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 appropriates a traditional reading of the assignment of different works to different persons, 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 general 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 theology using the concepts and techniques of philosophy. Most of the great theologians 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
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 carrying 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 (henceforth 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.
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 philosophers 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 circle. 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 matter is more personal. All four of the central examples that constitute the discussion 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
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 twentiethcentury 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 theorems. 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 without 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 continually 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 BurmaSiam 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: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 156–62.
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 congregation, 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 theology 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 gapstructure. 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 assistance 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 reformulates 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 feature 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.
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 eliminable, 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 humanity, 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 deception 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 morally 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).’
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 invoking divine assistance. We also see three nonChristian 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 strategies 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 capitalization of KANT is in the original, and Austin here makes Kant a hero of antidescriptivism.
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.
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 substance 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 ourselves, 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 common 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 subspecies, 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.
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 colovers (condiligentes). God’s Command suggests that we should see our destination as a particular way of loving 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 colovers. 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 manifesting 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 normal human desires. ‘Virtually all persons, when informed, want to live autonomously, to have deep personal relations, to accomplish something with their lives, to enjoy themselves.’ He then adds understanding, which is knowing about oneself 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.
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 disengagement 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, achievementdirected, 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 (especially friendship, but also political and other forms of community); practical reasonableness (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 nonhuman 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 violence, 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 assuming her list is supposed to be more or less complete, and that the omission of gender identity is therefore a defect.
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 political speech, and not being discriminated against); a relation to other species of living things; play; and control over one’s environment (and so political participation 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 aesthetic 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.
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 coherent 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.
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, excellence, 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 singleminded 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 constraint. 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 magnetic 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 constant 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. PseudoDionysius, 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).
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 representative. For example, it is possible that being trans male in a way like him differs significantly 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 sexuality 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 construction. Thomas has been insistent that his gender identity as a man is something he discovered, not something he made, though he has made his presentation of this identity; in that sense he is a selfmade 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 threeterm relation, metaphysically speaking, though this is my phrase, not his. 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. 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 genderfluid and nonbinary, though still notwoman. 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.
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 perceived 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 destination is to become, as Scotus puts it, colovers (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 threeterm 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 pictures, 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 threeterm relation mentioned previously contains in its first term something 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 separable 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 constructive suggestion of the chapter will be that the set of preferences he discovers can be described under a normative lifenarrative 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 prediction 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
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 transition 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 trajectory 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 themselves 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).
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 reason 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 humanity 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 socalled ‘political realists’ such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau held that while it may be reasonable to hope for altruism or selfsacrifice 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.
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 consistent 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 operation 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 universal 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 commitment 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 coordination 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.
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 common 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 illustrate 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 tension 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).
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 question 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 badness 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 contemplating 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 possible. 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.
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 propose 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 contemplating. 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.
