Agape Ethics

Moral Realism and Love for All Life

William Greenway

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498202381, 9781498286138
• eBook ISBN: 9781498202398
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Consider intense moments when you have been seized by joy or, in different contexts, by anguish for another person, or a cat or dog, or perhaps even for a squirrel or possum struck as it dashed across the road: whether glorious or haunting, these are among the most profound and meaningful moments in our lives. Agape Ethics focuses our attention on such moments with utter seriousness and argues they reveal a spiritual reality, the reality of agape. Powerful streams of modern Western rationality reject the idea of agape. This has created a crisis of foundations in modern ethics and alienated us from love for all creatures. Working wholly within the bounds of reason, Agape Ethics joins an increasingly vibrant struggle to legitimate the spiritual reality of agape, to awaken people to its power, to clarify its ethical implications, and to validate our spiritual communion with all creatures in all creation. The result is a powerful, inclusive, and wholly reasonable defense of moral realism that should speak to all who are passionate about creating a maximally loving and good world.

Part One

Awakening and Agape

Chapter 1

Love Diminished, Love Betrayed

A modern fable about pride and discovery

Let me begin by considering a major way in which modern Western philosophy and science cuts us off from creation. In the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes—and he was by no means alone—helped us come to see the universe as a great machine working in accord with the laws of nature. We exempted only ourselves. All reality was divided into matter and spirit: “matter,” the insensitive realm of the machine, and “spirit,” the realm of sentience, freedom, feeling, and value. In Descartes’s view, which became standard for the next four centuries of modern Western thought, spirit exists only in humans.

The significance of this conceptual split for all creation and all creatures becomes clear when one sees how it is related to a popular understanding—a fable, really—about the conceptual revolution sparked by the brilliant scientific work of Descartes’s contemporary, Galileo Galilei. The fable talks about how in the seventeenth century science humbled humanity, for science discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. In the medieval period people thought they were the center of the universe. They thought the universe revolved around them, and so they thought they had pride of place. Their place at the center of the cosmos fed their pride, so the fable goes, until science taught them that the universe does not revolve around them after all. So these people fought the humbling lessons of the new science. They even persecuted the truth tellers. Their pride at being at the center of the cosmos made them shameless and shameful.6

Now, it is most certainly true that Galileo was unjustly censured by the church and was wrongly subject to house arrest for the last years of his life. And it is also true that in the wake of Galileo’s censure scientific inquiry in Italy withered. This injustice and its consequences should be named and remembered. Criticism of the fable should in no way lessen criticism of the church’s treatment of Galileo. But the fable is not really about Galileo, let alone about the technical, mid-seventeenth-century debates in Europe over the relationship between natural philosophy (as natural science was then called) and theology. The fable is really about a shift in humanity’s self-image and understanding of our place in the cosmos. With regard to that shift, the fable portrays a reality that is opposite to the truth.

According to the fable, the scientific revolution humbled human pride because it displaced humans from their exalted place at the center of the cosmos and revealed that humans were, after all, just another part of nature, inhabitants of a small planet circling an otherwise unremarkable star amidst a vast cosmos. In this critical respect, the fable is only trivially true. Physically, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century displaced us from the center of the universe. But in the medieval, Aristotelian/Ptolemaic paradigm, the one the scientific revolution displaced, the center of the universe, where the earth was believed to be, far from being a place of pride was considered to be the worst place in the cosmos, below the perfect, ethereal realms of the moon, planets, and stars, at the furthest remove from God’s heavenly home beyond the outermost sphere. We were caught near the pit of the cosmos, just above hell, which was at the very center of the cosmos. Earth was a degraded sphere of change, death, and decay. Our place near the center of the cosmos primarily reflected the base nature of our mortal existence.

Despite their humble location in the pit of the cosmos, people still found ways to see themselves as among the most important beings in creation. Humans asserted their significance despite their humble position at the pit of the cosmos. We affirmed our significance, end, hope, and measure by placing ourselves within a larger context. We were sinful, mortal beings mired in the decaying sphere of the earth. True significance and hope, however, could be found insofar as we understood ourselves to be part of an order higher and greater than ourselves, an order founded in the Good and Eternal reality reflected in the ethereal spheres of the heavens, an order which ultimately oriented us to God.

We saw ourselves as by far the most important of mortal beings, then, but our significance was derivative, dependent upon the love and concern of the Holy and Loving One who resided in perfection beyond the outermost sphere, dependent upon the love and concern of God. We were not the measure of all things. We were mortal beings enmeshed in a larger physical, moral, and spiritual order. We recognized when we were moved by goodness, beauty, evil, and injustice.

By contrast, in the modern paradigm of the scientific revolution there is no center and no heavenly realm. No base realm below and ethereal realms above. All is machine. Or rather, all is machine but us. Humans alone are sentient, feeling, free, valuing. Only we are capable of moral consideration, only we have intrinsic value, only we warrant moral consideration, only we can be wronged, frustrated, violated, or denied fulfillment.

The popular scientific fable masks reality. In the scientific revolution humans were, trivially, displaced from the center of the universe. But philosophically, scientifically, and existentially, in the wake of the scientific revolution we alone rise above the brute flux of the material realm, we alone are self-aware and self-determining. The critical spiritual shift of the scientific revolution pivots not upon humans being displaced from the center of the cosmos, it pivots upon the destruction of the orienting moral matrix within which we interpreted our selves and our place within a larger whole.

Put otherwise, in the scientific revolution it was the external measure that was displaced. What was revolutionary and disturbing to contemporary theologians and to natural philosophers (i.e., scientists) alike—notably, many natural philosophers were also priests and virtually all were theists—was not that humans were displaced from the physical center of the cosmos, it was that God was displaced, along with the outermost sphere of heaven and along with the whole moral/cosmological order, only to be replaced with a self-same, mechanical universe operating blindly according to the inexorable laws of nature.

In the wake of this shift Westerners came to see themselves not as living within creation, but as living above nature. They came to see their significance not as derivative, but as intrinsic, a function of their superiority over all animals and all of nature, for only humans possess mind (spirit). All else, everything other than human minds, is relegated to the insensate sphere of the mechanism, the sphere of matter, of things.

Contrary to the fable about our humbling, the new science combined with Descartes’s human-centered division between “matter” (the insensitive realm of the machine, the quantifiable) and “spirit” (the realm of sentience, free will, feeling, and value) and became not an occasion for the humbling of humanity, but the basis for an assertion of human pride of place unimaginable within the medieval, Christianized Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmology. Existentially, we humans were radically loosed from our moorings within a created order now seen as brute flux. Within the world as modern Westerners came to see it, morally and existentially, humans become the sole locus of value in the universe.

According to the modern picture, human minds alone are the measure of anything and everything (for the sake of argument I leave aside the possible existence of extraterrestrials). Human minds are the only place where there is realization of any morals, beauty, or understanding. In the medieval paradigm humans were moral beings within a larger moral order that was ultimately subservient to God. In the modern paradigm humans are the only sources of value and valuing within a vast machine.

The scientific fable about the modern scientific humbling of humanity masks the reality of the momentous transition to the modern Western scientific image of existence: the emergence of humans as supreme beings, distinguished qualitatively and absolutely from all the rest of existence, which is now denigrated to the status of thing. Humans are de-centered only in a physical sense that, far from humbling, enables assertion of a previously unimaginable extreme of human pride. Humans become the sole measure of all things.7

Gnosticism and modern “orthodox” Christianity

Most Christians (which is to say, in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most everyone) integrated this astounding pride theologically. Following Descartes and others, Christians pictured themselves as part spirit and part machine. In all of creation, Christians began to think, God is ultimately concerned only with our spirits. Not surprisingly, today the vast majority of the world’s Christians, thinking themselves orthodox and even biblical, believe they have a soul and a body and when they die their souls will go to heaven while their bodies and the earth will perish.

Christian theology is not my focus, but it is worth pointing out that, in terms of Christianity’s fidelity to its classic confessions, this modern soul/body perspective, with its vision of souls leaving bodies and ascending to heaven, is Gnostic. Let me pause here for a moment to explain what “Gnostic” names. Gnosticism names a Neoplatonic philosophy that was very influential in the Roman Empire in the first few centuries after the time of Jesus. It was an anti-physical philosophy that saw salvation in terms of escape from the physical into a purely spiritual realm.

The Gnostics, taking a cue from the Platonic idea that our ability to recognize eternal mathematical truths was evidence that a part of us was eternal, thought that each person was essentially a divine spark, now fallen and encased within a material body and world. Some Gnostics saw matter as evil, others as a benefit insofar as it encased divine sparks and kept us from falling even further from true, eternal, nonmaterial reality. In either case, the goal of the Gnostics was (perhaps over the course of many lifetimes) to ascend through a hierarchy of increasingly more perfect realms until we were purified of any traces of material existence, coarse desires, and so forth, and finally emerged, wholly purified, into perfect spiritual existence.

Obviously, the Gnostics took a dim view of the physical world. This was in marked contrast to classic Jewish theology, which thought that God created the world, celebrated its goodness, was interested in the earth and all creatures, and was working towards establishing a new heavens and new earth. The “heavens” of “a new heavens and a new earth” in this Hebrew and early Christian context is not a reference to some spiritual, otherworldly realm, but a reference to the realm of the planets and stars. “A new heavens and new earth” is another way of saying “a new cosmos,” not another heavens and another earth, not a nonphysical realm, but a rejuvenation and renewal and perfecting of this cosmos, including its physical and its spiritual/moral/aesthetic dimensions. In the poetic words of the prophet Isaiah, the ancient Hebrews lived in hope and anticipation of the day when “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”8

Gnosticism is also markedly different from Christianity. Christianity, precisely in the face of the contemporary dominance of Neoplatonic, anti-physical, sheerly escapist spiritualities and philosophies, remained committed to Judaism’s ultimate affirmation of the profound significance of the physical world in its own signal proclamation that in Jesus Christ God Godself became flesh (i.e., the essence of Jesus and of God was homoousion, “of the same substance”). This affirmation is a continuation and radicalizing of the classic Jewish affirmation of God’s profound passion for all of creation and all creatur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Awakening and Agape
• Part Two: Science, Scientism, Morality
• Part Three: Beyond Objectivity, Relativism, and Extremism: Moral Realism, Ethical Surety, and the Sanctity of Life
• Part Four: Perfect Love in an Imperfect World: Agape Ethics
• Bibliography