America was founded as a civic nation, ‘premised on a certain set of political ideals, and that

64 Gorski, American Covenant, 17. 65 Gorski, American Covenant, 19; and for the definition of ‘apocalyptic politics’, American Covenant, 22. 66 Gorski, American Covenant, 29. 67 Gorski, American Covenant, 221.

Unity between People  207 acceptance of these ideals was and is the only legitimate criterion of national belonging and civic rights.’ What ideals does Gorski have in mind? His answer is fourfold: freedom, equality, solidarity, and inclusion.68 But he emphasizes that these values are embodied in specific persons, events, places, and stories, and these embodiments are the real core of the civil religion, its primary source of motivational force and ethical direction. He also emphasizes that America has continually failed to put these values into practice; this too is part of the tradition of covenant. Nonetheless, ‘we are part of a collective, multigenerational project, an ongoing effort to realize a set of universal political ideals—­above all, freedom and equality—­from within the confines of a particular historical trajectory.’69 We can return now to the eschatological picture at the beginning of this section, of the heavenly Jerusalem and the nations bringing their treasures into it, and we can ask what it means. Does it mean, for example, that we stay British or American in heaven? Surely not. For one thing, the modern notion of a nation state is post-­Westphalian, and nothing in Scripture corresponds to it. But there is still meaning in that text. We can suppose that each polity develops over time its own distinctive aspirations. These are aspirations and not facts on the ground, and they may not be in practice consistent with each other. Tentatively, Chapter 4 gave four examples of such aspirations in the United States: freedom, hospitality, mobility, and courtesy. The country aspires to a degree of freedom from bureaucratic control that is productive of excellent and original work and play. The country aspires to be hospitable to aliens and strangers, as expressed in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, and aspires to a genuine integration into a hybrid (not an assimilated) culture that is enriched by its newcomers. The country aspires to be open to overturning hierarchy and not to be bound by traditional class distinctions. Finally, the country aspires to a friendly and open manner in dealing with people we do not know. Writing personally, I remember when I got here wondering suspiciously why people were inviting me to lunch in their homes after barely meeting me. So, four aspirations. But then there are what Chapter  4 called the ‘practical contradictions’. In terms of freedom from bureaucracy, there is the mind-­boggling complexity of the process of getting a green card, often requiring professional legal assistance. Did America manifest hospitality to the Irish, or Chinese, let alone the Africans who came as slaves? And how open is America to mobility given the institutional patterns of segregated lending for mortgages and unequal educational funding? Finally, to what extent do we manifest courtesy to those who disagree with us politically in these polarized times? And to what extent was my lunch invitation to people’s homes a result of my privilege in class and race? African Americans crossing the street on the cross-­walk report hearing the ‘click,

68 Gorski, American Covenant, 216.

69 Gorski, American Covenant, 222.

208 Unity click, click’ of car doors being locked against them. All this is why we should talk about aspirations rather than facts on the ground. The situation is actually worse than this. Not only is there a contradiction, but the aspirations can actually get in the way of the performance; we can think that as long as we aspire, we do not have to act. This does not mean, however, that we should not have the aspirations, but that if they are merely aspirational, without the will to repent or change, they are just enabling the contradiction. If there are these distinctive aspirations, we can think of them as included in the treasures that the polity brings to the heavenly city. If they are godly as­pir­ ations, we can think of the Spirit as working within the community to bring them to fruition and to overcome the attendant practical contradictions. The unity in question is a common life. But it can be a difficult and struggling life, unlike what Aristotle calls ‘concord’ in which the citizens simply agree about their interests and act accordingly. In a country like America the practical application of the aspirations is under continual contestation. Sometimes we can wonder whether there is any common life or common aspiration left. The ­prophets of Israel saw God as sometimes turning away from the covenant people because of their dis­obedi­ence. But Hosea tells us that because God is God and not human, divine wrath will not be the end of the story, but ‘they will follow the Lord.’ (Hosea 11: 9–10) Other nations, however, and tribes and peoples and languages have come and gone on the earth. We cannot assume that God rescues them. But if the citizens of a country are right that God cares about the country, and not only about the individuals within it, they can throw themselves and their country upon God’s mercy. The present claim is that something endures from the common life into the new Jerusalem even if the country itself ceases to exist on the earth. Finally, since the aspirations we have been talking about are distinctive, they will be different from one polity to another. This means that we can think of the Spirit as analogous to a community organizer at a larger scale, not only within a nation but between nations, coordinating at the scale of the whole world. In the farewell discourse in John, Jesus says that the Spirit will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin, righteousness, and judgement (John 16: 8). This is the Spirit’s work in the world, and not just in the church. The eschatological hope is that if we now work for a world in which justice and peace embrace, we are working with the Spirit and on the side that will eventually prevail.

6.5  Unity with God Contemplation aims at unity with God, and it can be assisted to some degree by common grace, like the three examples in earlier chapters, but not to the extent of the filling with the Spirit which we will discuss shortly.

Unity with God  209 Unity with God, however, does not fit well with any of the Aristotelian distinctions so far mentioned. We are not merely continuous with God in the sense that God and we are both present in the space-­time that God has created to house us, and we are not merely one in genus in the sense of being, like God, spiritual beings (though we are also bodily). The important point for present purposes is that we do not make up with God an Aristotelian whole like a shoe of which we are both parts, and which is constituted as a unity by a single form. God and we are not like parts of a shoe which can only reach their full functionality when they are all present. This is because God is already complete without us, even though we are not complete without God, and even though God chooses freely to be ‘with’ us. God did not need to create us. This is denied in some Christian theologies, but is necessary if we are to maintain that God is free in creation. Fortunately, Aristotle has another distinction in Metaphysics VII, and it will serve our purposes well. He distinguishes between two senses in which one thing can be said ‘in itself ’ (in Greek, kath’ hauto) of another. Section 6.1 of this chapter quoted him saying that ‘things are called “one” if the formula which states their essence is indivisible into another formula which signifies the essence of [a] thing.’70 That does not mean that the formula which gives the essence of a thing is itself incomposite. If I say that a human is a rational animal, that definition has parts. But Aristotle thinks (unlike Scotus) that humanity does not divide up into parts that themselves have essences in the strict sense. Now, however, we can make a different point. A human is ‘in itself ’ animal, since ‘animal’ enters into the definition of ‘human’. But there is a way in which we can talk about an animal being ‘in itself ’ human, and this is not because ‘human’ enters into the definition of ‘animal’ but, vice versa, because ‘animal’ enters into the definition of ‘human’.71 This is a good way to think about the unity between us and God. God enters into our definition if we suppose (contra Aristotle) that we have individual essences, and that they are given their character by our unique ways of loving God. On the other hand, we do not enter into God’s definition, because God is there whether we are there or not. Actual human beings enter into the contents of God’s mind by God’s free choice, but not into God’s definition. God would still be completely God even if God did not think of us.72 What, then, is this unity with God reached in prayer and contemplation? One phrase used pervasively when Scripture talks about the Spirit is that people are ‘filled’ with the Spirit. Jesus, for example, full of the Holy Spirit, returns from his baptism, and is led by the Spirit into the desert.73 Barnabas is described on one 70 Aristotle, Metaphysics, V, 6, 1016a34. 71  Aristotle’s example is that colour is ‘in itself ’ white, Metaphysics, VII, 4, 1029b17. 72  Karl Barth has the idea that God chooses not to be by Godself, and being with us becomes part of God’s self-­definition. But this is still contingent, and not necessitated by what God is in se, even if God is love in se. 73  Luke 4: 1.

210 Unity occasion as full of the Holy Spirit, as is Paul, and as are all the disciples in Pisidian Antioch.74 Sometimes this filling is associated with speaking in tongues, as at Pentecost, but more often not.75 What does it mean to be ‘filled’? We connected this with the story of the wedding at Cana in section 6.3. It is not exactly like a jar being filled with water, where the space was previously empty with nothing in it except air which is then expelled. It is more like being filled with love for someone, where the fullness is an energy in which nothing is held back. Plato makes the mistake of confusing these two kinds of filling in his account of pleasure as a filling in the Gorgias.76 Hunger and thirst may be a previous emptiness that precedes the pleasure of getting filled up again with food or drink. But not all pleasures are like this. Kant suggests that aesthetic pleasure comes from the awareness of the unimpeded life in the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding.77 The difference between a jar being filled with water and a person being filled with love is that the person who loves is using what he or she already has, together with some new elements (like the miraculous wine which uses the elements in the water); what precedes in the empty jar is just the absence. This is why we are told to love with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. The fullness consists in our being fully and vitally engaged. If we ask in what way we are participating in this unity, a useful thought is Pascal’s description of ‘the eyes of the heart’.78 This lies behind his famous saying that ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’79 Pascal continues ‘It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.’ He talks also of ‘contemplating’ our own sin, and this puts him with Bonaventure and Edwards and Kierkegaard in the use of the term ‘contemplation’ for an activity of the heart.80 What lies behind these statements is Pascal’s theory of the three orders. This idea comes originally from mathematics, where lines, squares, and cubes (or x, x squared, and x cubed) cannot be added together because they belong to different orders. In the same way he thinks there is a human seeing that is proper to the physical senses, a seeing that is proper to the mind or intellect, and a seeing that is proper to the heart,

74  Acts 11: 24, 13: 9, 13: 52. 75  Acts 2: 2–4. Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit before he preaches, at Acts 4: 8, and Stephen before he looks up to heaven and sees a vision, at Acts 7: 55. Sometimes being full of the Spirit is associated with the gift of wisdom, as at Acts 6: 3, and sometimes with no particular gift, as at Acts 9: 17. 76 Plato, Gorgias 494a. 77  See Scotus on ‘the recollection of all our faculties’, Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 27, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 275f. 78  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.  J.  Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995), section 308, p. 96 (henceforth P). 79 Pascal, P, sections 423–4, page 127, and section 234, page 72. Kierkegaard also has the idea of what he calls ‘edifying contemplation’ in which we unite our will with the Good, see Purity of Heart, 157–8. 80 Pascal, P, section 149, page 49. We can think also of the discussion of Melanchthon and prescriptive realism in Chapter 5, section 5.4.

Unity with God  211 and the distinction between these needs to be carefully maintained. There is in the same way a distinction between carnal greatness, the greatness of a genius like Archimedes, and the greatness of Jesus. The three orders are, Pascal says, incommensurable: All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms are not worth the least of minds, for it knows them all and itself too, while bodies know nothing. All bodies together and all minds together and all their products are not worth the least impulse of charity. This is of an infinitely superior order.81

This last quotation shows how Pascal thinks about our unity with God. This is accomplished within the order of charity, and so is dependent on God’s work within the human heart.82 It is ‘incredible that God should unite himself to us’.83 God did this work within Pascal’s own heart through Pascal’s contemplation of the contradictions of human experience, our being both great and base.84 ‘Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.’85 Pascal sees God here as revealing Godself to our hearts by grace, and this moves us to love (charity), and in this way God inclines our hearts to believe. The cap­ acity to receive this gift should not occasion pride in us, any more than our cap­acity for being like the earthworm should cause us to grovel.86 The heart is here seen as having ‘eyes’ or as ‘perceiving’, but not in the way the mind or the reason sees and perceives. He does go on, in his notorious discussion of the wager, to give reasoning on behalf of faith. But, he says, those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.87

Usually Pascal talks about God’s work here as ‘grace’, but sometimes he says that God moves our hearts by filling us with the Holy Spirit.88 Pascal in these passages shows that he has, like Bonaventure as described in Chapter 5, a robust conception of the heart, according to which it has an object that it sees and loves, but the

81 Pascal, P, section 308, page 97. 82 Pascal, P, section 358, page 106. 83 Pascal, P, section 149, page 49. 84 Pascal, P, section 404, page 119. 85 Pascal, P, section 131, page 35. 86 Pascal, P, section 380, page 110. 87 Pascal, P, section 110, page 29. 88  ‘I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh’, Pascal, P, section 131, page 36; and see also section 367, page 108. See also section 407, page 119, ‘[Happiness] is in God both outside and inside us.’

212 Unity seeing is not understanding and transcends the reason.89 The heart is not merely affective, on this view, as though all cognitive content came from outside it and its job was just to add force (or as though the content were a billiard ball and the heart merely gave the push from the cue). Rather, there are different kinds of content, and one belongs to the intellect and another to the heart. This means that the dispute between Pascal and the intellectualists who are described in Chapter  5 section 5.5 is not straight-­forward, because the faculties are not being conceived in exactly the same way. But Pascal nonetheless makes a distinctive point. He is saying that the contemplation in our hearts of both our sin and our aspiration and longing for union with God produces a tension that is resolved by God’s infusion of love into our hearts so that, even though we do not comprehend it, we can find ourselves drawn into this union. This chapter is not going to discuss the more out-­of-­the-­normal gifts like glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and prophecy; that is a different project. Such a project would have to discuss the view of some Pentecostal Christians that there is a ‘second baptism’ of the Holy Spirit, one that is supposed to be accompanied with speaking in tongues. It would have to mention that Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit without speaking in tongues, and that when Scripture does describe the gift (in I Corinthians 12‒14) there is no endorsement of an uninterpreted use. On the other hand, it would also mention that there is nothing in Scripture that says that this gift is going to end with the early church. Perhaps it would conclude that there continues to be a place for the gift, but it is not a central part of being filled with the Spirit. But to defend this is a different project. Prophecy is different from speaking in tongues, because Jesus was a prophet, and it makes sense to say that in some sense all Christians are supposed to be prophets.90 That is Pascal’s view, though he acknowledges that the prophets of Scripture have a special status.91 But there are many different ways of being a prophet, and Paul’s account of the gifts suggests that not all receive this gift, though it is a better gift than tongues.92 It needs a different book to try to analyse this complex material, one that focusses on the special work of the Spirit in the church.93

89  What Pascal calls ‘first principles’ are also known in the heart, for example that one is a body located in three-­dimensional space and changing in time. These principles cannot be proved, and are, Pascal says, ‘felt’ or ‘intuited’. ‘It is just as pointless and absurd for reason to demand proof of first principles from the heart before agreeing to accept them as it would be absurd for the heart to demand an intuition of all the propositions demonstrated by reason before agreeing to accept them’; Pascal, P, section 110, page 28. 90  Jesus is traditionally held to fulfil the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18: 15, 18, that there will be another prophet like unto Moses. On the idea that prophecy is what all the faithful should be doing, see Cathleen Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 91 Pascal, P, section 382, page 112. 92  I Corinthians 12–14. 93  See Alex Ozar’s dissertation on prophecy within twentieth-­century Jewish philosophy, submitted at Yale in 2022.

Unity with God  213 There are two implications of the account of contemplation in this book for our view of what our lives are like after this world. The first is that one of the mo­tiv­ ations for teaching a doctrine of purgatory is removed. We might think that we are not ready for heaven when we die, and we need a period of training for it. But on the account offered in this book, our next life is one of movement, not one of activity in Aristotle’s technical sense where activity is already complete. The Holy Spirit helps us move towards unity in all the ways this book has described. Why should we not think of this work of the Spirit continuing in the next life? There is a much-­loved saying: ‘God isn’t finished with me yet’, though its origin is not known. On the picture presented in this book, God is never finished with us, though progress in this life often requires pain and in the next life it does not. But following Boethius, we can say that God sees the whole shape at once. The second implication has to do with judgement. We have to distinguish two judgements, which the tradition calls ‘particular judgement’ and ‘general judgement’. These are not terms from Scripture, but an attempt to make sense of two different themes that are in Scripture. One theme is that the saints are already with Jesus, which implies that they have already been judged worthy. Thus Jesus says to the penitent thief, ‘This day you will be with me in Paradise.’94 This is the particular judgement. The other theme is that there is a final judgement when the books are opened and all secrets are revealed.95 This is the general judgement. We need to talk of two judgements because judgement brings in the last times, but the particular judgement has not yet brought about the coming of the new heaven and the new earth. Again, it is helpful to distinguish the eternity possessed strictly only by God from the everlastingness which is possessed by all of us. For God the particular judgement and the general judgement are, like all events, simultaneous. This is why, perhaps, the two judgements are not distinguished in Scripture. Perhaps the final or last judgement is for our benefit. This is merely speculative, but we have seen in the various truth and reconciliation commissions of recent history the great value of the judgement being public, so that nothing is hidden. Justice is served when we all see the effects of what we have thought and said and done on all those we have affected. T.  S.  Eliot has described in ‘Little Gidding’ what it is like to get old:96 And last, the rending pain of re-­enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

94  Luke 23: 24.

95  Revelation 20: 12.

96  T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 138–42.

214 Unity The last judgement will no doubt be devastating. But it is not the end of the story. In Christian doctrine there is a time of mercy when, after the accounting has been made, we are covered by Christ’s atonement. For the purposes of the present chapter the key point is that the at-­one-­ment is a unification of our lives with God’s life, though not a merging of our lives into God’s; our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3: 3).

6.6  Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity? We can ask, finally, ‘Why does the Holy Spirit aim at unity?’, and the answer will be that the Holy Spirit is love. This claim is pervasive in the tradition, but we will look especially at Augustine in De Trinitate and then at Scotus. De Trinitate XV, 17, is headed ‘How the Holy Spirit is called Love, and whether He alone is so called. That the Holy Spirit is in the Scriptures properly called by the name of Love.’97 Augustine starts from the claim that the Spirit is ‘neither of the Father alone, nor of the Son alone, but of both; and so intimates to us a mutual love, wherewith the Father and the Son reciprocally love one another.’98 He concedes that the Scriptures do not actually say that the Holy Spirit is love, but he claims that there is an easy implication from what the Scriptures do say. He argues this in various ways, but the primary text is I John 4. The letter says that God is love, but also, Augustine emphasizes, that love is of God (in the sense of from God). So if we ask which person of the Trinity is referred to, it cannot be the Father, since the Father is not of God. The letter then tells us also to love each other, so that God abides in us, and concludes, ‘By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.’ (1 John 4: 13) So the love in this passage that is from God must be the Holy Spirit. Augustine also cites other passages, for example Romans 5: 5, where ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ He argues that because this passage says both that the love is given and that the Holy Spirit is given, this should mean that the Holy Spirit is love. Augustine is clear that he is not saying that only the Spirit loves. Indeed, it is because the Father loves and the Son loves that the Spirit is properly called the love by which they love. Also, he is not saying that the love is in itself a substance: ‘For we are not going to say that God is called Love because love itself is a substance worthy of the name of God.’99 But because of divine simplicity, we should say that

97 Augustine, On the Trinity, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. II, ed. Whitney  J.  Oates, trans. A. W. Haddan (New York: Random House, 1948), XV, 17, 856–9. 98 Augustine, On the Trinity, VIII, 10. 787, ‘Behold, then, there are three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and love.’ 99 Augustine, On the Trinity, XV, 17. 857.

Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity?  215 in that simple and highest nature, substance should not be one thing and love another, but that substance itself should be love, and love itself should be substance, whether in the Father, or in the Son, or in the Holy Spirit; and yet that the Holy Spirit should be specially called Love.100

In Scotus, the relation between love and the Spirit is more complicated and more finely articulated.101 He has an elaborate proof that there can be only two persons who proceed from the Father, namely the Son and the Spirit (who also proceeds from the Son). ‘There are only two productions there, distinct according to the formal natures of the productions, and this is because there are only two productive principles having distinct formal natures of producing.’102 A pro­duct­ ive principle is either productive from itself determinately in the manner of nature, or not from itself determinately, but freely, and thus in the manner of will. What is produced in the first way is an act of knowledge and what is produced in the second way is an act of love. (It is standard doctrine in Scotus that the intellect does not act freely, but determinately according to its nature, and that the act of the will, which does act freely, is to love.) Scotus in this way shows the Son to be connected principally by his nature to the act of knowing and the Spirit to the act of loving. This is not to say, however, that the Son does not love or that the Spirit does not know. The details of Scotus’s argument need not concern us. In this same passage, for example, he relies on the principle of parsimony, that ‘all plurality is reduced to unity, or to as small a number as it can be reduced’, and this can be challenged as a principle applied to the work of God. But the idea that the Spirit is principally active among us as the love proceeding from God fits the biblical texts well. It also makes sense of the experience of those (like Pascal) whose hearts have been moved by the Spirit to love. If we can connect the Spirit with love in this way, what does this tell us about the connection of the Spirit with unity? There are many biblical texts that tie love to unity. Here are three. Colossians 3: 12‒14 gives God’s chosen people a list of the metaphorical ‘clothes’ they are to wear (compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience) and it ends, ‘Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony (in Greek sundesmos tes teleiotetos).’ Philippians 2: 1‒2, written to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, tells them: ‘If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.’ Here being united with Christ is tied to fellowship with the Spirit, and this in turn is tied to the Philippians loving each other, which makes them in full accord and 100 Augustine, On the Trinity, XV, 17. 858. 101  I am relying here on Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God (London: Routledge, 2016), 131–61. 102 Scotus, Ordinatio 1.2.2.1–4, n.300, quoted in Cross, Scotus on God, 145.

216 Unity of one mind. Lastly, John 17: 20‒3 gives Jesus’s final prayer in the upper room before he and the disciples go out to the Garden of Gethsemane: I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity (in Greek teteleiomenoi eis hen) to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Here God’s love for the disciples is manifest in their glorious unity with each other. In all three passages, unity is tied to completion or being perfected because it is seen as the proper end-­point—­of the Colossians’ virtues, or Paul’s joy, or the disciples’ reception of God’s glory. Augustine says: ‘What, then, is love, except a certain life which couples or seeks to couple together some two things, namely, him that loves, and that which is loved?’.103 Love is here a kind of life that produces unity. It does so, he says, because it is directed properly at God, and God produces the unity of all things; God is, as it were, the middle term between love and unity. We could find this in many places in Augustine, but one place is De Doctrina Christiana, ‘Therefore He binds His body, which has many members performing diverse offices, in a bond of unity and charity which is, as it were, its health.’104 Sometimes Augustine seems to instrumentalize our love for each other, and there is a basis in Plato’s Symposium for this form of thought.105 But his more nuanced view is that we love the individual as a way of loving the whole body, which is in turn a way of loving God.106 The claim with which we began this section was not merely that the Holy Spirit acts as God’s love in the world, but that the Holy Spirit is love, that, as Augustine puts it ‘His substance itself should be love’, because of the doctrine of divine simplicity, even though love is not itself a substance. Can we make sense of this without this doctrine? Surprisingly, we can. John Donne, the seventeenth-­century Metaphysical poet has a poem ‘Ecstasy’ (which means, literally, standing outside oneself) in which one stanza reads When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls,

103 Augustine, On the Trinity, VIII, 10, 787. 104 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 1. 16, trans. D.  W.  Robertson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­ Merrill, 1958), 16. This passage is discussed well in J. Warren Smith, ‘Loving the Many in the One: Augustine and the Love of Finite Goods’, Religions, 7/11 (2016), 137–43. 105  Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato’, in Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 3–42. 106  The development of Augustine’s views is traced by Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-­Love in Augustine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).

Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity?  217 That abler soul that thence doth flow Defects of loneliness controls.107

Donne has made up a word here, ‘interinanimates’, to indicate that a new soul (‘anima’) is formed in the place between (‘inter’) two people. We can see this in the love between two human beings. Sometimes, especially if they know each other well and love each other deeply, it is as though there is a third life that they live together. Augustine signals this in the passage from De Trinitate quoted above, by saying that love is itself a kind of life. For example, the two lovers are together in some situation and a thought or a word occurs to both of them, but it seems more accurate to say that it occurs to the both-­ of-­ them-­ together. Sometimes they can make decisions together in this same way, as though what is making the decision is the common life between them. The unity between a mother and her young baby can have the same character, where she can be proud of her baby, or proud of herself for having the baby, but it seems more accurate to say that she is proud of the both-­of-­them-­together. The Moral Gap used this poem of Donne to talk about the union between us and Christ that is at the basis of atonement (at-­one-­ment).108 But we could think about this same picture as an analogy for the life of the Trinity. The Father and the Son love each other, and this produces a third life, the life of the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is just an analogy, however, and is not intended to give a comprehensive account of the ‘substance’ of the Spirit. Perhaps it can help us understand what it might mean to say the Spirit is love. And this in turn can help us understand why it makes sense to say that the Spirit aims at unity. We can think of love as present in the world guiding it in the four ways described in Chapters 2 to 5. It is not a substance, in terms of an Aristotelian metaphysic, but more like a doing or a force. For a Christian it is the doing or force of a divine person. This love has extraordinary power. The Song of Songs (8: 6‒7) says that love is strong as death, and ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.’ This song might simply be about a human love that is based on sexual attraction. But there is a long tradition of taking it as singing about the love between Christ and the church, and so about the Spirit who brings us this love. Our human love for each other can participate in this love. We can think about this in terms of 107 In one early edition, ‘interinanimates’ is replaced by ‘interanimates’. We can speculate that Donne was uneasy because of the use of ‘inanimate’ to refer to the absence of soul; but the ‘in’ is required for the metre, and it can be understood locally rather than negatively, as referring to the place where the new soul originates. 108 John  E.  Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chapter 7.

218 Unity ‘interinanimation’. A human being can participate in a common life with another human being, and this common life can also participate in a common life with the Spirit. Another picture of this is the piano duet mentioned in Chapter  3 section 3.8. The great pianist and I play together, and the music we make is a joint enterprise, even though I am playing in the power of her technique and understanding. But this is a picture of just two people, and what we need is not an ana­ logy for ‘the Spirit and me’ but ‘the Spirit and us’, where the Spirit is active in the relation between two or more others. Writing personally, when my wife died it was love that endured. Presumptuously, I think of this as a love that was a common ‘doing’ with the Spirit, even though it was full of my imperfection; ‘A threefold cord is not quickly broken.’109 Love is completely consistent with grief, but it can transform the grief so that it is not merely the sense of an absence. I can co­oper­ate with this love which is still there inside even after the earthly death, and let it live in me and grow in me, and the love I had with my partner before she died can be part of the narrative that takes both of us forward, since she too is still alive. We are then part of a story that is much larger than our own lives, even our next lives; the story is about everything coming together into a unity under God, so that ‘God may be all in all.’110 By way of summary of this chapter and this book, we can go back to the ingredients of the good human life discussed in Chapter 1, and see how the examples we have looked at can be understood in terms of the unity brought by the Spirit. We started with three lists, those of Jim Griffin, John Finnis, and Martha Nussbaum. We discussed four ingredients: aesthetic pleasure (which was on all the lists), gender identity (which was on none of them), political affiliation (on the lists of Finnis and Nussbaum), and contemplation (on all the lists in some form, but not for Griffin in terms of a relation to God). The ingredients were selected as examples of the four main types of unity: the first is an example of our relationship to the physical world outside us, the second is an example of a self-­ relation, the third is an example of our relation to other people, and the fourth is an example of our relation to God. The book has argued that all four are made intelligible as forms of unity enabled by the Spirit. The argument was not that only people who believe in the Holy Spirit can have aesthetic pleasure, or strong gender identity, or good political relations, of even a relation to God. Rather, the project was one of retrieval, to use Charles Taylor’s resonant term.111 There is a set of concepts within the Christian theology of the Holy Spirit which can help make certain parts of our lives more intelligible. We can organize this increase in intelligibility around four questions, one for each of the four examples selected for discussion. First, what is the ground of the 109  Ecclesiastes 4: 12. 110  I Corinthians 15: 28. 111  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 520.

Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity?  219 extraordinary deep pleasure we get from a sensory object we find beautiful or sublime? Second, if there is a normative narrative across gender transition, who is telling that story? Third, is there a morally legitimate patriotism, and how does it relate to the universal love of humanity? Fourth, in what sense can a human be a partner with God in contemplation? The suggestion of this book has been that we can make progress in answering these questions by thinking in terms of four unities that are teleological, headed towards an end. The first unity is that between the person sensing the object and the object itself.112 The object that is beautiful or sublime already has a ‘rightness’ about it that cannot be formulated in any rule, but it points beyond itself to the highest good that is not yet realized. The second unity is that between the stages of a person’s life, and it gives shape already as a movement towards what comes at the end, even though we do not yet see that end. The claim of this book has been that a transition of gender can be a path towards this destination. The third unity is within a country, and it embodies a particular vision of how justice and peace are to embrace, a vision distinct from that of the aspirations of other countries. This is a vision constantly in practical contestation, but one that we can hope is already an earnest of what is finally to come. The fourth unity is a fullness of life directed towards God without impediment, and is probably not realized completely in this life but can be already here in trace. The thesis of the book has been that these four unities are for Christian theology the work of the Spirit and communications to us of the life of the Spirit. It is the Spirit who brings together the aesthetic object and the person sensing it, so that we are led as if by an artist’s hand into beauty and the sublime. It is the Spirit who counsels an individual life so that it comes to fit a normative narrative that endorses gender transition. It is the Spirit who works within political units to bring justice and peace not just in one country but in the world. It is the Spirit who enables us to love God in a way that fulfils us, even when we cannot do that on our own. All four of these unities, we have suggested, can be understood as forms of life. They are together an earnest or pledge of the life we are to have in the end. We can move the claim to a higher level. It is the Spirit who is the centre that holds all of these different unities together and continues to be present in the life of the new heaven and the new earth which is a dwelling place of the glory of God.

112  In Kant’s phrase, it has a unique kind of teleology that he calls ‘purposiveness without a purpose’; KU 5: 221.

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Index of Biblical Passages For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Genesis 1  89, 162 1: 1–8  188–9 1: 2  1, 51–2, 80–1 1: 27  56n.3, 81, 89, 194–5 2 89 2: 18  82 Exodus 31: 1–6  183–4 31: 2–5  12–13, 50–1 34: 29–35  53 36: 1–9  183–4 36: 2  184 40: 35  53 Deuteronomy 10: 18–19  131n.108 18: 15, 18  212n.90 30: 15–19  147 1 Samuel 3: 4–5  87–8 2 Chronicles 30: 19  121 Ezra 1: 1  202 6: 22  132–3 Psalms 4: 6  53 19 37–8 27: 4  51 29: 2  51 42: 1  20 50: 2  51 71: 8  51 75: 3  33 85: 10  11–12, 27–8, 200 103: 6  133–4, 204–5 119: 111  48 145: 5  51 Proverbs 3: 12  130n.104 21: 1  202 Ecclesiastes 4: 12  218n.109

Song of Songs 8: 6–7  217–18 Isaiah 26: 10  129n.101 40: 18  162 Ezekiel 10: 4  53 Hosea 11: 3  197n.48 11: 9–10  208 Matthew 5–7 105–6 5: 44–8  129n.101 12: 28  111 14: 28  87–8 15: 21–8  130–1 16: 18  9 20: 20  93n.91 22: 30  93 26: 39  43 Mark 7: 34  176–7 9: 29  176–7 12: 25  93n.90 12: 28–30  170n.130 Luke 4: 1  209–10 5: 16  176–7 6: 27–36  129n.102 7: 21  129n.101 7: 41–2  129n.101 8: 40–56  76–7 9: 28–36  53 10: 25f  131n.108 10: 25–37  18 10: 38f  164 10: 40  80 10:42 176–7 20: 35  93 23:24 213 John 2: 1–11  199–200 2: 9  199–200

234  Index of Biblical Passages John (cont.) 3: 3  199–200 3: 16  130n.104 5: 19  176–7 8: 23  199–200 12: 45  176–7 14: 2  200–1 14–17 200–1 14: 16–21  85n.67 14: 25–6  21n.49 15: 7  200–1 15: 15–17  177–8 15: 16  200–1 15: 12  200–1 16:5 80n.56 16: 5–15  85n.67, 177 16: 11  204–5, 218 16: 8  97n.3, 129–30, 208 16: 21  200–1 16: 32  200–1 17: 11  200–1 17: 20–3  200–1 17: 22  200–1 17: 23  21, 200–1 Acts of the Apostles 2: 2–4  210n.75 4: 8  210n.75 6: 3  210n.75 7: 55  210n.75 9: 3  191–2 9: 17  210n.75 10: 47  193–4 11: 24  210n.74 13: 2  191–2 13: 9  210n.74 13: 46f  193–4 13: 52  210n.74 15: 8  193–4 15: 28  191–2 16: 6f  191–2 16: 14–15  193–4 16: 16  193–4 18: 18  193–4 20: 22–3  191–2 21: 9  193–4 22: 21  191–2 23: 11  191–2 Romans 5: 5  21n.47, 214 8 80 8: 23  168 8: 26  157n.94, 176 8: 26–7  168 13: 1  131–2, 202

1 Corinthians 11: 7  89 12: 7  201 12: 21  201 12–14 212 13: 13  158–9 15: 28  217–18 2 Corinthians 4: 6  51 6: 1  129n.101 Galatians 3: 2–5  21n.48 3: 27–8  198–9 3: 28  19, 56, 89, 193–5 5: 22  94–5 5: 22–5  198–9 Ephesians 1: 13–14  195–6 6: 18  176–7 Philippians 2: 1–2  215–16 Colossians 2: 8  2–3 3:3 214 3: 12–14  215–16 1 Thessalonians 5: 17  176–7 Philemon 16 193–4 Hebrews 11: 9–10  121 12: 1  24–5 12: 6  130n.104 James 1: 5–8  196–7 4: 8  196–7 2 Peter 3: 11–13  129–30 3: 13  97n.3 1 John 4:13 214 Revelation 1: 16  51 2: 17  9, 55–6 7: 9–10  24n.53 20: 12  213 21: 24  200 21: 24–26  131–2 21: 26  23

Index of Names and Topics For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abrahamic Faiths  1–2, 19–20, 121–2, 133–6, 137n.6, 147, 159, 166–7 active life  19, 21, 142, 177–8 Adams, R.  86n.70, 87–8 Adorno, T.  44–5, 173n.141 Akinwale, A.  11n.27 Appiah, K. A.  18, 120–2, 123n.91 Aquinas, T.  51n.94, 139–40, 149n.68, 158n.100 Aristotle  3–5, 66–7, 71–2, 76, 150, 166–7, 188 on contemplation  19–22, 52, 135–42, 147–8, 158–9, 163, 165n.118, 169–70, 213 on happiness  27n.4, 136–9 on process and activity  19–20, 143–4, 148, 159, 165–6, 168–9, 213 on substance  7–8 on unity  22–4, 180–2, 184–5, 192–3, 195–6, 196n.44, 199–200, 202, 209 on virtue  55–6, 79, 190, 194–5 Ásta  59–63, 68–9 Audi, R.  17–18, 105 Augustine  90, 156, 158–9, 164, 170, 185–6 on beauty  25, 50–1 on the Holy Spirit as love  214, 216–17 on the heart/will  7, 19–20, 147–8, 150, 151nn.77–78 Austin, J. L.  6–7, 59–61 Averroes 139–40 Avicenna  159, 163 Bauckham, R.  47–8 Baudelaire, C.  189 Barth, K.  87–8, 175–6, 192, 194–5, 197n.47, 209n.72 beauty  10–14, 22–3, 25–35, 49–54, 148, 152–3, 182–91, 218–19 Holy Spirit and beauty, see Holy Spirit, creation and enjoyment of beauty Beauvoir, S. D.  57–8 Benhabib, S.  18, 117–21, 125–6 Beethoven, L. V.  11–12, 26–7, 37–40, 49 Op. 2, No. 2  12, 40–1, 75–6, 192–3 Third Symphony  41–7, 187, 190 besire  19–20, 153–4, 156–7

biblical theology  1–3 Blake, W.  205 Boethius  166–7, 169, 178–9, 190–1, 213 Bonaventure  19–20, 22–3, 25, 49–51, 148–52, 158–9, 165n.119, 167, 170, 190, 210–11 Bradley, F. H.  3–4, 203n.59 Brighouse, H.  105–6 Brock, G.  105–6 Buber, M.  87n.74 Burhnam, S.  41–3, 45–7 Butler, J.  57–8 Calvin, John  2–3, 147 Chignell, A.  113n.49 Chua, D.  44–5, 187 centrality  15–16, 65–71, 74–9, 82, 89, 193 Clement of Alexandria  12–13, 49–51 Coakley, S.  13, 80n.55, 89–90, 92, 193 Cohen, H.  162–3 Coleridge, S. T.  184 common grace  1, 129–30 community  10, 18–19, 24–5, 72, 104–5, 107–8, 115, 117–18, 121–2, 130–3, 201, 203–4, 208 contemplation  18–22, 156–7, 197, 209–13, 218–19 contemplative life  19, 21, 139, 142, 175, 177–8 object of contemplation  21–2, 210–12 place of contemplation in life  21, 135–42, 145–7, 169–79 role of desire  19–20, 143–4, 147–52, 158–9 the contemplating subject  20–1, 144–5, 159–67, 169 Cornwall, S.  56n.4 cosmopolitanism  17–18, 96–7, 105–8, 111–12, 116–22, 129, 134 objections to strong cosmopolitanism  108–11 strong cosmopolitanism  105, 107 covenant  18–19, 23, 100–1, 128, 130–1, 205–8 Crashaw, R.  16, 80–1, 90, 92–4, 193 Dennett, D.  68–9 Derrida, J.  119

236  Index of Names and Topics Dewey, J.  11–13, 22–3, 184–8 desire  9–10, 23–4, 27–8, 55–6, 77–8, 90, 103–4, 152–9 centrality of desire  65–71, 74–6, 178–9 desire in contemplation, see contemplation, role of desire orders of desire  64–6 strength of desire  65–6, 74–5 dignity  9, 39–40, 171–3, 194–5, 202 divine command command and community  18, 104–5, 130–2, 177–8, 202–3 command and the highest good  9, 13, 27–8, 32–3, 39–40, 48, 147 command and objectivity  68–70 command and reception  7, 85–9, 148–9, 174–5, 192 Doyle, M.  108–9 Eckhart, M.  20–1, 164–7, 169, 177–8 Edwards, J.  12–13, 22–3, 26–7, 50–4, 150, 152–3, 191n.31, 210–11 Eliot, G.  123 Eliot, T. S.  179, 213 eschatology  16, 55–6, 83, 89–95, 111, 131–2, 168–9, 198, 207–8, 213 faith  27–8, 38–9, 84–5, 111, 113n.49, 183, 200–1, 205–6, 210–11 justification by faith  153–7, 172–5 life of faith  72–4 Finnis, J.  10, 218 Fox, M.  162, 167 freedom  26, 44–5, 171 Christian freedom  44–5, 47–8, 54 legal freedom  2–3, 10–11, 104–5, 108nn.35,37, 115–16, 127–8, 159–60 of the will  5–6, 9, 12, 28–33, 34n.29, 85–6, 148 gender  10–11, 14–16, 24–5, 55, 124, 191, 193–7, 200, 218–19 social construction of gender  57–63 goodness  44–5, 61, 65, 86, 99–100, 103–5, 107–8, 134, 136–9, 152–3, 202 fruit of the Spirit  94–5, 198–9 God’s goodness, see God, goodness good life  9–11, 24–6, 63–4, 70–1, 96–7, 145, 169–70, 218 good life-narrative  67–8, 71, 195–6, 200 good Samaritan  18, 130–2 good, the  3–5, 32–3, 38–9, 51, 81, 147, 157–8, 210n.79 highest good  11–12, 19–23, 26–8, 32–4, 34n.29, 45, 133, 138–42, 148, 156, 170, 183–4, 186, 190, 218–19

moral goodness  7, 13, 19–20, 22–3, 28–9, 32–3, 34n.29, 39–40, 48–50, 55–7, 79, 85, 113–14, 160, 183–4, 190–1 God as Holy Spirit, see Holy Spirit as Jesus Christ, see Jesus Christ Gorski, P.  18–19, 23, 100–1, 205–8 Gregory of Nyssa  89–90 Griffin, J.  9–10, 96–7, 218 Habermas, J.  117 Haidt, J.  121–2, 130–1 happiness  28–9, 40–1, 48–9, 51–2, 103–4, 136–8, 148–9, 149n.68, 151–2, 158–9 duty and happiness  113, 129, 133 union of happiness and virtue  11–12, 27–8, 32–4, 183 Hare, R. M.  3–7, 17, 32–3, 61–2, 97–8, 100n.12, 102–5, 152n.80, 185n.15, 203–4 Hare, J. E.  26n.1, 28n.7, 39n.51, 67n.27, 77n.51, 96n.1, 97n.4, 99n.11, 105n.26, 108n.34, 135n.1, 138n.13, 139n.14, 141n.30, 145–6, 152n.80, 175n.148 God’s Command  1, 5, 7–9, 19–20, 27n.4, 49n.90, 68n.30, 85n.68, 86–8, 86n.69, 103n.18, 122n.89, 130n.107, 131–2, 131n.108, 142n.35, 153n.82, 161n.107, 178n.156, 192 The Moral Gap  1, 5, 7, 9n.23, 48–9, 49n.90, 65n.22, 98n.9, 217 heart as will, see will, heart or will God’s knowledge of heart  76–7, 80–1, 167–8 heart and choice  52–3, 132–3, 153–6, 198, 202 heart and contemplation  23–4, 158–9, 165–6, 170–1, 179, 209–12 heart and love  21–2, 92–3, 147–9, 172, 193–4, 214–15 Hegel, G. W. F.  41–2, 119, 172–3 Heidegger, M.  184–5 Herbert, G.  176–7 Herder, J. G.  27n.4, 38–9 Holy Spirit  1, 7, 11, 96, 107n.33 creating political unity  18, 97, 121–2, 129–34, 200–8 creation and enjoyment of beauty  11–13, 26–7, 49–54, 182–91 guiding a life  9–11, 16, 56–7, 64, 72, 79–83, 86–9, 94–5, 177–8, 191–200 source of unity  22–4, 180, 182, 214–19 source of unity with God  21–2, 142–3, 156, 159, 167–9, 176–9, 208–14 Hopkins, G. M.  3–4, 187 Hume, D.  57n.8, 77–8, 121–2

Index of Names and Topics  237 identity  9–10, 63–4, 94, 101–2, 102n.15, 121, 130–1, 160, 167 gender identity  14, 23, 55–8, 62, 64, 76–9, 135, 191, 193, 197 Irenaeus  12–13, 131n.111 Isocrates 145–6 Irwin, T. H.  8n.16 James, W.  88n.76 Jesus Christ  48, 51–3, 81, 133–4, 153–4, 165–7, 175–8, 191–2, 198–201, 204–5, 208, 212–17 being ‘in Christ’  23, 56, 89–92, 176, 193, 198–9, 215–16 events in the life of Jesus  9, 53, 55–6, 77–80, 87–8, 93, 105–6, 129–31, 164, 176–7, 190–1, 199–200, 209–10 judgement internalism  153 justification (doctrine of)  1, 7, 19–20, 49–50, 152–9 Kant, Immanuel  1–4, 49–50, 57n.8, 73–4, 202 aesthetic argument for the existence of God  27–35, 183 autonomy and freedom  27–8, 44–5, 47–9, 127–8 categorical imperative  5–8, 29–30, 87–8, 97–100, 102–3 constitutive vs regulative principles  103, 203–4 foedus pacificum  107–8, 113, 116–17, 129 moral theology  3–4, 17–18, 27, 96–7, 111–17, 129, 133 patriotism/cosmopolitanism  17–18, 96–7, 105–8, 117 radical evil  7, 17–18, 48–9, 73–4, 85, 105–7, 113n.51, 174 the beautiful and the sublime  11–13, 22–3, 26–41, 52–4, 183–5, 187–90, 209–10 Kenny, A.  136n.2 Kierkegaard, S.  21, 23, 41–2, 72–4, 84–7, 123, 153–4, 171–5, 182–3, 196–200 Kleingeld, P.  96n.2, 102n.15 knowledge  10, 27–8, 31–2, 38–9, 102–3, 105–6, 136–8, 141–2, 195–6, 215 God’s knowledge  31–2, 85, 177–8, 203–4 knowledge of God  54, 86, 140, 150, 160–1, 163, 168, 177, 210–12 of eschatological destination  9, 16, 20, 24–5, 56–7, 76–7, 194–5 self-knowledge  140, 168 Leibniz, G. W.  3–4 love  25, 148, 157–9, 162 charity  170, 211, 216

co-lovers  9, 15, 151–2, 200–1 fruit of the Spirit  94–5, 198–9 in contemplation  149–52 love of country  11, 16–19, 24–5, 96, 98, 100–6, 126, 129, 131–2, 134, 200, 203–4 love of God  19–24, 99–100, 143–4, 156, 167–8, 170–5, 194–5, 209 love of humanity  96–7, 122–9, 134, 203–4, 218–19 love of neighbor/other  6n.10, 24–5, 104–5, 130–1, 177–8, 200–1, 203–4 practical love  48, 99–102, 109–10, 126–8, 133 logical positivism  4–5 Luther, M.  7, 42–3, 48–9, 105–7, 131n.112, 155–6, 197 MacDonald, G.  167 MacIntyre, A.  102n.15, 172–3 Mackie, J. L.  68–70 Macleod, N.  83–5 Maimonides, M.  20–1, 144–5, 161–3, 167, 176n.151 Matthew, T.  80–1, 91 Melanchthon, P.  153–6 Mendelssohn, M.  113–14, 119–20 Micklethwait, J.  10n.24 Milbank, J.  44–5, 47–8, 154–5, 154n.86 moral gap  7–8, 23–4, 129 moral theory  1, 6–7, 9–10 Morgenthau, H.  17–18, 105–7, 110–11 Murdoch, I.  13, 147, 157–8 Nagel, T.  139 narrative  15–16, 63–9, 71–5, 78, 84–5, 126n.93, 178–9, 191, 193, 200, 218–19 nationalism  18–19, 97, 105–6, 129, 205–6 Niebuhr, R.  17–18, 105–7, 110–11, 129 Nussbaum, M.  10–11, 96n.2, 138–9, 218 patriotism  1, 17–18, 96, 98, 100–1, 102n.15, 106–9, 122–9, 133, 218–19 Parfit, D.  70n.36, 97n.4, 103–4 particularity, problem of  98–100 Pascal, B.  23–4, 210–12 philosophical theology  1–3, 166–7 Pickstock, C.  155n.88 Plato  4–5, 13, 25, 50–1, 53, 65–6, 70–1, 77–80, 138–40, 146–8, 157–9, 166–7, 183, 202, 210–11, 216 Plotinus 51 political realism  105–8 prayer  20–1, 175–9, 192, 208–10 prescriptive realism  19–20, 153–4, 156–7

238  Index of Names and Topics principle of providential proximity  18, 131–2, 203–4 providence  11–12, 16, 18, 33–4, 84–9, 96, 114–16, 120n.78, 126–7, 129, 133, 184, 188–9 revelation  2–3, 41–2, 49–50, 53–4, 111 Rumph, S.  27n.4, 37n.41 Ruse, M.  68–70 Russell, B.  3–4 Schectman, M.  67–9 sex  14, 57–8, 78–9 Sabia-Tanis, J.  82n.59 Scotus, John Duns  3–4, 7–8, 15, 24–5, 56n.5, 98n.8, 154–5, 167, 175, 201, 215 contemplation  21, 170–1 haecceity  8–9, 55–6, 77–8, 99–102, 122, 150–2, 195–6 Schumann, C.  96n.2 scripture  9, 12–13, 23, 47–8, 82, 129–30, 147, 149, 202, 204–7, 209–10, 212–14 Sidgwick, H.  103–4 Singer, P.  65 Sipe, T.  42–3, 45–6 Smith, M.  20n.44 speech act theory  59–62, 153 sublime  1, 11–14, 22–3, 27, 29n.14, 35–8, 49–50, 52, 54, 81, 190–1, 218–19 varieties of authoritarian sublime  39–40, 46, 49 dynamical sublime  35–7, 40–1 hopeful sublime  37–9, 41–2, 44–7, 49, 187 mathematical sublime  35–6 solipsistic sublime  42–3, 46–7 uncanny sublime  38–9, 46 Taylor, C.  63–4, 177n.153, 218 teleology  16, 18, 67–72, 74–6, 82–3, 117, 119–20, 185n.13, 218–19 Teresa of Avila  16, 80–1, 91–5, 156–7, 193 Trinity  1, 15, 21, 49–52, 56–7, 79–80, 151–2, 200–1, 214, 217 Tufayl, I.  20–1, 159–63 unity  7–8, 31–4, 34n.29, 51, 76, 151–2, 214–19 aesthetic unity  11–12, 182–91 between persons  18–19, 96, 104–5, 200–8

kinds of unity  22–4, 99–100, 180–2 with God  19–25, 135–6, 166–9, 208–14, 218–19 within a life  15–16, 63–5, 67–8, 71–2, 191–200 uniessentialism 75–6 utilitarianism  9–10, 65, 105–6 value  9–10, 62, 69–70, 90, 104–5, 125, 132, 145, 156–7, 213 aesthetic  22–3, 34 instrumental  18–19, 102–3, 140 intrinsic  102–3, 203–4 local and universal  18, 120–2 moral  79–80, 110, 126–8, 153, 164 national values  18–19, 207 virtue  28–9, 28n.9, 38, 49–50, 55–6, 66–7, 79, 94–5, 138, 157–8, 170, 194–5 practical virtues  136–7, 143, 145–7, 169–70 union of virtue and happiness, see happiness, union of happiness and virtue Vlastos, G.  25, 158n.98, 216n.105 Volf, M.  83n.61 Von Balthasar, H. U.  51, 184–5 Walker, M.  140–1, 145 Wesley, J.  155–6 Whitehead, A. N.  4–5, 169n.127, 185–6 will  5–6, 9, 17, 29–30, 33–4, 42–3, 49–50, 66–7, 97–9, 112, 127, 148, 150–2, 164, 166, 170, 192, 196–7, 199–200 freedom of the will  48, 104–6, 127–8, 147, 215 God’s will  36–7, 48, 79–80, 85–8, 156–7, 168, 176–7 heart or will  14, 19–20, 55, 78, 148, 174–5, 193, 197 revolution of the will  11–12, 52, 113–14, 116 wisdom  19–20, 87–8, 114–16, 138, 140, 146–50, 169–70, 175, 178–9, 210n.75 Witt, C.  75–6 Wooldridge, A.  10n.24 Wolterstorff, N.  183n.8 Zahl, S.  21n.48, 153n.84, 155n.89 Zwingli, H.  205