Resurrection and Moral Imagination

Sarah Bachelard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317064596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Moral life gathers its shape, force and meaning in relation to an underlying sense of reality, imaginatively conceived. Significant contemporary writing in philosophy appeals to the concept of 'transcendence' to explore what is deepest in our moral experience, but leaves this notion theologically unspecified. This book reflects on the appeal to transcendence in ethics with reference to the Resurrection of Jesus. Bachelard argues that the Resurrection reveals that the ultimate reality in which human life is held is gracious, forgiving and reconciling, a Goodness that is 'for us'. Faith in this testimony transforms the possibilities of moral life, both conceptually and in practice. It invites our participation in a goodness experienced non-dualistically as grace, and so profoundly affects the formation of the moral self, the practice of moral judgement and the shape of moral concepts. From this perspective, contemporary philosophical discussion about 'transcendence' in moral thought is cast in a new light, and debates about the continuity between theological and secular ethics gain a thoroughly new dimension. Bachelard demonstrates that placing the Resurrection at the heart of our ethical reflection resonates with the deepest currents of our lived moral experience and transfigures our approach to moral life and thought.

Chapter 1
Transcendence in Ethics

The philosopher Raimond Gaita has written of an experience he had at seventeen while he was working as a ward assistant at a psychiatric hospital.¹ The patients at the hospital were judged to be incurable – some had been there over thirty years – and, Gaita says, ‘they appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives’.² They had long since ceased to receive visits from friends, wives, children and even parents; often they were treated brutishly by the psychiatrists and nurses. A small number of psychiatrists, however, worked devotedly to improve their conditions and they spoke ‘against all appearances, of the inalienable dignity of even those patients’.³ Gaita says that he admired these psychiatrists enormously.

One day a nun came to the ward and everything in her demeanour towards the patients,

the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.⁴

For Gaita, reflecting on this episode, what was astonishing about the nun’s love for the patients was its power to reveal what their affliction had obscured, the power to reveal their full humanity and moral equality. Gaita insists that he cannot explain how the nun’s love revealed the humanity of the patients, nor can he demonstrate that her love was justified by anything about them. What she revealed, he says, is essentially mysterious, and he is simply claimed in testimony by it. He goes on to say, ‘there are philosophies that leave or create conceptual space for such mystery, and there are some which close that space. Most do not even see the need for it’.⁵

Raimond Gaita is one among a small number of contemporary moral philosophers who explore the limits of a wholly naturalistic ethic, one that leaves no room for mystery or goodness with a capital ‘G’. For Gaita, his encounter with the nun’s love showed that ethics answerable to what is morally deepest in human experience must open into the reality marked out by these concepts of mystery and absolute goodness. This is a view shared by Iris Murdoch, who, pre-eminently in the world of English-language philosophy, has insisted on and explored this relationship between morality and the transcendent good.⁶ Significantly, however, although both Gaita and Murdoch believe that an adequate philosophical account of morality must acknowledge the irreducible and mysterious goodness that conditions its deepest manifestations, each wants to leave that mystery theologically unspecified. Murdoch speaks of the proper background to morals as a ‘non-dogmatic mysticism’;⁷ Gaita speaks of ‘absolute goodness’ and ‘ethical other-worldliness’.⁸ While possessing a sensibility deeply influenced by the Christian tradition as well as Platonism, neither can make sense of a specifically Christian characterisation of the space of ethical transcendence.

In my judgement, Gaita’s and Murdoch’s explorations of moral reality and the moral life are among the deepest and most significant in contemporary philosophy. They are also, at one level, among the most congenial to theological ethics. For this very reason, however, their clear refusal of any theological articulation or development of their approach must be taken seriously by a theologian.⁹ To what extent is their resistance to theological articulation of the space of ethical transcendence morally, philosophically and even theologically important? Conversely, to what extent might this resistance cause us to miss something significant? In this chapter, I begin to explore these questions by considering in more detail how the appeal to absolute or transcendent goodness is necessary, on both Gaita’s and Murdoch’s view, for a proper understanding of ethics. Before I turn to this task, however, some brief remarks about the concept of transcendence are necessary.

The notion of ‘transcendence’ is philosophically tricky. It is defined largely by contrast with ‘naturalism’, and this may give rise to the charge that its definition is merely stipulative. Charles Taylor, for example, has argued that a wholly immanent or naturalistic account of reality struggles properly to do justice to the human experiences of creativity, ethics and art.¹⁰ In response, William David Hart has criticised Charles Taylor’s appeal to transcendence, where ‘transcendence’ means a ‘superhuman’ reality beyond a ‘naturalistic ontology’, because it illegitimately truncates the concept of nature. Such an appeal

fails to acknowledge intermundane, ‘this-worldly’, and naturalistic forms of transcendence. As I construe it, ‘naturalism’ is … a metaphysically laden category that describes everything that is and the ‘appearance’ of everything that is: … that is, nature doing what it does and everything that follows that agency. On this view, no one quite knows what nature can do. The ‘self-surpassing’ capacities of nature continually surprise, mystify, and enchant. Nature is ‘magical’.¹¹

In other words, why shouldn’t what appears to ‘transcend’ nature be conceived as part of the depth of nature itself?

Gaita himself seems to reflect something of this concern in more recent writing, distancing his argument from certain ways of speaking of ‘transcendence’ or at least from some of its cognate terms. Although in the second edition of Good and Evil he continues to draw a distinction between non-reductive naturalism and absolute goodness in ethics, he writes in the new preface that he now ‘regrets’ using the expressions ‘ethical other-worldliness’ and ‘mystery’. They sound ‘either too religious or too theoretically formidable’.¹² He thinks that he ‘should have been content to characterize the wondrousness of saintly love – to mark its conceptual features, to locate it in a sympathetic conceptual space and to leave it at that’.¹³

Later in this chapter, I return to Gaita’s discussion of whether particular metaphysical or ontological claims are implied by or require resolution for the appeal to transcendence in ethics to be considered illuminative of moral reality. For the moment I prescind from these questions, and simply draw on the concept of transcendence to gesture towards and explore certain phenomena in the moral field that seem qualitatively distinct.¹⁴ Like Gaita and Murdoch, I invite the reader to recognise these phenomena without having to commit to any particular claims about their ontology or metaphysical implications. My interest at this stage is not primarily in ontology, but in our lived moral experience.

Appeal to Transcendence

For both Gaita and Murdoch, the refusal of much contemporary philosophy to think of ethics as opening into what they call absolute or transcendent goodness leads to impoverished accounts of the moral domain. It leads to blindness to certain aspects of reality, inability to account for the formation of moral selves capable of deep and truthful responsiveness to that reality, and a truncated or distorted set of moral concepts. In the case of Gaita’s nun, for example, the mysterious power of her love to reveal the full humanity of the patients suggests that moral ‘reality’ is not straightforwardly accessible to anyone, not a matter of simple empirical experience. Moral reality has normative depth.¹⁵ The nun’s example shows that the revelation of this depth is dependent upon a certain kind of responsiveness and at the same time exposes the poverty of the concepts by which the psychiatrists were attempting the same moral work. That is, on Gaita’s account, the nun revealed the relative poverty of the concept of dignity with which the psychiatrists attempted to secure the equality of the patients, as compared with her practice of unconditional love.¹⁶

The appeal to transcendence arises, then, for both Gaita and Murdoch in response to certain kinds of experience. Gaita speaks of ‘marking an encounter’ with goodness, or with love whose purity is an occasion for wonder, or with remorse as a ‘pained, bewildered realization of what it means … to wrong someone’;¹⁷ Murdoch appeals often to ‘our’ awareness of what it is like to strive to be morally better, our sense of being answerable to a reality whose demand is absolute and whose authority cannot be denied.¹⁸ They each note that, although there is an essentially mysterious quality to these experiences or encounters, they are not esoteric or disconnected from ordinary life. They ‘reveal something universal’,¹⁹ something that is perfectly well, if unreflectively, understood by ‘unselfish mothers of large families’ and ‘virtuous peasants’.²⁰ If we are to understand the true nature of morality and of goodness, then it is to these kinds of encounter that we must attend.

There are three features of these kinds of experience that are significant for Gaita and Murdoch, and which help to give content to the concept of transcendence at issue here. They are the experience of being answerable to a reality beyond oneself, the experience of some aspect of reality being revealed in a new way, and the experience of being in contact with a source of moral transformation. By exploring in more detail the nature and significance of these experiences, we shall be in a better position to consider what difference it makes to refuse theological articulation of this space of transcendence.

First, let us consider the experience of answerability. Moral philosophies are sometimes defined according to whether they are realist or non-realist, or realist or voluntarist. The distinction is between those philosophers who believe that moral value is in some sense ‘out there’, objective, existing independently of the valuing activity of the moral agent, and those who believe that moral value resides in the will or preference or rational choice of the moral agent. To speak of being answerable to a reality beyond the self is a form of realism. As M...