The Crucial Crisis

The first and, finally, the sole history that I know and can accomplish is my own contingent, limited, mortal history. All history amounts to my history, because it derives from it. There is no solipsism in this circle, just the admission that my life remains mine, unsubstitutable, unique, unrepeatable - thrown forth and lost at once. Why does history itself amount to my history and my history to irrevocable uniqueness? Because I must die. To die signifies to die alone. To die signifies that nobody will die in my place; the proof: if someone commits himself to die in my place, that will not exempt me from dying, later, on my own account, and, if it can be put thus, in my own place; there is no one but me who can truly die in my place; my place is even defined by this unsubstitutable death. Death will never be taken from us, and in the end it is death that attests to our irreducible singularity. No one can separate me or dislodge me from my death, for in order to take it from me he would have to begin by giving it to me. In this death, which makes me me at the very moment when it undoes my me, all is decided for and by me, and all the former antagonisms are settled. We must say, then, that one crisis remains accessible to me when all the others have lost their edge and slipped away - my death.

- Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity

Corners of Peace

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
- Thomas à Kempis

Everywhere I have searched for peace and nowhere found it, except in a corner with a book.
- Thomas à Kempis

9/11/1989 and 9/11/2001

I didn’t want today to pass without some mention of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. This happened on 9 November 1989, or 9/11/89 (Europeans reckon their dates with the day before the month). Timothy Garton Ashe has noted that the two 9/11’s, Europe’s and America’s, have yielded two fundamentally different outlooks on the world – the one, tearing walls down and looking for opportunities to promote international citizenship through diplomacy and tact; the other, throwing walls up and looking for opportunities to promote international democracy at the point of a gun. Ashe asks, what has and will America do with their ascendancy? What relevance and influence does Europe have twenty years after the fall of the wall?

The answer to some of these questions depends on how one chooses to explain why the wall fell. Americans, especially Republicans, are fond of arguing that the wall fell because of Mr. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric, including his Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall address. This explanation justifies Mr. Reagan’s big defense budgets, Star Wars rhetoric, and repeated tax increases. Another explanation, favored by many Europeans and some Americans, is that the wall fell because of diplomacy, propaganda, and the Helsinki Accords.

For my part, I think they’re both right. Reagan’s rhetoric and theatrical powers were critical, but Gorbachev’s role is significantly downplayed. European diplomacy, including efforts by the Catholic Church in Poland and elsewhere, and the general resuscitation of civil society behind the iron curtain was essential. The anti-nuclear efforts of Americans, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, kept the conversation moving and gave credence to peace movements in Eastern bloc countries. The Velvet Revolution and samizdat do not get enough traction in American explanations. Churchill’s prediction in January 1920 that Communism in Russia would fail because it was “fundamentally opposed to the needs and dictates of the human heart, and of human nature itself,” is good evidence in my mind that it wasn’t all Reagan. The system self-destructed in many ways, but Reagan no doubt helped it along.

Just as the causes are multiple and complex, the effects and reverberations often take a long, long time to work themselves out. It’s fair to say that the Second World War ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, but in another sense it didn’t. Osama bin Laden cut his international teeth in Afghanistan during the cold war of the 1980s . . . and Afghanistan and bin Laden are with us yet. Indeed, America’s 9/11 was a logical outgrowth of the Cold War, even if many don't want him to remind us. Leninism married to capitalism is a long way from dead in China – indeed, it presents a new kind of challenge to the heavily leveraged “wealthy nations” of the west. The fall of the Berlin wall was a long reverberation of earlier events; the reverberation of the Berlin wall’s fall is still rippling its way.

That way will be determined in large part by what we think of it, how we talk about it, and how we remember it. It is certainly true that Europeans will have learned different lessons from this momentous event than Americans. It is expectedly and appropriately thus, but the forces that shaped this event and are now shaping world events compel us to continue conversations about their meaning and significance.

(Cross-posted to www.omninerd.com.)

Virtue Ethics, Part III: The Theological Virtues

Having discussed virtue ethics and the Cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance in Part I & Part II, this post addresses the theological or Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.

It is essential for the sake of the argument that readers find a way to bracket their qualms about religion (at least momentarily, and not entirely). My assertion is two-fold, that human nature is religious (following William James) and that the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love are higher virtues than the four Cardinal virtues. At the same time, the higher virtues are entirely necessary for the full flourishing of our nature, and for human communities, from families to neighborhoods to nations, to live virtuously. Without them, we so far fail to reach our virtuous potential.

Consider for a moment the postmodern philosopher Jack Caputo’s take on the theological virtues, from his book On Religion, as a way into the discussion:

The present and the future-present fall under the range of our powers, our potencies, our possibilities. Here things are manageable, cut to size and proportioned to our knowledge, so that we know what to do in the present situation and what to expect in the future. Here we are self-possessed and we have our bearings. This is the sphere of what the medieval theologians called the “cardinal” virtues, the four strictly philosophical virtues “prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance,” upon which human life is propped as upon the four hinges ( cardines ) of a table. These are the virtues of the self-possessed, of the best and the brightest, what Aristotle called the " phronimoi ," the men (and he meant men ) of practical wisdom, of insight and practical know-how, the well-hinged who know what is what, the men of means who went to all the best schools and who set the pace for the rest of us who are lower down on Aristotle’s very aristocratic list. But when we come unhinged, when our powers and potencies are driven to their limits, when we are overwhelmed, exposed to something we cannot manage or foresee, then, in that limit situation of the possibility of the impossible, we experience the limits, the impossibility, of our own possibilities. Then we sink to our knees in faith and hope and love, praying and weeping like mad. These are what the theologians call (somewhat chauvinistically) the “theological” virtues, by which they mean that we have come up against the impossible. Here, in the sphere of these limit situations we are asked to believe what seems incredible (remember Mary, or father Abraham trekking his way to Moriah). For after all, to believe what seems highly credible or even likely requires a minimum of faith, whereas to believe what seems unbelievable, what it seems impossible to believe, that is really faith. If you have real faith, Jesus said, you could say to the mountain, “‘move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing shall be impossible for you’” (Matt. 17:20). So, too, to hope when all seems hopeless, to “hope against hope,” as St. Paul says (Rom. 4:18), that is really hope, as opposed to the sanguinity that comes when the odds are on our side, which is the hope of a mediocre fellow. Finally, to dare to love someone far above our station, like a beggar in love with a princess, or to dare to think that someone so wonderful could love us, to dare to love in such an impossible situation, that is love worth its salt. Or, to go to a further and still more paradoxical extreme: to love someone who is not lovable. It is no great feat, after all, to love the loveable, to love our friends and those who tell us we are wonderful; but to love the unlovable, to love those who do not love us, to love our enemies – that is love. That is impossible, the impossible, which is why we love it all the more.

The Cardinal virtues, in other words, speak to everyday material conditions, including managing risk, dealing within human power. The theological virtues, on the other hand, are for when we reach the limits of the ordinary. They are the virtues of our spiritual nature.

Faith. “Faith,” Dierdre McCloskey writes, “is a backward looking virtue. It concerns who we are; or, rather, italicized, who we are, ‘the mystic chords of memory.’ In personal and modern terms it is called ‘integrity’ or ‘identity.’” To say that you’re faithful to your spouse, for example, is to say that you’re true to them, their memory, and your promise. Faith remembers. Faith, being, in St. Paul’s words, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” cannot be blind. Or, rather, it may be better said that faith has to do with the ear rather than the eye. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes from hearing.

In his book, Faith, Hope, Love, Josef Pieper begins by asking, "Who really determines what is meant by “belief”? What do men mean when they say . . . “belief”? . . . . “believe” can be replaced by “think”, “assume”, “consider probable”, “suppose” (Pieper, 19, 26-27). “To believe always means: to believe someone and to believe something.” And no one can live life without beliefs. The principle of faith was defended best by the atheist David Hume who insisted that speaking philosophically the idea of cause and effect is the one thing we know the least about – especially when we’re talking about human action. That moment, for example, when one billiard ball hits another – that’s the moment we know nothing about. What was the cause of the second ball moving? The other ball? The stick that hit that ball? The arm holding the stick? The brain moving the arm? Most of life has to be taken on past experience and convention. We don’t know the egg on the table doesn’t have a poison yolk, but we dig in any way because we believe it’ll be just like all the other eggs we’ve eaten.

“Unbelief contradicts what man is by nature” (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 63). Truth – especially human truths about social and political organization and religion – is not some neutral thing. A jury cannot be neutral about murder, only about whether x committed murder. Truth may not be approached without allegiance, without acknowledging its claim on us, or without respect for its rank, worth, and beauty. The essence of this trust in truth is faith. While most social science today is built on the illusion that certainty can be attained in matters of social truth, another way to think is the realization that much of social life depends on faith in other people, which depends more on understanding than certainty.

Hope. “Hope is, by contrast to faith, forward-looking, the virtue of the energetic . . . It is the opposite of . . . spiritual sloth, despair, hopelessness” (McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues, 160). If you have no hope you kill your self. As McCloskey points out, America is rootless and faithless, for the most part, but Americans have always had an abundance of hope.

“Hope says: It will turn out well; or more accurately and characteristically: It will turn out well for mankind; or even more characteristically: It will turn out well for us, for me myself. . . . Both he who hopes and he who despairs choose these attitudes with their will and let them determine their conduct” (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 114).

Love. All you need is love. It is the pinnacle of human virtue. When I say I love you, I’m saying I’m glad that you exist, Pieper says. The next question, then, is am I glad that you exist for my sake or for your sake? If the latter, I’m achieving a higher kind of human experience, the fulfillment of a higher kind of desire. Of course, we often need those we love, not merely for the love they give us, but also to have something to love (and for many other reasons). Nevertheless, Love is always particular. “What is not loved for its own sake is not loved at all,” says St. Augustine.

The Greeks had many names for love. Storge: affection, especially of parents to offspring, and of offspring to parents. Philia: brotherly love or friendship; dispassionate love that includes loyalty to friends and family; from it we get Philosophy – the love of wisdom and Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love. Eros: erotically charged love; passionate and sensual; romantic longing. Agape: self-less, pure love.

Love seen in terms of these types suggests it may have various manifestations. There is gentle love and tough love. "Maternal love does not have to be “earned”; and there is nothing anyone can do to lose it. A father, on the contrary, tends to set conditions; his love has to be earned. But that likewise repeats a fundamental element peculiar to all love: the desire that the beloved not only “feel good” but that things may go well for him. A mature person’s love must, as has rightly been remarked, contain both elements, the maternal and paternal, something unconditional and something demanding" (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 273).

“There may well be untold number of possible ways for human beings to feel good toward one another . . . But varied as these forms and unsystematic as these degrees of fondness, attachment, liking, solidarity obviously may be, they all have one thing in common with friendship, parental love, fraternity and specifically erotic love: that the lover, turning to the beloved, says, “It’s good that you are here; it’s wonderful that you exist!”" (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 273).

Speaking existentially, it’s a good thing for all living beings that there is love. It may yet be the mechanism of evolution, as argued by the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce in his brilliant essay, "Evolutionary Love." (I mentioned this argument to a friend of mine in medical school. He huffed, incredulous, and asked, “does the cell divide because of love?” I say, at least one did.)

In closing, let me re-state un-categorically my central claims:

First, that living virtuously depends on the knowledge we have of virtue (including the understanding that virtue is a mean between vices) and of the power we have to do and apply the virtues in our lives. Virtue can be taught and learned and can be adopted by habit to become second nature.

Second, that the Cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance are the virtues of the community. All of public life, from markets to courts to tennis matches, depend on people who act prudently, justly, courageously, and temperantly.

Third, that humans live by the virtues of faith, hope, and love everyday. Many may no longer charge these virtues with theological import, but we can no sooner be deprived of them than we can food and water. We live by faith; we hope for a better world; we long for that love that will never cease.

(This piece was cross-posted to www.omninerd.com.)

Virtue Ethics Part II: The Cardinal or Pagan Virtues

In Part I, I situated virtue ethics within alternative approaches to morality in modern philosophy. This post describes four of the seven classical virtues known as the Cardinal or Pagan virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. Part III will discuss the theological or Christian virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

Deirdre McCloskey, in her Inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture, argues that the seven classical virtues are as the primary colors of virtue. Just as every color in the spectrum is derived from the three primary colors, so every virtue imaginable, McCloskey asserts, can be derived from the seven classical virtues. For example, honesty is Justice and Temperance in matters of speech; thrift is prudence and temperance in money matters, etc.

It has been said that the Cardinal virtues are the virtues of the city, of public life, and that the absence of these virtues leads to failed cities and states. One can make a strong case that the four cardinal virtues are the virtues of citizenship, whereas the three theological virtues bind us to a higher vision of human nature. The best philosophical analysis of the virtues is by the philosopher Josef Pieper, a close student of St. Thomas Aquinas, and what follows leans heavily on Pieper’s work The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance.

Prudence: Prudence is the virtue most concerned with the self. It is foresight, practical understanding, proficiency, sagacity. Save some for a rainy day. The Latin phrase, recta ratio agilbilium constitutes the best definition of prudence: right reason about things to be done or the right method of conduct. Prudence, like all the virtues, is active. It is basically concerned with how we treat ourselves, how we prepare for our future and make ourselves useful in the present.

The contemporary term self-interest is often our poor substitute for thinking and talking prudently. The term “self-” makes the aim seem subjective rather than virtuous, but they are not always mutually exclusive. It is prudent for me to care for my own children, for example because they will be more likely to care for me. This may sound selfish rather than virtuous, but virtue adheres in seeing Prudence as one among the virtues. In other words, I may care for my own because it’s Prudent, but I may also do it because it is Just and because I Love them. Seeing this broader picture is a means of understanding that possessing one virtue does not make us virtuous.

Prudence is the father of the virtues, or the charioteer of the virtues, using Aristotle and Aquinas’s system, because it is the virtue of the mind that helps us find the golden mean in any given circumstance. It is the virtue of making right decisions and thus drives, as a charioteer drives a chariot, the other six virtues.

Justice: If Prudence is concerned with the self, Justice is the virtue that regulates our relationships with others. Justice is uprightness, equity, vindicating the right, giving to others what is due them with pleasure, consistently, and in a timely manner. It is paying what is owed, fulfilling the terms of a contract to a T, imparting fairly by good measure, pressed down and shaken together (see Luke 6:38).

Aristotle said that Justice is concerned with geometrical proportion, meaning that its interest is equality between two things. “This, then,” Aristotle says, “is what the just is – the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good.”

Much has been said and written about justice, its administration and its function. Different conceptions of justice have emerged to describe different aspects of the same coin: distributive justice is concerned with a just distribution of goods throughout society; retributive justice is the idea that a proportional punishment evens out a crime: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth (and if we followed this rule, Gandhi says, we’d soon all be blind and toothless); restorative justice is a way of conceptualizing crime as against individuals and communities rather than against the state, encouraging offenders to make reparations for offenses.

The question that should be asked, Pieper says, is when justice may be said to prevail in a nation? "One might almost say that the subject of justice is the “community,” although of course it is only the person, and, therefore, the individual, who can be just in the strict sense of the word. . . . it is the nature of communal life for men constantly to become indebted to each other and then just as constantly to pay one another the debt. We have further said that as a result the balance is in a constant state of shift and needs constantly to be restored to equilibrium. The act of justice is precisely to effect this process of compensations, restitutions, and satisfactions for debts" (Pieper, 70, 104).

Yet, at the same time, “the fact that some debts are not or cannot be paid is essential to the world’s actual conditions” (Pieper, 104). The community must pursue justice, but as a virtue it is only one piece of the puzzle of virtuous living.

Courage: Courage is spirit. Courage is heart. Courage is self-control in the face of fear. In Part I, I described courage as occurring on a continuum between over-confidence and cowardice. It is a willingness to take risks, to assert oneself – not always for the sake of oneself – but for the sake of a higher purpose, too. It includes a willingness to risk one’s life, but for the purpose of justice rather than merely saving one’s self.

To be courageous and brave, Pieper argues, presupposes vulnerability. If there were no vulnerability and no fear there could be no courage. The ultimate injury is death, and courage “is basically readiness to die or, more accurately, readiness to fall, to die, in battle” (Pieper, 117). But the brave man does not suffer injury or risk death for its own sake, “but rather as a means to preserve or to acquire a deeper, more essential intactness,” meaning it is about achieving a lost wholeness (Pieper, 119).

Temperance: Like Courage, temperance is self-control, but self-control in the face of pleasure. Today it means being temperate in eating and drinking, but in the classical world it meant the moderation of anger, sexuality, and attitude (humility). Aquinas says that the second meaning of temperance is “serenity of spirit,” which must go deeper than the surface of intellectual and spiritual life to man’s inner order (Pieper, 147).

Temperance may apply to all pleasures, but Aristotle argues that it applies primarily to bodily pleasures of touch. In other words, we would not call a lover of honor or a lover of learning to be self-indulgent. Nor would we say that someone who delighted in objects of vision – like colors – or of hearing – like music – as acting self-indulgently, nor those who act towards these things as they ought temperate. As it applies to touch, however, temperance includes chastity and unchastity as well as food and drink. Anger, too, in this manner: “In the upsurge of his self-will,” Pieper writes, “the intemperately angry man feels as if he were drawing his whole being together like a club ready to strike” (195)

Temperance is the virtue most concerned with the body and with nature. Everyone gets hungry and thirsty or craves sexual connection. Where we most likely go wrong in these endeavors is the direction of excess. To become a slave to self-indulgence is voluntary, and means that we place our own pleasure at the cost of everything else.

This entry was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com.

Reaction to Delusions

The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) God is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steadying itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere over all those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything? Would that apply, then - confining ourselves just to things Christian - to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and hostels? To the golden rule, "Love thine enemies," "Judge not lest ye be judged," prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed the clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangelo's Pieta, "ah! bright wings," San Marco's mosaics, the Bible of Amiens, and all that gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that, if only purged of the toxin of faith, these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith, it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all. And since none of these things would seem to fall outside the general category of "everything," it must be that Hitchens means (assuming he means anything at all) that they fall outside the more specific category of "religion." This would, at any rate, be in keeping with one of the rhetorical strategies especially favored in New Atheist circles: one labels anything one dislikes - even if it is found in a purely secular setting - "religion" (thus, for example, all the twentieth-century totalitarianisms are "political religions" for which secularists need take no responsibility), while simultaneously claiming that everything good, in the arts, morality, or any other sphere - even if it emerges within an entirely religious setting - has only an accidental association with religious belief and is really, in fact, common human property (so, for example, the impulse toward charity will doubtless spring up wherever an "enlightened: society takes root). By the same token, every injustice that seems to follow from a secularist principle is obviously an abuse of that principle, while any evil that comes wrapped in a cassock is unquestionably an undiluted expression of religion's very essence.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions

Bishop N.T. Wright and Historical Resurrection

forgyf us ure gyltas

Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum,
si thin nama gehalgod.
To-becume thin rice.
Geweorthe thin willa
on eorthan, swa swa on heofenum.
Urne daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to-daeg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas,
swa swa we forgifath urum gyltendum.
And ne gelaede thu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfle:
Sothlice.

- The Lord's Prayer as written in the southwest of England about the year 1000.