Self, World, and Time

Ethics as Theology, vol. 1

Oliver O'Donovan

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780802869210
• eBook ISBN: 9781467437554
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Self, World, and Time takes up the question of the form and matter of Christian ethics as an intellectual discipline. What is it about? How does Christian ethics relate to the humanities, especially philosophy, theology, and behavioral studies? How does its shape correspond to the shape of practical reason? In what way does it participate in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Oliver O'Donovan discusses ethics with self, world, and time as foundation poles of moral reasoning, and with faith, love, and hope as the virtues anchoring the moral life. Blending biblical, historico-theological, and contemporary ideas in its comprehensive survey, Self, World, and Time is an exploratory study that adds significantly to O'Donovan's previous theoretical reflections on Christian ethics.

CHAPTER 1

Moral Awareness

Unfamiliar trains of thought and specialized patterns of inquiry may be provided with an introduction, which show the student their grounds and scope. But what of trains of thought and patterns of inquiry, communications, and practices which have been with us since before we were even conscious of thinking? No introduction can be imagined for what we can never meet for the first time: conscious experience itself, in all its forms. And a very great part of conscious experience is our sense of ourselves as agents. Practical reasoning has been our native element. Yet we can, and may, feel the need to grow more aware of that element; we can learn to ask sharper questions about it and to open ourselves up to the logic of what we have always simply counted on. And we can ask about what it tells us of more ultimate things: of God, especially, who stands behind and before our agency, and of our position in his world and time. If we cannot pursue these questions, we cannot be at rest with ourselves; but if we can pursue them, we can be helped and encouraged to do them. It is with that in view that we propose this induction into Ethics as Theology, to be followed in due time, if God permits, by a further exploration of it.

Introduction

“So then we are debtors,” says Saint Paul quite suddenly in the middle of everything (Rom. 8:12). Certainly, we are debtors! We know it as soon as we are told it. We swim in a sea of moral obligations, tangled in seaweed on every side, acknowledging claims here, asserting responsibilities there. It is our native element. Yet we have no idea how it became so. What led Saint Paul to his “so then” was a long account of what God had done for us: justification by free grace, one righteous act that gave life to many, delivery from the power of law. But at every moment it assumes that we were debtors already: debtors when we suppressed the truth in ungodliness, debtors when we were reconciled to God, debtors when we could not continue in sin that grace might abound. Of this or that concrete debt we can explain how it came about: we signed a rental contract, agreed terms of employment, made a confession of love. But these acts were not the start of our indebtedness. We rented the flat because we had a job we had to get to each morning; we took the job because we needed to be near our girlfriend; even the confession of love was shaped by a complex of obligations shaped by emotional exchanges that gained ground on us and closed us in. Obligations formed us, and we formed obligations, for as long as we ever knew ourselves. They governed our behavior and shaped our character before we knew how to think of them. We did not reach our thoughts of obligation by inference from other thoughts, abstract ideas like those of mathematics or aesthetics or immediate perceptions of the senses. What other thoughts could there have been that could have immersed us in this sea of obligations for the very first time?

Let us say, we awake to our moral experience in the beginning. What seems like the beginning is not really a beginning at all. We wake to find things going on, and ourselves going on in the midst of them. The beginning is simply the dawning of our consciousness, our coming-to to what is already happening and to how we are already placed. For some thinkers about Ethics, both academic and popular, this has proved an embarrassment. They would like to find a safe ground of knowledge of ourselves or of our situation, some truth drawn from a scheme of objective knowledge — theology, sociology, evolutionary biology, or whatever — and to work from that point to discover whether there is such a thing as a morality, and what it is. “Morality should be governed by science!” is the familiar hunting-halloo of the revisionary theorist. It would be nice to test the ground of morality before we step on it. But to all such proposals there is one inevitable reply: they come too late. Already we are asking questions about our actions and obligations. Already we are contesting the reasons for acting in this way or in that way. The scientific starting-point, whatever it may have been, is far behind us and beyond our field of vision. It is a reasonable ambition, of course, to situate moral awareness within the wider scheme of things, to identify its presuppositions and its function in the world, but one must begin with it where it is to be found, which is where we find ourselves, active subjects caught up in the middle of things. Here is the element of truth in the ancient and recurrent claim that value cannot be derived from fact. The medieval mystics held that love, the employment of the will, arises “without previous knowledge”; twentieth-century philosophers denied that “is” could imply “ought.”¹ A great deal of confusion has surrounded this claim, which is frequently mistaken for a license for voluntarisms and intuitionisms that reduce moral reasoning to nonsense. But we must grant the starting-point: moral experience is not constructed or achieved out of non-moral experience; it is woken up to as experience that has accompanied other experience, present from the beginning and distinct in kind.

And what is this distinct kind? If we follow Paul’s exposition further, we find that indebtedness accompanies phronēma, which is to say, practical thought, thought about what we are to do. Practical thought is the most commonplace of human rational exercises, for action is the first and elementary horizon of human existence. At home in our minds like fauna in their native habitat, reasons for acting need no introduction to us but occupy their mental environment with assured right of possession. We can hardly think of thinking without thinking first of them. The moment of pure observation, when our practical impulses come to rest in sheer wonder at our object, when we stand right back behind the line of sight: that is the rare and acquired moment of thought, the one that we need some kind of introduction to.

When we speak of “morality,” then, we do not speak of what we do, but of how we think what we are to do, which is to say, how we act. Doing is something that humans have in common with non-human animals: birds build nests, mammals hunt for food. But morality involves taking note of doing, making doing the object of thought, not simply by looking back at it afterwards, but by looking forward to it as a project. Whether morality can be attributed to non-human animals is a speculative question; we have no discourse with them, and cannot exchange narratives of action, so that we do not know what a dog thinks it is doing when it chases a ball. Narrative is an important condition for moral thought. Homer is of interest to Ethics because he narrates the deeds of Achilles and Hector and shows us what makes them great from their motives to their accomplishment. Yet narrative is not itself moral thought. Homer’s Achilles is simply Achilles, his Hector simply Hector. If as we read we say, “As were Achilles and Hector, so are we!” moral thought has taken over from narrative. It arises at the tipping-point between narrative and self-awareness. We can own, or we can deny, that we, too, like Hector and Achilles, are actors. To deny it, we need only curl up with a book and become literary critics, historians, or sociobiologists. The motives which Homer attributes to Hector and Achilles need not be motives for us. But if we do not deny our agency, we experience their motives as a kind of demand laid on us. And finding ourselves awake, we know we must give our attention to being wider awake. Out of this focused attention moral thinking arises.

Morality supposes life of a certain kind, life of intelligence, responsibility, and freedom which is, as Saint Paul has told us, the life of “Spirit.” Even to pose a moral question is already to tread water, to trust our weight upon the element of Spirit. Is it, then, Spirit that lays our obligation upon us, to which, in the last resort, we are indebted? Paul gives the impression of being about to say just that: “we are debtors not to the flesh but . . . ,” and our minds supply the conclusion. But Paul steps deftly aside and postpones that conclusion until some prior understandings are in place. We have no independent standing over against Spirit; Spirit is not one among our creditors whom we can look in the eye and ask how much we owe him. What we “owe” Spirit is precisely that we owe anyone anything; we owe Spirit our moral obligations. So when he reaches the conclusion it is not a matter of being debtors to Spirit; it is being led by Spirit.

The prior understanding Paul puts in place is the danger of a mistake, and on a grand scale: “We are debtors, not to the flesh. . . .” From the moment we first find ourselves immersed in moral experience a false apprehension of obligation may arise, a practical reason grounded not in Spirit but in “flesh,” phronēma sarkos, as Saint Paul calls it. Moral intelligence, with its sense of obligation, responsibility, and freedom vis à vis reality, can be mislocated, falsely framed within a material set of presuppositions, improvised around bare factual determinants. We may think of the bombastic “imperative of research” which drives the proud biotechnical Leviathan, or of the empty pleadings of politicians urging us to be “led into the future” (as though we could go anywhere else!). There are moral discourses without foundations, and we may pile up a crushing burden of debt, a fearful sense of the doom that hangs upon our actions, and yet find no space for Spirit. It is self-destructive to say “ought” of the heavy, necessitous “is” of dull factual realities; it plunges us into the self-refutation lying in wait for all materialism, which is to understand that there is, after all, no understanding. It puts to death the life of freedom Spirit has conferred. Life in Spirit, on the other hand, is a different kind of “putting to death,” for it deflates purely material necessities and asserts freedom against them. It annuls every sense of being “debtors” to the flesh.

In what direction, then, does our debt lie, if not to Spirit and not to flesh? The first step towards an answer is given in the word “life.” We are in some sense debtors to the business of living, but that means there is a difference between being alive and living, between the life we live without trying to do so and the life we must reach out to live, by knowing ourselves not merely materially conditioned but spiritual: “If by the Spirit you put to death the body, you shall live.” Human beings cannot live as vegetables, which grow, leaf, and flower simply by virtue of being alive. They must appropriate life, make it their own. We make a difference between “life,” as such, and “a life” which has to be lived for ourselves. And, the apostle proceeds, to live by Spirit is also to be led by Spirit. The spiritual life is a directed life. In giving life to our mortal bodies, in constituting us as subjects of moral experience, Spirit “leads” in the direction of free action. Which brings the apostle to a third designation: “Spirit himself bears witness to our spirit” (8:16). Induction into life and action is accomplished by a word of truth addressed to us, a declaration of the way things are between the world and ourselves. We are debtors to a life, a direction, and a truth.

And then we are in a position to add, debtors also to God. For the witness from Spirit to spirit, Paul would have us understand, is a word from God to man. It originates beyond our human ken, yet is also a word from Spirit to spirit. The spirits are not equal; one is Creator, the other creature. Yet they are spirits together in a graced analogy; God’s witness comes to one whom God has made to answer and reflect him. The spirit hearing is like the Spirit heard, though at the same time wholly unlike. That likeness is what being led by Spirit consists in, living a life that is given by Spirit and corresponds to Spirit’s life. The witness tells us we are children of God, not tools, not subordinate implements moved around to serve purposes of which we know neither the why nor the wherefore, not random creatures of cosmic energy blown about as dynamics of flesh may chance to dictate. We address God as “Abba! Father!” — freed in this elemental prayer to affirm his works and make them our own. We are led to know ourselves for what we are, to come to ourselves in coming to our Father, to enact our existence truly. It is the freedom to live, the most total expression of active, conscious, authentically engaged existence. Any other life that may seem possible to live, any life conceived according to “the flesh,” in terms of mere facticity, is not life at all, but a shadow-life that leads towards death.

Waking

The metaphor we have reached for, the metaphor of waking, speaks of a general, not of a specifically religious experience. “Man, yes, man outside the biblical revelation, awakes,” wrote Balthasar.² Yet we have not been able to elaborate and explore it without theological concepts. It is a metaphor which makes a definite proposal about how general moral experience is to be understood, and that proposal is of Christian provenance. There are other metaphors in current use for what we do when we engage in moral thought. Some like to speak of “constructing” morality, comparing it to a building operation. Others conceive it as a variety of sight, speaking of “moral vision,” or as a supplementary sense, a “feeling” of good and evil. Others again describe it as a crisis of bewilderment, talking of “resolving dilemmas,” or as a state of indeterminacy where we “make choices.” We need not refuse the illumination shed by any of these. For most purposes we can afford to be free with our metaphors, switching from one to another as the poetry of the moment or the play of light may suggest. But metaphors harden into categories, and it makes a difference in the longer term which we think of as foundational.

A purely philosophical justification can be given for the metaphor of waking, complete with its entailment of Spirit and hint of the presence of God. It is the task of moral philosophy to account for moral experience efficiently, equipping it with ordered concepts that clarify its logic and open it to critical discussion. To this work of conceptual ordering Christian theology has its own contribution to add, arising from its hermeneutic responsibilities to its canonical text. Philosophy is not as such text-based, though it may read philosophical texts and learn from them; its task is to render an account of reality, and in doing so it will take its concepts where it finds them. Theology, avoiding philosophy’s hazardous smash-and-grab tactics, insists on having its primary concepts issued and duly signed for out of the scriptural inventory. Yet the difference between them may not be as great as this metaphor may suggest, for since text alone can justify or falsify its own interpretation, the deployment of scriptural categories, too, has a hypothetical character, and in making this or that biblical concept central to its thought, moral theology runs its own risk that a rereading of the text may put its conceptual order in question. Nevertheless, the validity of a concept depends for theology not only on whether it seems to fit experience, but on whether it illuminates, and is illuminated by, the scriptural text. And that is as true for moral theology as for any other.

Theology has a further task over and above that of conceptual ordering, which takes it beyond the scope of philosophy. A theological justification for the metaphor of waking will show how it leads moral experience back to its source in God’s purposes. It will account for experience in the light of what is told us of its causes and ends; it will situate it in the narrative of a God who, having made us as agents, now redeems and perfects us. Theology has a special interest in the renewing of human agency. It has to tell of conversion, and of how our occasional moments of moral wakefulness may lead into an awakening that will be complete and final: “Awake, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon you!” (Eph. 5:14).

Throughout the Scriptures of Old and New Testaments the cry, “Awake!” summons agents, human or divine, to exert themselves. In the poetic literature of the Hebrew Scriptures the exertion may be military, judicial, artistic, or even, addressed to the gentler breezes, erotic (Cant. 4:16). The early Song of Deborah (Judges 5:12) uses this cry to summon its heroine to military leadership; much later Deutero-Isaiah uses it to summon the city of Jerusalem to assume her proper dignity at the end of the exile (Isa. 52:1). The Isaianic apocalyptist echoes him (Isa. 26:19), calling on the city’s inhabitants to rise from the dust and sing. Singing, especially, is a task that demands some wakefulness; a Psalmist launching a celebratory composition may call not only on his own inspiration but on his instruments, too, to wake (Ps. 57:8 = 108:1f.) The nameless Servant Prophet of Deutero-Isaiah, meanwhile, can speak of God’s “awakening his ear” to prepare him to instruct others (Isa. 50:4). But most characteristically the cry is addressed to God himself, calling him to judgment, sometimes military, sometimes purely judicial. He will awake to vindicate an outraged poet (Ps. 7:6; 35:23) and to punish nations that have oppressed Israel (Ps. 44:23; 59:5). His “arm” will awake to repeat the drama of the Exodus (Isa. 51:9), and in Trito-Zechariah, most strikingly, God calls his own sword to awake, putting an end to royal authority in Judah (Zech. 13:7).

At this point the contrast between the Old Testament and the New could hardly be more striking. Nowhere in the New Testament do the faithful call on God to awake. God has already awakened, has already acted. All that remains now is for them to be aw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Moral Awareness
• Chapter 2: Moral Thinking
• Chapter 3: Moral Communication
• Chapter 4: Moral Theory
• Chapter 5: The Task of Moral Theology
• Chapter 6: The Trajectory of Faith, Love, and Hope
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture References