The title of this journal is a reference to an extraordinary moment of conversion in the life of St. Augustine, the great philosopher and theologian of the early medieval period. The story begins with St. Augustine sitting beneath a fig tree, weeping in distress over his inability to leave behind his life of sin and follow God faithfully. Amidst his tears he hears the distant voice of a child chanting the words “Tolle, lege! ” or “Take up and read!” Aroused from his pitiable state and taking this as a sign from God, he goes to his house, picks up the first book he finds, and reads the first chapter. The book contained the letters of St. Paul, and the verse that Augustine read spoke to his heart with such force that he was convinced beyond any doubt of the truth of God; he was converted on the spot.
This journal of philosophy and theology is meant to embody a spirit of truth-seeking on the part of both the contributors and you, the reader. Like St. Augustine, we are all faced with the choice between complacency and continual conversion toward truth. We hope that this journal will serve as an aid in the discovery of truth, and thus we exhort you in all earnestness to “Take up and read!”
Editorial Note
“Tolle, lege!” These two words inspired St. Augustine to embark on a journey of faith in pursuit of truth, and in 2007, they became the cornerstone of our journal. Ever since, we have sought to inspire students by showcasing masterly essays in philosophy and theology written by their Mount peers. After a year’s hiatus we are pleased once again to offer you, our readers, an opportunity, through a new set of essays, to take up your own journey in pursuit of truth.
For this issue, our editorial board selected eight essays on a wide variety of topics from a pool of well over a hundred submissions As in previous years, submissions were evaluated in a blind review process. The essays that appear in these pages stood out to our editors on account of the interesting topics they explored, the clarity of their arguments, and, in some cases, their contemporary relevance. The prize-winning submission, Anthony Zaccaria’s Whether it is Good to Grieve? is a philosophically penetrating, theologically illuminating, and deeply affecting analysis of a fundamental human experience, creatively written in the form of a medieval disputation.
This volume is the product of the combined efforts of many people, not least the members of the editorial board, who devoted countless hours to reading submissions and debating their merits with one another in a genuinely truth-seeking spirit. Special thanks are due to Savannah Laux, who shepherded the other editors through the editorial process. Finally, due acknowledgement is owed to those whose submissions made this volume possible. It is to be hoped that the example of all these students will inspire readers of this volume to follow the example of St. Anselm, pursuing understanding not in order to believe but believing in order to understand.
Publication of this volume would not have been possible without the support of many other members of the Mount St. Mary’s community. We would like to thank the provost, Dr. Boyd Creasman, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Dr. Bryan Zygmont, for their generous financial support.
So tolle, lege take up and read! We hope that through this journal, you will be inspired to participate in a community conversation directed toward the discovery of truth and its revelation to others.
Contributors
Jeremy Belk is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Baltimore who attended St. John Paul II Seminary for his pontifical bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He is currently a seminarian at Mount St Mary’s Seminary, where he hopes to obtain his Master of Divinity by 2027.
Joseph Carlson graduated from Mount Saint Mary’s in the spring of 2024 with degrees in theology and economics. After his wedding in June of 2024, he moved back to Northern Virginia and now works for the United States Army as a data analyst.
Owen Eby graduates from Mount St. Mary’s in the spring of 2025 with a degree in biochemistry. After graduation, he will be doing his Ph.D. in biophysics at Harvard Medical School.
Michael Moore is a seminarian for the archdiocese of Baltimore who is currently pursuing his M.Div. and M.A. in theology degrees, concentrating in systematic theology. He studied at Mount St. Mary’s for his freshman year of college before being assigned to complete his philosophical studies at the John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C. He hopes to be ordained a priest in June of 2027 and then go on to serve the faithful of the archdiocese.
Nathan Schmidt is a seminarian for the diocese of WheelingCharleston. He is expected to graduate from Mount St. Mary's Seminary in 2028. He earned his Master of Arts in Philosophical Studies in 2025.
Emma Smith graduated from the Mount in May 2023 with degrees in philosophy and political science. Afterward, she volunteered with Capuchin Corps for one year at the homeless shelter Christ House, based in Washington, D.C. Emma is currently working for a familycentered Catholic organization near Pittsburgh.
Anthony Zaccaria will graduate from Mount St. Mary’s in the spring of 2025 with majors in mathematics and computer science and minors in philosophy and data science. After graduating, he will attend Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute with the aim of earning a Ph.D. in mathematics.
Whether It Is Good to Grieve?
Anthony Zaccaria
Objection 1: It seems that it is not good to grieve. In Augustine’s Confessions, he prays to God, “Blessed are those who love you, and their friend in you, and their enemy for your sake. For they alone lose no one dear to them to whom all are dear in him who is not lost.” 1 Grieving is a state of extreme sorrow over a loss of grave importance. One ought to love all things in God, and therefore lose nothing, since God is not lost. If one is grieving, one cannot also love what is lost in God, else it would not be lost and there would be no cause to grieve. Hence, it is not good to grieve.
Objection 2: St. Paul exhorts Christians to “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:6). 2 However, grieving and rejoicing are contrary to each other and cannot be performed at the same time. If one is grieving, one cannot at the same time obey St. Paul’s exhortation or the Holy Word of God. Therefore, it is not good to grieve.
Objection 3: In Boethius’s Consolation, Lady Philosophy harshly dismisses Boethius’s sad muses, created due to his unfortunate and distressing situation, describing them as being “like the Sirens” and telling them, “your blandishments will lead only to my destruction.” 3 The sad muses were expressions of Boethius’s grief. But it cannot be the case that what leads to a man’s destruction is good; therefore, it is not good to grieve.
Objection 4: One of the Divine attributes is impassibility, meaning that God does not feel emotion. If God does not feel emotion, then He does not grieve, since grief is an emotion. One ought to do one’s best to imitate God and so participate in His divinity. Grieving cannot
1 Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 4:9, 14.
2 All biblical quotations are from the RSCVE
3 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 4.
help one imitate God, since God does not grieve; therefore, it is not good to grieve.
On the contrary: When seeing the burial place of His friend, “Jesus wept” (John 11:25). Jesus is fully God, and God is without any evil, or lack of good. Therefore, since Jesus grieved for His friend, it must be good to grieve.
I answer that: It is good to grieve, given the human condition, insofar as it lifts one up to God.
Grieving is the act of being in sorrow due to a loss. It is the human body’s natural response when something which is placed in high esteem is lost. St. Thomas Aquinas states that “it is always the case that an operation that is appropriate for a man, given the condition he is in, is pleasurable to him.” 4 Grieving is the operation appropriate to a man, given a state of extreme sorrow over a loss. Therefore, grieving is pleasurable given that state. This is corroborated by human experience, for when Augustine was pondering why his grief was pleasurable, he never questioned that it was pleasurable. 5 It releases something bottled up, something demanding to be released, inside of a person. It acts the same as when one excretes waste from one’s body. However, one cannot say that because grieving is pleasurable, it is good. Rather, because it is pleasurable, it can be ordered to the good. As Boethius pointed out in his Consolation, “One indulges [pleasures] and for this one gets pain and disease.” 6 On the other hand, all that is good emanates from The Good and points to it as art emanates from the artist and communicates something about him. Pleasure itself must be good since it exists, and all that exists is created by God, who is incapable of creating that which is not good. Therefore, pleasures can be enjoyed in a way that points one toward The Good, which is God. Grieving is not good to do for its own sake, nor is it good to do for the pleasure that it brings. Neither is it good because it releases what is deep within us, as in the waste example above, for if one fails to excrete waste but needs to, one will perish. It is not the same with grieving. If one refrains from grieving, it may be painful, but it will not cause one to die. Rather, it must be done, as with all virtues, in the right way.
4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 38, art. 2.
5 Augustine, Confessions, 4:5,10–6.11.
6 Boethius, Consolation, 76.
What makes grieving good to do at all is humans’ finite earthy condition. If humans could truly grasp their ultimate end, among the blessed in Heaven, then there would be no grief, since they would lose nothing, for all things would be loved in God in whom nothing is lost, and grieving only occurs when something good is lost. But this is extraordinarily difficult and only possible for the most saintly of people. Even if people intellectually assent to the idea that they ought to love all things in God, most would not have the power to carry this out. Augustine recognized this: “Whatever you perceive through your flesh is only a part, and you pay no heed to the whole of which these things are parts.” 7 The parts are the goods in this world and God is the whole. One should love the parts in the whole but is unable to, for one perceives only the parts. When one grieves in the right way, one recognizes this poor state. One humbles oneself and recognizes one’s failure to do what all people ought. The words of the Oracle of Delphi are truly written in their hearts.
It is possible to grieve in a way that is not beneficial. This occurs when one grieves for the pleasure or the release alone. Augustine was admittedly guilty of this in his younger years when he grieved the loss of his friend. He did not place his hope in God; in fact, he “had no hope”; he “merely grieved and wept” and “wept bitterly and found rest in bitterness.” 8 He recognized his wretched state but could not recognize his ultimate end; therefore, he did not follow the injunction to “know thyself.” The Psalmist communicates the end that ought to be sought in grief: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my savior and my God” (Psalms 42:5–6).
The goal of every person’s grief and distress should be to hope in God and praise Him, ultimately to be better able to love all things in God. In our grief, we ought to call upon God so that we may know Him better. By directing our grief to God we are praying in a way that gives ourselves to Him efficaciously. This giving of ourselves is easier to accomplish when we are in a state of grief, for it releases what is inside of us. By knowing Him better, we are better able to recognize the whole when we perceive the parts, becoming better able to love all things in God. The goal of grieving is never to grieve again, for we ought to direct it to God, hoping in Him, praying that he hears us, bringing us closer to Him and allowing us to recognize Him in each
7 Augustine, Confessions, 4:11, 17.
8 Ibid., 4:5,10; 6.11.
thing, better able to love all things in Him so that nothing will be lost. Hence, grieving will not occur, for there will be no cause for grief. It is good to grieve in this way.
Reply to Objection 1: It is true that people must love all things in God. However, given the earthly state of people, it is extraordinarily difficult to do this. Grieving allows us to direct more of ourselves to God so that He may make us able to love Him in all things through His grace.
Reply to Objection 2: It is also true that all people should rejoice in the Lord always. However, this is once again extraordinarily difficult, as controlling one’s emotions so as always to be able to rejoice requires an impossible amount of self-mastery. This can be known since no one is truly known to have rejoiced at every single moment. Rather, we should seek to achieve our ultimate end. There we will be able to rejoice in the Lord always.
Reply to Objection 3: Lady Philosophy was not destroying Boethius’s muses because they were expressions of grief. Rather, the muses expressed the kind of grief that does not lift the soul to God and instead distracts it, hindering it from being able to receive true consolation in God.
Reply to Objection 4: It is true that people should do their best to imitate God and so participate in His divinity. However, this does not take into account the human condition. God is eternal and people are finite. It is not possible that people feel no emotion, barring some sort of disorder. God even communicates through emotions, for in Scripture, which is held to be His Holy Word, grieving and lamentation are common themes. This is evident when Job cries, “Perish the day on which I was born” (Job 3:3) and when the Psalmist writes in his distress, “Because of you friend and neighbor shun me; my only friend is darkness” (Psalms 88:19). God is not a deceiver; therefore, it cannot be the case that emotions are bad and should be avoided, which would be the case if it were true that we must imitate God in this way.
Two Theories of Authentic Agency
Emma Smith
To most people familiar with philosophy, the work of the contemporary analytic philosopher Agnes Callard and the French existentialist Albert Camus would seem so far apart as to not be able to be brought into any kind of conversation. However, upon close examination of these thinkers’ writings, it becomes clear that Callard and Camus are talking about different species of the same phenomenon: a process for making major life decisions that Callard calls “large-scale transformative pursuits.” These are actions that “change what one cares about . . . in some substantial way. They typically require years of sustained effort, both in the form of preparation and in the form of the work attending the completed state.” 1 Callard and Camus are offering different accounts of how a person can possibly undertake these transformative pursuits and how he may change what he cares about when it is impossible fully to see the value of the person he might eventually become. Though they are radically different, Callard’s ideas about the process she names “aspiration” and Camus’s philosophy of the absurd both illustrate how a person might employ his own agency in order to come to lead a more fulfilling life or, as we might think of it, to become a more authentic version of himself. 2 Emphasized in both philosophies is the central role that values play in such a personal transformation.
Callard and Aspiration
In her 2018 book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, Callard identifies and describes a process she calls “aspiration,” which is a unique analysis of how a person can approach a large-scale transformative pursuit. “Aspiration,” writes Callard, “is that form of agency in which one acts upon oneself to create a self with
1 Agnes Callard, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 74.
2 I will state at the outset that in this paper, I assume that a fulfilling life and an authentic life are synonymous.
substantively new values.” 3 This phenomenon, she argues, has been overlooked by past philosophers but is nevertheless an important explanatory theory of decision-making that corrects the mistakes Callard sees in the decision-theoretic approach used by philosophers such as Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Laurie Paul, with whom Callard engages heavily in the first part of her book. 4 Callard’s aim in explaining the process of aspiration is to show that even though a person might have only a vague idea of what a new perspective undergirded by a novel set of values would entail, large life transformations can still be approached rationally, something that decision theory fails to recognize.
Callard first contrasts her analysis of large-scale transformative pursuits with that of Ullmann-Margalit, who comes to what is for Callard an unsettling conclusion: that while decision theory is useful in resolving medium-sized decisions such as buying a car, in small and large decisions the theory can offer no guidance. 5 In a small decision such as choosing a box of cereal off a grocery store shelf, for example, a shopper is simply “picking one of several nearly identical items,” and so there is no place for rationality or irrationality. 6 When someone makes a big decision such as choosing a career path which UllmannMargalit calls “opting” his preferences change so greatly that in effect a “New Person” is created. 7 Because both the Old Person and the New Person have internally consistent sets of preferences, Ullmann-Margalit argues that there is no rational way to choose between these two sets of preferences. 8 Ultimately, decision theory is just as unhelpful when one is facing a large as when one faces a small decision.
Laurie Paul offers a similar assessment of decision theory, using as illustration the ludicrous example of someone deciding whether to become a vampire. Because a person contemplating vampiric life cannot appreciate fully the expected value of such an “epistemic and personal transformation,” it is impossible for that person to make “an informed choice in the traditional way.” 9 On this view, the investigation that comes before such a decision can be undertaken
3 Ibid., 183.
4 Ibid., 258.
5 Ibid., 41.
6 Ibid., 40.
7 Ibid., 42.
8 Ibid., 43.
9 Ibid., 45.
only in a detached and aloof manner. Further, once a decision on the matter is made it is irreversible: a bite magically transforms a human being into a blood-thirsty creature, and this cannot be undone even if the person desired a reversal. 10
Paul views other large transformations in a similar way, arguing for instance that a would-be mother cannot understand the value of motherhood until she experiences it herself. The author states simply that “knowing what it is like to be a mother requires becoming a mother”; therefore, any thoughts the woman might have about parenthood are mere “unjustified assumptions.” 11 The only option in this case is to step into the dark, as it were, by committing oneself blindly to one choice or another. For Paul, too, it is clear that decision theory breaks down when the attempt is made to apply it to large-scale transformative pursuits. It follows that such transformative pursuits cannot be approached rationally or non-arbitrarily; any transformation in values or character that occurs after the decision cannot be considered the result of the person’s own agency.
Callard argues that this “decision model” as she refers to the framework put forward by Ullmann-Margalit and Paul errs in failing to recognize that the true cause of value transformation in large-scale transformative pursuits may be one’s own personal agency rather than factors imposed by outside forces. 12 The two decision theorists’ description of large life changes as things that merely happen to people, as well as their idea that people are completely ignorant of the value of potential experiences, disturb Callard. In her view, people are the cause of their own valuational and character transformations; they neither passively drift toward such transformations nor are compelled to change.
In her book, Callard offers a theory of decision-making that she believes corrects the main flaw of decision theory as described by Ullmann-Margalit and Paul, that is, the claim that large-scale transformative pursuits cannot be approached through one’s own efforts in a rational way. According to Callard, “large transformations in people’s lives are rational” and self-directed, though this is better understood by what Callard calls “aspiration.” 13 Aspiration is a coherent and continuous process that brings one through incremental
10 Ibid., 57.
11 Ibid. 58.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Ibid., 54.
steps into a new valuational condition, but in a different manner than the “drifting” described by Ullmann-Margalit. 14 Furthermore, rather than emphasizing the moment of decision as the crucial and sole moment of personal transformation, the aspiration model sees decision-making as an activity that includes the time before and after the actual decision, in which the instant of decision is conceived of as a “climactic” moment “embedded in a longer transformative journey.” 15
The consequence of making personal agency the lynchpin of the aspiration model is that Callard’s readers are reacquainted with their ability to transform themselves and acquire new values through their own efforts. People are reminded that they bring about the value changes in their lives rather than passively allowing such changes to arise “in the way one might end up with an ulcer or an inheritance.” 16 The would-be mother, for instance, can familiarize herself with the value of motherhood by spending time with her married friends and their children or by reading books about parenting. In this way, she takes control of an otherwise mysterious situation by increasing her appreciation of the values she would have were she to understand the full worth of motherhood. Transformation in values and character should no longer be thought of as something that simply happens to a person but rather as a task which an agent voluntarily decides to take on and direct. The self, as both the one who does the creating and the one who is created, can truly be called a “cause of herself.” 17
The analysis up to this point raises the question of how, if a person cannot fully grasp the importance of a prospective value or experience, he can be motivated to engage in the work of aspiration in the first place. Callard argues that though it might seem irrational for an individual to pursue values that do not satisfy his current desires, it is the exercise of what she calls “proleptic rationality” that makes this pursuit reasonable. 18 Proleptic rationality begins with a recognition that one does not appreciate a particular good for its intrinsic worth but instead has a tenuous grasp of its value. Along with this recognition of insufficiency comes a realization that the things that one values and identifies oneself with are inferior to more fulfilling
14 Ibid., 55.
15 Ibid., 63.
16 Ibid., 180.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 179.
goods. This realization is painful because it may lead to a conclusion that one is living inauthentically. Callard illustrates this by her example of a music student who currently values classical music to a lesser extent than he would like; he has only a vague idea of the part classical music could play in his life, and he actively works to acquire a better appreciation of its value. 19
Critically, the aspirant has enough wisdom to know that he must act proleptically, that is, with a view toward his future self, if he is ever to reach the valuation condition to which he aspires. Callard argues that even though the aspirant might be discouraged by the extent to which he currently values certain goods, the exercise of proleptic rationality is actually the best approach to large-scale transformative pursuits; the agent knows that for the moment he must “lean” on people with a better grasp of the value but that this leaning “is itself aspirational,” since by it he will eventually reach a better valuational condition where he can rely less on other people. 20
By voluntarily acting on proleptic reasons, the agent is thus engaged in an act of “self- creation,” bringing himself from an old to a new perspective. 21 But there is at least one philosopher who disputes the very possibility of self-creation, namely, Galen Strawson. Strawson argues that self-creation is either bringing to light values that were already entailed by one’s previous values or acquiring new values imposed by some outside force. 22 A person who acquires new values as the result of some decision, Strawson claims, is “merely lucky” and is responsible neither for these values nor for his character. 23 Callard calls this proposed dichotomy “Strawson’s dilemma” and, in the final analysis, proposes that this dilemma can be unequivocally answered through the process of aspiration. This is something that will be discussed in a later section; for now, it is necessary to consider a similar process, described by Camus, used to understand large-scale transformative pursuits.
Camus and the Absurd
Camus’s philosophical and fictional writings converge on the central theme of what he calls “the absurd” and what he sees as the
19 Ibid., 73.
20 Ibid., 199.
21 Ibid., 180.
22 Ibid., 181.
23 Ibid., 191.
correct response to it: continual revolt against it. The notion of the absurd is both the most important and most obscure concept in Camus’s thought, and we shall have opportunity later to attempt a definition of it. For now, it is enough to make clear that Camus considers a person who lives his life in ignorance or denial of the absurd to be living in illusion. Chief among Camus’s writings are a short but dense essay called “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942) and an impressive novel, The Plague (1947). In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus provides readers with a detailed account of the process a person may undergo in order to come to a more fulfilling and authentic version of himself. Then, in The Plague, Camus brings this philosophy to life through a work of literature. I will call the person who travels through all the stages of this process the “absurdist.”
Just as Callard considers aspiration to be a single continuous activity, it is reasonable to regard Camus as intending his philosophy of the absurd to constitute a unified process. Nevertheless, if we want to understand the inner workings of this process, it is helpful to divide it conceptually into four distinct stages: an initial stage in which the person whose life will eventually be transformed has as yet no inkling of the absurd or of the transformation to come; a moment in which the person comes to recognize the insufficiency of his values; a moment of recognition of the absurd; and the person’s response to the absurd. Rather than being a universal process, experienced by everyone, the process described by Camus is a path that only certain people travel at a particular time in their life. Though the experience of the absurd is deeply unsettling, it is precisely this journey, according to Camus, that leads one to a more authentic life through an embrace of relatively more fulfilling values than the ones held before.
The time before the experience of the absurd is a time in which the person lives his life in an ordinary way. During this period, one senses no insufficiency in one’s values or manner of living and is therefore content; the person has no intimation that life might soon be turned upside down. The average man’s two most pressing concerns at this time are work and pleasure. While most people do not see this sort of existence as problematic, Camus criticizes this life and compares it to the afterlife of the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus. As punishment for his impiousness, Sisyphus, after he died, was condemned by the gods to the unending task of rolling a rock to the top of a hill only to see it roll down again, thereby forcing him to begin
the process anew, over and over again for eternity. 24 The story of Sisyphus is a metaphor for how Camus views most people’s lives, which he believes are typified by the torturous boredom of working a repetitive job and then spending any remaining time pursuing fleeting pleasure. Yet because death is the ultimate destiny of each person, in such people’s lives, their “whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing,” which means that all their efforts are futile and their existence absurd. 25
It is said that all metaphors limp, and there is indeed a fundamental difference between Sisyphus’s experience and that of Camus’s contemporaries. Sisyphus possesses an awareness of the absurdity of his existence; he is “conscious . . . [of] the whole extent of his wretched condition.” 26 Indeed, it is that very awareness in which his misery consists, for unless he grasps the absurdity of the task he has been forced to perform, the fate to which he has been condemned is really no punishment at all. Camus noticed, however, that most of the people with whom he interacted were unaware of the true wretchedness of their condition. In his opinion, they erred by maintaining hope in their daily lives and by cultivating a futureoriented outlook. 27 This drastically differs from the tragic hero exemplified by Sisyphus who readily maintains a consciousness that time is “his worst enemy,” since daily it leads him closer to an absurd death.
28
Camus, in his novel The Plague, applies these ideas through a lessthan-flattering description of the inhabitants of Oran. Plague bacillus, a disease thought long extinct in the industrialized world, appears in the coastal Algerian town, where, according to the narrator, the average person is a workaholic who “fritter[s] away at card-tables, in cafes and in small-talk what time is left for living.” 29 Rather than being masters of their own lives, the people passively allow events to unfold and in this way they “drift . . . through life rather than live.” 30 When the plague first hits, the Oranians believe that it will simply disappear
24 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 23.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 19.
28 Ibid., 5.
29 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International Books, 1991), 38.
30 Ibid., 73.
after a time; even when the town’s legislators institute official measures to combat the disease, including closing Oran’s gates and forcing people into quarantine, the people still do not awaken from the stupor and illusion in which they live. 31
However, there is a cohort of individuals in Oran who are deeply shaken by the plague. These few begin to question the value of their repetitive lives and experience a dawning recognition that the life they have been living, the one focused on work and pleasure, is inauthentic and meaningless. The archetype of this sort of thinking in The Plague is Dr. Bernard Rieux, who is concerned about the large number of dying rats and is one of the first people to recommend that the city government directly name the disease and take precautionary measures. Rieux, who has always lived contentedly, begins to question the efficacy of his daily struggle as a healer in the face of so much suffering and death. For Camus, this questioning is to be expected; he writes in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm . . . . But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.” 32 Although such questioning is painful and disorienting, Camus regards it as critical because it places people on the path toward growth and authenticity; it has the potential to lead individuals to acquire the same “consciousness” heroically possessed by Sisyphus and to live, as Sisyphus does, more in accordance with reality. 33
The next stage in Camus’s process is the experience of a yet more unsettling recognition, the recognition of the absurd as such. Not every person who sees that something is lacking in his life will also arrive at the recognition of the absurd, but for those who do, the consequences of this stage comprise the central point of Camus’s entire philosophy. Camus defines the absurd as the gap between man’s “longing for happiness and for reason” and “the unreasonable silence of the world,” a gap which causes one to realize not only that his current values and activities are insufficient to provide meaning, but that there is nothing in the world that could. 34
31 Ibid., 40.
32 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 5
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 10.
If only relatively few of Oran’s inhabitants recognize the insufficiency of their values, even fewer reach the recognition of the absurd. Among those who do besides Rieux is Jean Tarrou, a foreigner who becomes friends with the doctor through their shared work of combating the plague. The experience of the absurd in Tarrou and Rieux manifests itself as a constant “feeling of exile” and a “sensation of a void within which never left.” 35 Unlike their fellow townspeople, they see that there is no God or immortality to give meaning to their efforts on earth, and that even when progress is made in fighting the disease, such “victories will never be lasting” and the worst human suffering never entirely eradicated. 36 Each of these men is an absurdist, who wonders with Camus whether the immense amount of suffering they witness and the seeming meaninglessness of life “dictate death.” 37
At this point in the transformative process described by Camus, the overwhelming force of the absurd requires a response. One realizes that there exist various options of escape: a mental repression of the absurd, an embrace of religion, or an act of suicide. As has been noted, most of the inhabitants of Oran do not even reach the recognition of the absurd and spend their days in pursuit of pleasure in order to distract themselves from their terrifying reality. 38 Others, like Monsieur Othon, actively mentally repress the absurd by attempting to maintain their daily routine. 39 A second manner of escaping the absurd is evident in the character of Father Paneloux, who as a Catholic priest commits himself even more fully to the practices and promises of Christianity. In a sermon he preaches during the “Week of Prayer,” Paneloux tells the congregation that, as happened to the ancient Egyptians, plague has come because the people of Oran “deserved it.” 40 He proceeds to talk about the meaning that can be found in suffering when one embraces the love and forgiveness offered by God. A final option for escape is physical suicide, which is a temptation faced by a number of characters in The
35 The Plague, 71
36 Ibid., 128.
37 Myth of Sisyphus, 3.
38 The Plague, 121.
39 Ibid., 116.
40 Ibid., 94.
Plague, and one that for Camus is a serious possibility to be reckoned with.
41
Yet, according to Camus, none of these means of escape are legitimate. He argues that mentally repressing the absurd is inauthentic because it denies the existence of something that is an undeniable albeit unfortunate part of human existence. Likewise, religious belief which Camus calls “philosophical suicide” allows one to live in relative peace but with illusions of a better world to come. 42 Both of these responses are, therefore, an irresponsible and cowardly escape from the absurd; each is based on a leap of faith that has no rational basis. Furthermore, Camus argues that physical suicide is something which must never be undertaken because it amounts to an affirmation of the absurd. 43
For Camus, the only legitimate response to the absurd is revolt. This attitude is paradigmatically exemplified by Sisyphus, who, in full consciousness of the futility of his act, pushes the rock up the hill for the hundredth time. In The Plague, Rieux and Tarrou embody this response in their constant fight against the disease, even though they know that they will be making only a small reprieve from the suffering. In the face of the absurd, they realize that they have a duty to fight it, because it is the only thing they can do. Sisyphus, Rieux, and Tarrou are great because they acknowledge their fate without experiencing “the resignation that ought to accompany it.” 44 They thus serve as models for the townspeople for how to live in an absurd world a world bereft of God without resorting to suicide.
Two Species of the Same Process
Though Callard and Camus represent divergent philosophical traditions, they are in fact describing two processes that tend toward the same goal: to become, through the exercise of personal agency, a more authentic person, one who lives free of illusions. For both the aspirant and the absurdist, this journey to authenticity begins with a disheartening recognition of the insufficiencies of their values. Yet it is their very consciousness of failure that ultimately propels the aspirant and the absurdist to pursue life on a higher plane of existence.
41 Although Camus ultimately rejects suicide, he writes at the outset of “The Myth of Sisyphus” that suicide is “the one truly serious philosophical problem.”
42 The Myth of Sisyphus, 10
43 Ibid., 19.
44 Ibid.
Callard’s aspirant concludes that the things he values in fact do not fulfill him or that the appreciation he has of his current values is incomplete. 45 Similarly, Camus’s absurdist realizes, by light of the absurd, the lack of any values that could give his life meaning in the face of the world’s unfeeling silence. Both lament the fact that they have not achieved their full potential. As the aspirant and the absurdist discover cracks in the foundation of their values, they find themselves in uncharted territory where the way forward is not clear to them. The aspirant, in pursuing a new value, does not know why he wants to pursue a specific good or how to attain it. 46 In the same way, the absurdist, having left behind his familiar and comfortable way of living, goes about “fumbling in the dark, trying to make something out.” 47
This newfound freedom has the potential to lead a person to a feeling of great despair over his condition. The aspirant, if he is less brave, might conclude that aspiring would take too much effort and that he was content with his current values. Likewise, the ideal Camusian revolt against the absurd is far from foreordained; as is clear from The Plague, philosophical or physical suicide or flight remain live options.
Callard and Camus, however, argue that such freedom might be utilized to launch the aspirant and the absurdist on the path to attaining more desirable and fulfilling values. According to Callard, this necessitates a refusal to ignore the painful recognition of the insufficiency of one’s current values, just as it is necessary for a person who is digging a tunnel to first burrow deeper into the darkness before emerging on the other side. Similarly, Camus states that one must “endure this experience [of the absurd] without flinching, with complete lucidity.” 48 It is only after acknowledging that one is not living in the way one desires that the stage might be set for a true personal transformation. By welcoming their suffering rather than rejecting it, the aspirant and the absurdist may become stronger than the things that block them from achieving their full potential. This is how the tragic hero, Sisyphus, lives: Sisyphus remains conscious during his horrendous ideal and, instead of allowing the suffering
45 Aspiration, 180.
46 Ibid., 231.
47 Myth of Sisyphus, 126.
48 Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 143.
resulting from his imprisoned state to crush his spirits, he harnesses it in order to transcend his situation. 49
The moment in which a person knows that he wants to aspire or in which he recognizes the absurd is a turning point because it leads him to recognize that a more fulfilling life can only be achieved by his own effort. The aspirant and the absurdist realize that now they are responsible for the course of their lives, for creating new selves. Callard illustrates this idea with her concepts of the creating self (S1) and the created self (S2), and it is this concept that she utilizes to answer Strawson’s dilemma. Strawson argues that cases of valuechange are merely cases of self-cultivation, not aspiration, and that S1, as normatively prior to S2, is the point from which the norms governing S2 derive. 50 Callard concurs with Strawson’s claim that the two selves are rationally connected, but she argues that S2 is instead normatively prior to S1. In Callard's view, the creator self is “guided by the very self [he] is bringing into being”; S1 uses his vision of his future, more fulfilled, self (S2) to propel himself toward a better valuational condition. 51 This “guiding” tactic may lead even a person who has established “a sense of identity around not valuing something” to embrace opposing values to those he had previously held. 52 In not being forced to acquire a new value by any other person, the aspirant has grown in his understanding of himself as an authentic person and witnessed firsthand the strength of his own will.
The absurdist, too, possesses a vision of himself that he attempts to live up to and knows that he must accomplish this through his own efforts. Even the inhabitants of Oran eventually come to this realization, knowing that, in their “extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbor; each had to bear the load of his troubles alone.” 53 Alone, too, the absurdist must reject his former values and embrace what the absurd has taught him about the importance of focusing on the present and of constantly affirming his new values until they become deep-seated aspects of his very self. Though self-reflection has its place in Camus’s process, as it does in Callard’s, the critical thing is to take action in order to bring about the person that one desires to be. Thus, in Camus’s process of the absurd
49 Myth of Sisyphus, 23
50 Aspiration, 182.
51 Ibid., 183.
52 Ibid., 196.
53 The Plague, 76.
as in Callard’s process of aspiration, we sense a celebration of the uniquely human ability to create a new person out of oneself, to work in order to acquire new values and to inhabit a more fulfilling plane of existence. We find ourselves agreeing with Rieux when he declares that the things that would destroy us instead lend themselves to our advantage. 54
Conclusion
Though in different ways, both the aspirant and the absurdist recognize insufficiencies in the manner in which they have been living: the aspirant realizes that he desires to leave behind values which he finds unfulfilling and acquire new values, while the absurdist sees that by living in ignorance or denial of the absurd, he has been prevented from achieving his full potential. Callard and Camus argue that the pain that arises as a result of these parallel moments of recognition need not lead a person to despair; instead, such pain might serve as a springboard for the aspirant and the absurdist to undertake a transformational process which will lead them to embrace a more fulfilling existence underpinned by new values. Through this transformation that they themselves direct, the aspirant and the absurdist are reminded of something they had perhaps forgotten: that they and not anyone or anything else oversee their valuational and character changes. The transformations, however, do not end here; rather, they are carried on as the person comes to resemble more closely the image of himself to which he aspires.
54 When questioned by Tarrou about his struggle against the plague despite his atheism, Rieux states that what is “true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves” (The Plague, 125).
The Christian Symphonia
Joseph Carlson
Since Constantine, Christendom has had for itself two juxtaposed symphonies between Church and State, one spiritual and the other physical. The first finds its source in Christ Himself, and the other was grafted on as a kind of paganization of Christianity. The spiritual roots of Christian political theory are the very Incarnation of Christ, whereby man and God were joined in perfect symphony, and where the human will of Christ existed perfectly intact and autonomous, yet fulfilling its purpose in obeying the divine will and working toward the ends of the divine will in its own human way. For any institution to be truly Christian, it must be cast in this mold of the Incarnation.
Such is the commentary on Russian history offered by Vladimir Solovyov, Sergii Bolgakov, and Mother Maria Skobtsova. The opposing arguments come from two ends, one from Emperor Justinian and another offered by Leo Tolstoy. We will see that these two opposing views really look at Church and State in the same way; symphonia saw a cohabitation of Church and State in the same sphere, but the inevitable problem with this conception is that both occupy a material sphere and therefore compete for material resources. In this schema, the State, as definitionally having a monopoly on violence, will eventually overpower the Church, and she will become an arm of the State. To avoid this problem but remain within the same paradigm, Tolstoy requires the abolition of the State, since they cannot coexist in a purely material way without the Church falling before the State. He does not believe in the Incarnation and therefore has no mold in which Church and State may be cast. This is not the dichotomy set up by the three aforementioned theologians; rather, they saw the Church and State as occupying two fundamentally different but linked spheres. It is only by this kind of separation that the Church can fully realize itself in both the material and spiritual dimensions.
Two Symphonies
One may say that the first person to institute a symphonia of Church and State was Christ Himself, when He declared, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:21). The original idea, in fact, was that both Church and State had their own proper function and role in society, and that the Christian was bound to both in some manner. In what manner was proven repeatedly by the early Church, for they obeyed the State but only in so far as they could do so without disobeying God. As the Apostles said to the authorities who commanded them against Christ, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). 1 The State, from the beginning, had a natural and divinely sanctioned authority, an authority only to be contradicted when the State contradicts God. The Church, therefore, is set, in some capacity, above the State, for though materially it has no power over the State, the Church possesses eternal life; thus the State has no power in threatening the Christian with death. The following text, often attributed to Tertullian, declares this truth before the Roman State: “Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum.” 2 The early Church, therefore, was intensely opposed to both accommodationism and nonconformism, offering a different system altogether.
This different system, which we will call the “alternative symphony,” was manifested in the person of Christ Himself. He is king forever, and in His greatest regel act, he suffered for the sake of unbelievers he took their penalty and refused to harm them even as they constituted a material threat to everything he stood for. The two symphonies existed there on Calvary: the Roman state, which assumed
1 St. Justin Martyr demonstrates this as fundamental Christian doctrine in his First Apology to Emperor Antoninus Pius: “Everywhere we (Christians), more readily than all men, endeavour to pay to those appointed by you the taxes both ordinary and extraordinary, as we have been taught by Him; for at that time some came to Him and asked Him, if one ought to pay tribute to Cæsar; and He answered, Tell Me, whose image does the coin bear? And they said, Cæsar’s. And again He answered them, Render therefore to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Whence to God alone we render worship, but in other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging you as kings and rulers of men, and praying that with your kingly power you be found to possess also sound judgment. But if you pay no regard to our prayers and frank explanations, we shall suffer no loss” (Justin Martyr, The First Apology, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe [Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885], revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/-fathers/0126.htm, 17). So we see that the early Church understood its duties to Christ and State quite easily.
2 “We multiply when you cut us down. The blood of Christians is seed” (Tertullian, Apologeticus, L, 13 in Tertullian: Apology, De Speculata, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960], 215; translation mine).
it had power to enforce the religion of the empire over and against all private conscience by means of violence, and the alternative symphony, the God–Man, who manifested the ideal State in His regel act of dignifying, of deifying all human persons. 3 Kingship does indeed belong to God alone; the mold for how the human will and the divine will ought to interact is the person of Jesus Christ.
The emperor Justinian formally authored a different opinion, the symphonia of Church and State, the simple transfer of the old imperial cult to the new Christian cult. The Emperor remained practically a divine figure, the “viceregent of Christ,” 4 with the capacity to call councils and to weigh in on theological controversies; after the sixth century, the emperor even had vetting powers in choosing the Patriarch of Constantinople. 5 Here is Justinian’s own articulation: There are two great blessings, gifts of the mercy of the Almighty to men, the priesthood and the empire (sacerdotium et imperium). Each of these blessings granted to men was established by God and has its own appointed task. But as they proceed from the same source they also are revealed in unity and co-operative action. 6
Justinian, too, took it upon himself to persecute heretics, wielding violence and at times executing heretics. 7 It should not be lost on anyone that the same sword that visited violence upon Christians persecuted the new dissenters.
These two symphonies persist in Russian Christendom until today; but in Russian history, the majority has always sided with Justinian.
3 “In the Gospel of John, Jesus articulates a redefined understanding of kingship. This king is one who washes his disciples’ feet. Jesus’ reply to Pilate, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ is not a statement about the location of God’s kingdom but concerns the origin of the inspiration for Jesus’ view of the kingdom. Its norms are the result of God’s spirit and righteousness. It is otherworldly only in the sense that it is wrong to suppose that the definition of kingship and kingdom is to be found in conventional regal persons and practice” (Christopher Rowland, “Scripture: New Testament,” The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh [Blackwell Publishing, 2004)], 28).
4 J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 300.
5 Ibid., 313–14.
6 Justinian’s Sixth Novella, quoted in Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, trans. Lydia W. Kesich (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 151.
7 The Enactments of Justinius 1, 11, trans. S. P. Scott, accessed March 24, 2025, https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Anglica/CJ1_Scott.
Christological Dogmas
The alternative symphony advocated by Solovyov, Bolgakov, and Skopskova is predicated upon the person of Christ. Thus, even as Justinian’s symphonia was taking shape, the Church was declaring Christological dogmas and indirectly teaching the alternative symphony. These dogmas become our mold in which to cast every divine–human cohabitation, including Church and State. After those dogmas which declared the Trinity and the denunciation of Arianism, already there was an immediate question as to how fully the human could integrate with the divine. These questions were of the person and nature of Jesus Christ, but they all dictate the later understanding of Church and State expressed by many of the liberal orthodox.
Apollinarianism supposed that Jesus had a divine mind, the Logos, and a human body and soul; this too was rejected at Constantinople (381). Therefore, at Constantinople, rejected as well was the idea that divine edicts of the Church could directly dictate the affairs of the State. As Solovyov declares in “The Idea of the Christian State,” “the Kingdom of God proclaimed by [Christianity] was not and could not be for man-kind a ready-made, perfect order of things which it had simply to accept; it was given to men as a morallyhistorical task, to be accomplished by their own free efforts.” 8 The kingdom of God, to Solovyov, is a task that humanity can take up; this would have been thwarted by Apollinarianism, for there would have been no human will in Christ to assent to the divine will.
The condemnation of Pelagianism at Ephesus (431) condemned the capacity for the human person to attain salvation on his own, as if as his own first cause. Though not a Christological dogma, it implicitly declares the incapacity of humanity to create a Heaven on earth through political means; they cannot, by fulfilling their nature well, create a Heavenly city. It is only by the human’s free response to grace that he can be saved, and this is true of the State; the State must be a secondary cause in the salvation of the world, after the primary cause, Christ, who subsists fully in the Church.
Nestorianism sought to separate Christ into two persons, human and divine. This put the human on the same plane as the divine and thus found a practical manifestation in Justinian’s symphonia. Mary, Theotokos, is the antithesis of this Nestorian move. She is of course the mother of Jesus, who is God, and therefore the mother of God. But
8 Vladimir Solovyov, “The Idea of the Christian State,” A Solovyov Anthology, arr. S. L. Frank, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: SCM Press, 1950), 183.
if we were looking for a way for two persons, one divine and the other human, to be in perfect union, we may look no further than Mary, who by accepting the grace of God merited to be one with God.
Monophysitism, denied at Chalcedon (451), would have the human overpowered by the divine. Again, there is a false dichotomy, the old pagan way of viewing the gods; where the gods were, the human could not be. Where the gods were, therefore, there was violence against man, and mankind was burnt up. To the fathers, the Burning Bush is symbolic of the true reality of the Incarnation: the bush (humanity) is on fire (divinity) but not consumed (the Mystery of the Incarnation). Monophysitism, therefore, would have the State, which is human, somehow be burnt up by God and by Heavenly realities. Salvation for man would have had no earthly element, and the State would have been forgone. There would be no hope for the State, since “for that which He has not assumed, He has not healed.” 9 Man, and therefore his work (which we find in the liberal orthodox is immanently social and therefore political), are not saved.
Chalcedon saw the sorry loss of the Alexandrian school; who knows if symphonia might have had a better counterbalance if Constantinople had not been allowed to gain such theological hegemony? We do see that this hegemony yields some nasty fruit in the Eastern Roman Empire by the seventh and eighth centuries (with the Patriarch of Constantinople 10 professing Monoenergism and the emperors attempting Monothelitism and iconoclasm).
Constantine II condemned Monothelitism, which asserted that Christ had only a divine will and not a human will. This would have had the same effect on Christendom as Apollinarianism, and it becomes the central question in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian theology of Church and State. If the human person has its own autonomous will which is designed, in the mold of Christ’s human will, to perfectly submit itself to the divine will by its own proper autonomy, then that means that all that is proper to the human will should be lived out to its fullest, with the divine end in mind.
9 St. Gregory Nazianzen, “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinaris” (Letter 101), trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a.htm. This is in fact from St. Gregory’s critique of Apollinarianism.
10 Sergius I.
Finally, we arrive at what seems to be a special case but is actually the most pertinent to our discussion of Church and State (as we will see with Skobtskova), namely, the iconoclasts condemned at the Second Council of Nicaea (787). John of Damascus made the argument that “the Son is the first natural and unchangeable icon of the invisible God, the Father, showing the Father in Himself.” 11 Therefore, since Christ Himself became flesh, we can truly see Him, and therefore we can preserve an image of Him in created things, for he assumed the nature of a created thing. It is the proper and distinct role of created things, therefore, to be icons of Christ; they are sacraments, that is, signs of Christ’s love and nature. 12
It must be noted, too, that before the Church could work out this proper relationship in the person of Christ, Byzantium had already assumed the symphonia which would later be articulated by Justinian, that the human will could exist in the same sphere in the same way as the divine will, that the Church could exercise human punishments through the State, and that the State could exercise divine judgments through the Church.
The Baptism of the Rus and the Russian Martyr
The Baptism of the Rus at Chersoneses 13 is told in the Primary Chronicle and in hindsight demonstrates the passing on of the Justinian symphonia to the newly formed Russian Christendom. Volodomir the Great intercedes with God on behalf of the nation and has them baptized; in the future, it will be the Tsar’s unique role to protect authentic Orthodoxy. Ilarion, the first Rus’an 14 to be the metropolitan archbishop of Kyiv, praises Volodomir explicitly as the new Constantine.
A son of Volodomir, Svyatoslav, does not inherit Christendom but rather the paganism of his forefathers. He initiates a persecution
11 St. John Damascene, St. John Damascene on Holy Images followed by Three Sermons on the Assumption, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas Baker, 1898), 93; accessed via Christian Classics Ethereal Library at https://ccel.org/ccel/damascus/icons/icons.i.i.html.
12 Mother Maria Skobtskova, “The Second Gospel Commandment,” in Mother Maria Skobtskova: The Essential Writings, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2003), 60.
13 Chersonosis is taken by Volodomir from the Byzantines while he is still pagan. It is in this city that he is eventually baptized. It is telling that the Christianity which he received he received by stealing, as it were, a portion from the Greeks.
14 Russia, of course, did not yet exist as we know it today. The history of the Rus is long and complicated, but it is enough here to say that this nation, the Kieven Rus, which finds its civilizational birthplace in her baptism at Chersonisis, is the common heritage of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
of his own brothers, and two of these, Boris and Gleb, become the first Rus’an martyrs and some of the nation’s first saints. They represent, in some sense, the alternative Symphony, since they wear the martyr’s crown at the hand of the State. Yet there is something telling here, too: the brothers choose martyrdom, not because they are asked to denounce Christ, but rather because they are unwilling to perform any violent opposition to the State. In a move that becomes iconographic of Russian holiness in the face of autocracy, they accept the punishment of the State as from God. Though they continue to value only Christ, the legitimacy of the State that carries out violence, even against believers, is not questioned. In the end, another brother, Yaroslav, becomes head of the State, eventually introducing the first Rus’an law code, and appointing and commissioning Illarion as archbishop. It may be said that the following are simply propaganda efforts to legitimize Yaroslav’s claim to leadership: Boris and Gleb being saints, delegitimizing the rule of Svyatoslav, and simultaneously accepting the authority of the State. Such things typically contain some truth to them; regardless, the Russian consciousness is heavily affected by this story of their first martyrs.
Tsar and Schism
There are two more events especially worth mentioning before we attempt to further read this history, and these are what is called the Old Believer Schism and the Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great.
The Old Believer Schism (1652), for our purposes, is significant because it represents, almost alone in Russian history, the direct defying of the State in favor of what was considered Orthodoxy. The State was deemed, again, to be below Christ, in such capacity that many schismatics were willing to be martyred.
The second event is the Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great (1720), where the Tsar of Russia was proven, yet again, to be the de facto head of the Church. Peter had the Patriarchate abolished and installed a synod headed by a layman to run the affairs of the Church essentially as his direct representative. The tsar, here, has proven again to be not only the servant and defender of Orthodoxy, but the true head of the Church as well as the State. Thus, the tsar can, in this view, rightfully decapitate the Russian Church, since he is its true head.
Sobornost
Russian ecclesiology found its most accepted articulation in Khomiakov’s vision of Sobornost (unity in love). Here we collect some quotes that obviously inspire (or anticipate) our authors:
1. In reference to the Church: “you will see before you a living organism, for you have recalled the very principle of life: love.” 15
2. “The Church possesses and receives [Christ] constantly by the inner action of love without demanding an external phantom of Christ, as the Romans do. The invisible head of the Church did not find it necessary to leave the Church His image for the pronouncement of oracles; rather, He animated the whole Church with His love so that she could have in herself the eternal truth. This is our faith. The Church, even the earthly one, is a thing of heaven.” 16
3. “Neither God, nor Christ, nor the Church is an authority: an authority is something external. They are the truth: they are the life of the Christian the inner life . . . . But they are one’s life only to the extent Christians themselves live the universal life of love and unity, which is the life of the Church.” 17
The Church is a unity of love in Christ, and that Church dwells within the Christian in a manner unlike in any institution or authority. In fact, the Church cannot be an authority, since it is purely this indwelling! We see that the material Church, as a result of Russian symphonia, has gradually lost itself to the State such that the only way she can assert her continued existence is in a purely spiritual manner. It attempts to assert the human role in the alternative symphony, but it leaves such room for interpretation that we will see Tolstoy and Solovyov take opposite sides on this same idea. There is, too, in Khomiakov, a deemphasis on doctrine, which we also find in Tolstoy. Tolstoy takes the Church as Sobornost without a kind of tangible authority to its logical extreme.
15 Alexei Khomiakov, “Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris,” On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader trans. and ed. Boris Jakim and Robert Bird (Stockbridge: Lindisfarne Press, 1998), 74.
16 Ibid., 75.
17 Khomiakov, “Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Brochure by Mr. Laurentie,” in Jakim and Bird, eds., On Spiritual Unity, 58.
Tolstoy
We have (in extreme brevity) surveyed the tradition, and now we will compare the charges set against it. We first consider Tolstoy.
Tolstoy did not believe in the Incarnation, but he desired in some sense to be a Christian. His quasi-Christianity reached this articulation: “The true meaning of Christ’s teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore admitting no exceptions,” 18 and “the Christian revelation was the doctrine stating the equality of men, that God is the Father and that all men are brothers.” 19
His acceptance of love without the historical reality of the Incarnation and the person of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, necessitated his views of Church and State. He was an absolute pacifist, and he was, for that reason, an anarchist as well, since the State is definitionally the institution with a monopoly on violence in a given territory. He believed that Christianity’s great revelation was the “law of love,” entailing violence under no circumstances, and that this was lost after the Constantinian Fall. He follows Khomiakov closely, and both could easily say the following: “the objection will be raised, ‘but you are asserting that for so many centuries . . . Christianity has forgotten the love that is its basis and essence?’ . . . Yes, it is improbable, impossible, but it is true.” 20 The difference is, of course, that Khomiakov believes that this unity and love can only be found within the Church, and Tolstoy thinks that it is possible for human beings on their own.
To accept that human persons can achieve this perfect love and Sobornost on their own is to have a purely good view of humanity. Persons are naturally capable of the same love that Christ was capable of (for Tolstoy believes that this is the great value of Christ, that He demonstrated this capacity). Tolstoy quotes a German historian describing precisely this new faith: “I can see a new religion, based on trust in man, appealing to untouched depths within us, believing that we can love good without any recompense, and that the divine principle exists in man.” 21 Since persons can choose the good without being redeemed by Christ, there is no need for the Incarnation. There
18 Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, trans. Mary Koutouzow Tolstoy (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2010), 176.
19 Henry George, quoted in ibid., 186.
20 Khomiakov, “Remarks on the Occasion of a Letter by the Archbishop of Paris,” 74.
21 Solter, quoted in Tolstoy, Law of Love and Law of Violence, 170.
is, too, no need for the State, since persons may choose the good on their own, without threat or enforcement.
The State is diametrically opposed to Sobornost, since it threatens all with violence. There is no possible way, in fact, for the State to be elevated, for the Incarnation has not elevated all human institutions. The person has only to choose the good; he cannot be further empowered, for holiness is possible from his own nature.
Solovyov
Our dear Dostoyevsky was close with Solovyov, and it is said that Alyosha, the young monk told to leave the monastery and be a monk in the world, is inspired by his person. It is Alyosha’s beloved elder who declares a central truth of Solovyov’s integral Christology: “Truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.” 22
It seems that this would be eschatology or ethics or something, but no. Instead, here Christology becomes most vividly an ecclesiology and political program. The link between Heaven and earth (the cornerstone, if you will) is the person of Christ, the divine person who took on a human nature. This elevation is accomplished in the Church. Thomas Aquinas said the same for the West from what has been understood from of old in Christianity: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. 23 Already we have mentioned this in St. Gregory of Naziansus’s critique of the Christological heresies: the foundation of Christendom is that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity assumed all that is properly human and “set it the task of transforming its life in accordance with the truth. In truth, all are one, and God the absolute unity is all in all.” 24 Solovyov declares: in order that universal unity should be not an empty form, not a whited sepulchre, but a living form filled with appropriate content, it was necessary first of all to provide a new unifying basis for human life itself . . . . the first thing needed was a divinely-human fact. Such a fact was and is given in the
22 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David MacDuff (New York: Penguin, 2003), 298. Solovyov and Maritain are of the same mind in so many places. See Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern world, and a Letter on Independence, rev. ed., trans. Otto Bird (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).
23 “Grace does not destroy nature, but completes it” (Summa Theologiae I,1,8 ad obj. 2; translation mine).
24 Solovyov, “Idea of the Christian State,” 186.
historical revelation of the incarnate Son of God, and in all that directly follows from His Incarnation the grace of the sacraments, the Church as holy and sanctifying, as the real and mystical body of Christ.” 25
Christ came into the world in time and established the world in time; these He did in uniting Himself to humanity. Therefore, it is the human task to bring about the kingdom of God in some capacity. 26 To accomplish this, Solovyov proposes in The Christian State a “social trinity” of Church, State, and society. 27 These are both divine and human and are modeled after the threefold office of Christ. The Church is divine in origin and manifests the priestly office of Christ; there is the State, human in origin, which represents the royal office of Christ; and, last of all, there is the prophetic office, manifested in society, which involves the cohabitation and intermingling of the divine and human, an ideal not yet realized.
Solovyov goes on to articulate a kind of republican monarchy, where the Church enjoys a privileged position (he calls the system a theocracy) but has no right to punish anyone for purely spiritual crimes. This is instead the State’s job, though punishment is to be purely medicinal. 28 Solovyov goes on to anticipate much of the Roman Church’s contemporary teachings on political issues as articulated in Gaudium et Spes.
Tolstoy vs. Solovyov
Tolstoy and Solovyov should be conceived of as two opposite poles of the Russian personalists because Tolstoy receives Christ as an idea while Solovyov receives Christ as a person. Tolstoy admires the law of love, while Solovyov believes that love became incarnate in man such that now man has been deified and is uniquely worthy of love. In every other place, we can see Solovyov’s admiration for Tolstoy: Tolstoy conceived of something very true in the law of love being lost after the Constantinian fall of Christianity; Solovyov understood this same period to be one, generally, of a Christianized paganism, 29 in all
25 Ibid., 187.
26 Ibid., 183.
27 Ibid., 188.
28 Ibid., 190.
29 Solovyov, “The Collapse of the Medieval World-Conception,” in Frank arr., A Solovyov Anthology, 60.
truth missing Christianity in the worst places. Both were prophets. 30 They both were affronted by the violence and schism in the Church. The difference, of course, is that one maintained faith and the other didn’t. And we see this in their political philosophy, for Solovyov sees the Catholic Church as the solution to disunity in humanity, while Tolstoy imagines the dissolution of governments, not the Christianization of governments, as the solution. What is good in Christian dogma, to Tolstoy, is boiled down to the law of love. For Solovyov, the Christian dogmas the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, Iconodulia are the only philosophical backing for the law of love, and the source from which governments can be transcended. The Trinity professes the eternal communal nature of humanity, one which is global, and therefore should not be constrained by Tolstoy’s anarchism. The Incarnation professes the possibility of deification and the dignity of all persons. Iconodulia, as we shall see in Skobtsova, is the natural and holy response of the Christian to human persons. These have preeminence compared to any kind of imperial theologizing of the medieval age.
What is most ironic is that while Tolstoy’s entire project was against the Constantinian symphonia, he never realized that he had already ceded the only ground to it that it needed. This is the idea that man can create Heaven on earth, not in a prophetic ideal realized only in the Church as in Solovyov, but by human beings alone. This is required for a State to take such authority for itself that it does not need to be spiritualized and subordinated to the Church, as did the tsars.
The Economic Alternative
Bulgakov was once a Marxist economist, so there is a period in his life when he is a Christian but still a layman when such questions still engage him. One distinction he makes is between two extremes, hedonism and asceticism: “Hedonism seeks to deliver up the spirit into the bondage of matter, [and] asceticism strives for its complete liberation from matter.” 31 The argument here is that denying either the
30 Tolstoy declared the necessity of the new age governed by the law of love, and Tolstoy’s absolute pacifism inspired Gandhi, who of course inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. Solovyov demanded that the tsar forgive his father’s murderer. See Richard Hare, “East Moves West: The Enigma of Vladimir Solovyov,” The Russian Review 17, no. 1 (1958): 32. https://doi.org/10.2307/125723.
31 Sergei Bulgakov, “The Economic Ideal,” Towards a Russian Political Theology, ed. Rowan Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 35.
human body or the spirit requires denying the person. He criticizes Tolstoy along these lines, writing that “the distinctive features of Buddhism the rejection of economics, material culture, history and social morality have been received in . . . for example, Tolstoy’s philosophy.” 32 Oddly enough, when Tolstoy denies, for various reasons, the economic, social, and political functions of the human person, he is denying the human person, at least in some sense. Though Tolstoy desires to elevate the person, he denies him instead. Though these realms are material in nature, they are meant to be spiritualized by the Christian:
“You cannot serve both God and mammon” this saying retains permanent significance. Whichever principle prevails in man, the ideal or the lower and carnal motivation, the latter must always come under the control of the spirit. 33 Our perfect model and mold is the person of Christ, whose human will is perfectly submitted and ordered to the divine will; in Christ, we have the ideal relationship between spirit and matter. This is the alternative symphony in the very will of the human person.
Icons
Father Bulgakov was Mother Maria Skobtsova’s spiritual director, and it is in Mother Maria that Bulgakov’s incarnational humanism takes its fullest shape. In On the Imitation of the Mother of God, Mother Maria warns against the duel temptations, one from a secular humanism which adopts Christian principles as if they come naturally out of such a secular humanism, and the other temptation from Christianity, which would have the human be a kind of distraction from the things of God. Both are evil, for “[t]he first of them destroys the idea of man, who is nothing if not the image of God, while the second destroys the idea of the Church, which is nothing if it does not imply the individual human being within it, as well as the whole of mankind.” 34 The Christian cannot reject either God or man; thus, it is through this kind of unique suffering that the Christian suffers with Jesus Christ in every human person. 35 This inaugurates Mother Maria’s view of monasticism. Like Solovyov, she believes in the calling to “be
32 Ibid, 37–38.
33 Ibid. 47.
34 Mother Maria Skobtsova, “On the Imitation of the Mother of God,” in Pevear and Volokhonsky, trans., Skobtsova: Essential Writings, 62.
35 Ibid., 67.
a monk in the world.” She ran a kind of poor house in Paris, where she would pick up all types of people in need to live with her community and to be served by her. She acknowledges that old monasticism behind walls has its positives, but she understands that the necessity of modernity, of an age losing Christianity, has brought the monk’s real vocation into the world. It is something like the idea that if the monk were to stay behind his walls, eventually he will come out to find that the world, because he was away, has gone to hell. 36 “Christ gave the whole world to the Church, and she has no right to renounce its spiritual edification and transformation.” 37
Finally, there is the great truth that persons are icons of God: “God became man so that man might become God.” If we take this seriously, we must see persons differently, for when we behold human beings, we remember our Lord, who Himself was most human. Though there is far more to be discussed, for now it is enough to say that these manifestations of Orthodoxy in Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Skobtsova find their root and lifeforce in the alternative symphony of God and man found in the person of Christ and demonstrated in the dogmas of the early church. Figures across Russian and Byzantine history have offered a subversive symphonia of Church and State, where the Church is inevitably made to be a function of the State. Solutions to this problem that do not come from the person of Christ, such as the anarchism offered by Leo Tolstoy, place the Church and State on the same playing field by treating them both as material institutions. This all constitutes a complete reversal of Christ’s person, in whom the human will was perfectly and autonomously human but subordinated to his divine will in total love and unity. All persons, therefore, ought to be treated as icons of this Christ, for humanity itself has been divinized in the person of the God-Man.
36 Mother Maria Skobtsova, “Towards a New Monasticism I,” in Pevear and Volokhonsky, trans., Skobtsova: Essential Writings, 94.
37 Ibid., 95.
A Sketch of the Virtuous Worldview Believer
Nathan Schmidt
There exist morally right beliefs and morally wrong beliefs. To take an example from Clifford, suppose that a shipowner influenced by greed convinces himself that his vessel is seaworthy when there is good reason to believe that she is not; as a result, he allows the ship to sail, risking the lives of those on board. As Clifford observes, the shipowner’s belief is immoral, regardless of whether the ship sinks or not; in other words, the problem is the shipowner’s wrong belief, not merely the catastrophic result of that belief. 1 If belief can be wrong, then there must be an “ethics of belief,” to quote the title of Clifford’s essay. What is the account of these ethics, and how can we apply that account to controversial religious, philosophical, and political beliefs? For brevity, I shall call these “worldview beliefs” and those who hold such beliefs “worldview believers.” (All fully developed human beings appear to be worldview believers; the term will nonetheless be convenient to use throughout this essay.) To use Aristotelian terms, then, the question is: what makes a worldview believer a virtuous worldview believer?
In this essay, I will attempt to sketch an account of a virtuous worldview believer. By “sketch” I mean that I will “indicate the truth roughly and in outline” about the subject matter, to use Aristotle’s language. 2 For, as we shall see, there is not much that precise philosophical demonstration can tell us about how to believe virtuously in matters of worldview, other than the trivial advice to “be prudent.” Therefore, I aim to develop here an account of virtuous worldview belief that is true only “roughly and in outline” but which also provides enough substance for prudent moral decision-making. My sketch of the virtuous worldview believer is, in brief: he believes
1 William Kingdon Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Lectures and Essays, vol. 2, ed. Leslie Stevens and Frederick Pollock (Macmillan and Co, 1879), 177–78
2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans W. D. Ross and J. O. Urmson, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1984), 1094b20.
whatever worldview beliefs can be demonstrated by philosophical wisdom, yet he also holds some worldview beliefs that do not admit of philosophical demonstration. He strives to detach from selfinterested motives that may cloud his judgment about both demonstrable and indemonstrable worldview beliefs. Nonetheless, since he cannot reliably judge for himself what self-interested motives he ought to correct, he listens for and trusts whatever worldview beliefs God reveals to him.
If belief can be morally right or wrong, then belief is in some sense a choice. As Amesbury points out, whether beliefs are chosen is controversial; for perhaps our beliefs follow naturally from our circumstances without any choice on our part. 3 Consider how the shipowner in Clifford’s example might have arrived at his wrong belief: he probably avoided looking closely at the condition of his ship. Perhaps he looked at logs from past voyages showing that the ship never ran into any trouble in the past. The shipowner’s exposure to this “evidence” will produce a belief about the seaworthiness of the ship without his directly willing to hold that belief. However, as Amesbury also observes, we can choose circumstances that lead to belief formation, so we are nonetheless morally responsible for the beliefs that arise from those circumstances. 4 The shipowner is responsible for whatever reasons for belief he chooses to look at or think about, and therefore his belief is a voluntary action. For the purposes of developing our sketch, then, it hardly matters whether beliefs can be chosen directly, or if beliefs are only chosen indirectly by choosing to look at certain evidence or other reasons to believe. In either case, beliefs are chosen, and we are concerned with how a virtuous person chooses beliefs in matters of worldview.
A virtuous person aims to believe in a worldview that is true. Now, for Aristotle, there are five intellectual virtues “by which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial”: craft, prudence, understanding, scientific knowledge, and wisdom. 5 Of these, craft has no bearing on our question, so we shall consider the last four.
Understanding, scientific knowledge, and wisdom deal with truths that cannot be otherwise; for understanding knows first principles, scientific knowledge knows what can be demonstrated from first
3 Richard Amesbury, “The Virtues of Belief: Toward a Non-Evidentialist Ethics of BeliefFormation,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 63, nos. 1–3, 2008: 30–31
4 Ibid., 31.
5 Nicomachean Ethics, 1139b15.
principles, and wisdom is scientific knowledge together with understanding. 6 Therefore, a virtuous believer understands first principles and believes whatever can be demonstrated from them. For example, if the existence of God and of a natural moral law can be known by philosophical wisdom, the virtuous man’s worldview incorporates those certain truths. However, though wisdom about truths that admit of demonstration is necessary for a virtuous worldview, it is not sufficient. For even if by philosophical wisdom someone can believe rightly about, for example, the existence of God and of a natural moral law, there are still many questions of worldview whose answers are not philosophically demonstrable: for example, whether Jesus really rose from the dead, or whether the government is controlled by a conspiracy, or whether our own nation is at fault for most of the world’s problems. Perhaps it is not necessary for a virtuous person to form a belief about the answer to these questions; however, in that case, surely a virtuous person will form a belief about whether he ought to form a belief on these three issues and others like them. Yet this belief about whether a belief should be formed is, itself, a worldview belief, and its truth or falsity cannot be known by relying solely on philosophical wisdom. Therefore, philosophical wisdom is necessary, but not sufficient, for virtuous worldview belief. Prudence is necessary also, although not in the way that we might assume at first glance. For prudence is “a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that that are good or bad for man.” 7 Therefore, it is obvious that prudence is necessary to form true worldview beliefs about what is good for example, whether it is good to worship only one God. However, some worldview beliefs, such as whether the government is controlled by a conspiracy, do not immediately concern what is good for man, and therefore prudence does not help a person know them directly. Rather, prudence is necessary to know whether holding a particular worldview belief is a good action. Now, a morally good act of believing is an act of believing something that the believer has good reason to believe this is a tautology, since “a good reason to believe” is whatever makes a belief morally good to believe. Further, “a good reason to believe” is always a reason to believe that the thing believed is true. For, as Amesbury notes, if I believe that I am entitled to believe that X is true, I must believe X as a matter of logical necessity: “Any doubts one might have
6 Ibid., 1139b20, b33; 1140b30–1141a2; 1141a18
7 Ibid., 1140b7.
about one’s own entitlement to a belief are ipso facto doubts about the belief itself.” 8 Therefore, we can conclude that a virtuous person believes worldview beliefs prudently, and only believes whatever he has good reason to believe.
Yet this conclusion tells us little that is useful unless we can sketch what prudent worldview formation looks like in practice. Therefore, let us attempt to do so, beginning with Clifford’s own account.
Clifford’s essay is most famous for the assertion that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” 9 Call this the “Clifford Thesis.” What, however, does he mean by “insufficient evidence?” For any proposition p, let the term “obligatory amount of evidence” or OAE refer to the amount of evidence for p that we have a moral obligation to obtain before believing p. Now the term “insufficient evidence” in the Clifford Thesis could be interpreted as “evidence that is less than the OAE.” In that case, then the Clifford Thesis will be tautologically true, for of course it will be “wrong always, everywhere and for anyone” to believe in p with evidence that is less than the OAE. Call this interpretation the “Tautological Clifford Thesis” or TCT. To put it in Aristotelian terms, believing on “insufficient” (in this sense) evidence is one of those actions like murder and adultery, the very names of which “already imply badness.” 10 However, tautologies do not help us develop our sketch, and they can be misleading. For what if, in certain circumstances and for certain propositions, the OAE is “no evidence”? In such cases, TCT remains true, for in these cases “no evidence” is not “insufficient evidence.” Hopefully, Clifford has a non-tautological sketch of the virtuous believer, and more particularly, the virtuous worldview believer; what is that sketch?
For Clifford, the virtuous man has built his worldview by subjecting traditional worldview beliefs to inquiry. By “traditional worldview beliefs” my term, not Clifford’s I mean, not any particular body of beliefs but rather whatever worldview beliefs a person has adopted, typically as a child, from the traditions of the surrounding culture. Most of the worldview beliefs held by most people are traditional worldview beliefs. Now the prudent person according to Clifford’s sketch tends to doubt traditional worldview
8 Amesbury, “The Virtues of Belief,” 33.
9 “The Ethics of Belief,” 186.
10 Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a10.
beliefs unless and until he has “tested” them and discovered a positive reason that justifies holding those beliefs apart from the weight of tradition. Thus, Clifford writes that belief “is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning.” 11 This “long experience and waiting toil” appears to be Clifford’s sketch of his term “sufficient evidence.” Meanwhile, the value of tradition, for Clifford, is not so much as a source of beliefs as a source of “questions”:
An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life. It is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?
We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; that the main purpose of the tradition itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things; that if we misuse it, and take it as a collection of cut-and-dried statements to be accepted without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, but, by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to cut off ourselves and our race from the human line. 12
Clifford’s words are eloquent, but they do not draw a convincing sketch of a virtuous worldview believer. While the prudent man is in the process of “testing” traditional worldview beliefs that is, before he has “established” those beliefs “by long experience and waiting toil” does he still hold those beliefs or not? If he holds the beliefs, then he is believing before they have been “established by long experience and waiting toil,” which Clifford said that the man would be wrong to do. Does the prudent man, then, not hold traditional worldview beliefs while he is “testing” them? Then, in Clifford own words quoted above, the man will not be able to “breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life,” for “we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which [these beliefs
11 “The Ethics of Belief,” 183.
12 Ibid., 198.
supply].” For those beliefs will not supply the necessary “forms and processes of thought” if the man does not hold those beliefs to be true. Clifford’s sketch is therefore incoherent.
Furthermore, as Amesbury observes, Clifford’s sketch of a virtuous believer reflects a “guilty-until-proven-innocent paradigm of entitlement [to holding beliefs].” 13 According to this paradigm, “we are obliged to refrain from holding [our] beliefs (or to give them up) unless we have adequate reasons for holding them.” 14 Of course, a problem of infinite regress will arise unless some beliefs are not doubted; therefore, according to this guilty-until-proven-innocent paradigm, we may assume as true only those beliefs “that are not susceptible to doubt.” 15 I observe that these “foundations” would be whatever truths are discerned by the virtue of understanding, as described earlier in my essay. However, as Amesbury further argues by drawing on Wittgenstein, we must in reality hold many beliefs as innocent until proven guilty; that is, we should not doubt them unless there is some positive reason to do so, even if the beliefs are in principle susceptible to doubt. 16 To use an example from Wittgenstein quoted by Amesbury, Wittgenstein may believe with certainty that his name is Ludwig Wittgenstein even though the proposition “I am Ludwig Wittgenstein” is not some self-evident first principle. 17 Certainly, some beliefs ought to be doubted until evidence is obtained; for example, the seaworthiness of the vessel in Clifford’s parable. However, the point stands that, contra Clifford, some beliefs are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and some are to be presumed guilty until proven innocent; and there appears to be no abstract system of universal “rules” that can tell a person questioning a belief which of the two rubrics he ought to place the belief under. Since there is no such system of “rules,” we cannot analyze worldview belief formation solely in terms of “duties.” This consideration underscores the importance of analyzing worldview belief formation in terms of virtues; Amesbury reaches the same conclusion. 18 Yet we still do not have a useful sketch of these virtues.
What is Amesbury’s sketch of a virtuous worldview believer, then? Although his analysis does not directly address worldview beliefs, he
13 Amesbury, “The Virtues of Belief,” 30.
14 Ibid., 29.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 28–30.
17 Ibid., 29.
18 Amesbury, “The Virtues of Belief,” 33–36.
does sketch some features of the virtuous believer in general. Amesbury suggests that “what the ship owner [in Clifford’s story] needs is not a rule about entitlement [to beliefs] but a deeper, more perspicacious self-understanding, a clear-sighted view of his own motives and interests and how they cloud his judgment.” 19 Unethical belief comes from character vices such as greed and laziness; for example, the shipowner’s financial interest in having the ship sail motivates his unethical belief in the seaworthiness of his vessel. As practical advice to counteract the vice of self-deception, Amesbury urges dialogue with others, for “others may be able to detect flaws in our thinking that we are unaware of.” 20 Amesbury predicts that, if a person develops greater self-awareness and eliminates the character vices that make self-deception tempting, then “belief will fix itself” with little help from epistemic “rules.” 21
Amesbury’s sketch of the virtuous believer seems to capture well how virtuous people form beliefs about relatively mundane issues, such as whether a ship is seaworthy. How can his account be applied to the virtuous formation of worldview beliefs?
A virtuous worldview believer considers his own motives for believing the worldview. I suggest that two common motivations for holding a worldview are desires for physical comfort and for acceptance by a group. For example, if the worldview believer is an atheist, perhaps his atheism helps him justify his intemperate sexual behavior because he can dismiss religious traditions that tell him that sexual activity is for marriage. If he is a Christian, perhaps his Christianity assures him of acceptance by a church community with whom he shares a strong emotional bond. In both these cases, the believer ought to detach from the motives that tend to cloud his judgment. The atheist in the first example should look to simpler pleasures. The case of the Christian in the second example is harder, for no one should simply shun acceptance by those with whom he shares a strong emotional bond. Still, on the terms of his own Christian worldview, he should know that he ought to detach from any attachment to human respect. He should ask himself if he is willing to be disliked by his local church community, if he knows that he should speak out against some transgression against Christian principles within that community. This type of detachment can only
19 Ibid., 35.
20 Ibid., 36.
21 Ibid.
lead to greater confidence in one’s worldview beliefs, if indeed those worldview beliefs are true.
Note, however, that a worldview believer need not suspend judgment on worldview beliefs until this detachment is attained. As I discussed when dismissing Clifford’s sketch, to abide by a “rule” of suspending judgment on worldview beliefs is impossible and this remains the case whether judgment is suspended pending “evidence” or pending detachment. If a man does virtuously change his worldview beliefs, it will be after greater self-understanding and detachment are attained, allowing a more objective evaluation of the evidence or whatever other reasons for belief exist.
A problem remains: worldview beliefs influence our ability to identify our own vices, and yet our vices drag down our worldview beliefs. For example, I hold the worldview belief that I can get good moral advice from priests, and this worldview belief influences what changes in my character I attempt to make, which may in turn affect how strongly I identify with the Catholic faith and the level of trust that I put in priests. If it is not in fact the case that I can get good moral advice from priests, it may be impossible for me to reject that belief. Any worldview believer could give analogous examples from his own experience.
Now, if this cycle of worldview beliefs and moral character is vicious, some sort of outside influence is necessary to break it. Sometimes other human beings can break the cycle; hence the importance of dialogue, as Amesbury says. However, my most likely dialogue partners probably share my worldview beliefs. Even if they do not, they may be stuck in their own cycles of vicious habits and vicious worldview beliefs. In fact, the entire human race may be stuck in such vicious cycles. No one will find this possibility too implausible if he considers that, regardless of his worldview beliefs, the overwhelming majority of human beings do not share those worldview beliefs.
If the entire human race is in fact stuck in various vicious worldview belief cycles, then in order to break out of these cycles, some dialogue partner more reliable than man is necessary. Yet the only completely reliable dialogue partner is God, who is the Truth; this fact admits of a scientific demonstration, although I do not have the space to recapitulate the argument here. 22 Therefore, the virtuous
22 See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 5.
worldview believer strives to be in dialogue with God. In other words, the virtuous man listens attentively for whatever God should be pleased to reveal. Let this conclude our philosophical sketch of the virtuous worldview believer, for we have sketched as much as is possible without the help of revealed truth.
The History of the Dogma of the Holy Spirit
Jeremy Belk
The theology of the third Person of the Holy Trinity is primarily founded upon the Scriptures and expounded by her Fathers and Doctors. The Holy Spirit’s life-giving action penetrates all of human history, from creation to the Incarnation to the end times, the life of the Church, and from the beginning to the end of the spiritual life of the Christian. In this essay, I will demonstrate the history of the dogma of the Holy Spirit as rooted in the Scriptures, developed through the centuries of the tradition of the Church, and expressed in the liturgical life of the Church.
Any treatment of the dogma of the Holy Spirit must begin with a chronological approach to the Holy Spirit’s presence in the Old and New Testaments. In the Pentateuch, the Spirit is active in creation, endows craftsmen with skill in building the tabernacle in Exodus, and works through the elders and prophets in Numbers. 1 The Spirit has a threefold agency in the Pentateuch: in creation, preparing the empty world for its construction; in judgment, for God’s judgment of humanity; and in revelation through Israel’s leaders and the prophets, especially “Joseph the patriarch, Moses the lawgiver, the seventy elders and tribal leaders, and even Gentile prophets.” 2
In the historical Books of the Old Testament, the Spirit fills Joshua with wisdom, works miracles through him as he leads the Israelites, and “conveys God’s power to deliver his people Israel from other nations.” 3 In Samuel, the Spirit designates and empowers the various leaders appointed by God over Israel. 4 In the rest of the historical books, the Spirit is particularly active in conveying Yahweh’s words to his people, especially through Elijah and Elisha. These books
1 Gregg R. Allison and Andreas J. Köstenberger, The Holy Spirit, Theology for the People of God (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 10–11.
2 Ibid., 15.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Ibid., 21.
further reveal the involvement of the Spirit with the history of Israel and their leaders. 5
In the Prophetic Books, Isaiah wrote of the Spirit’s activity in the “messianic Branch from Jesse” and the Servant of Yahweh, “in conjunction with the end-time restoration of God’s created order following a new exodus.” 6 Ezekiel highlights the following three notions: the Spirit gives “a new heart and new S/spirit to his people,” works in Israel’s restoration, and grants the people to enjoy His gifts. 7 Overall, the Old Testament contributes two important characteristics of the Holy Spirit: the Spirit acts powerfully through the creative Word and inspires the prophets.
Turning to the New Testament, the Spirit is referred to most properly as the Spirit of God, but not explicitly as a Person of the Trinity. At the same time, the work of the Spirit coincides with that of the Son and the Father. In the Gospels, the Holy Spirit works through numerous key figures, including John the Baptist, Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, and Simeon. 8 At His baptism, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus, who possesses the Spirit “to an unlimited degree,” and the new baptism through Christ will be done with the Holy Spirit and fire. 9 At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fills the apostles as well as all those who call on the Lord; thus, all believers will possess the Spirit. The giving of the Holy Spirit is also critically important for the future of the Church in the evangelizing mission of the disciples. 10 This missionary Spirit strengthens numerous figures in the book of Acts, especially in their outreach to the Gentiles. 11
In addition to the Gospels, St. Paul presents one of the richest treatments of the Holy Spirit in the tradition of the Church. In Galatians, Paul highlights the inclusion of the Gentiles through their reception of the Holy Spirit, which establishes their filiation and inheritance with God. 12 In the Thessalonian letters, the Spirit is active not just in conversion through baptism, but also in the ongoing sanctification of Christians’ lives. The unity brought by the indwelling of the Spirit and His imparting of spiritual gifts is highlighted in
5 Ibid., 26.
6 Ibid., 33.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 53.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 61.
11 Ibid., 88–92.
12 Ibid., 113.
Corinthians. 13 Paul powerfully emphasizes in Romans the importance of the Spirit’s role in the Resurrection and in the love of God in men’s hearts. 14 In sum, for Paul, the Holy Spirit partakes in salvation history, sanctifies and dwells in man through a new life, and plays a role in the Church’s life, fellowship, and worship. In sum, the New Testament reveals that the Holy Spirit played an indispensable role in the Incarnation, in Jesus’ earthly ministry, and in the mission and life of the Church.
Sacred Scripture served as the foundation for the treatments of the Holy Spirit for the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, particularly St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Augustine. St. Maximus frames his consideration of the Holy Spirit through a “unitarian cosmological vision,” where the history of the world is divided by the Incarnation, with one half concerned with the preparation for the Word and the subsequent half with the mystery of the divinization of man. 15 Maximus was one of the early proponents of the Holy Spirit’s role in creation and the preparation for Christ, which through the Incarnation progressively became the Spirit of Christ. 16 Saints Basil and Gregory laid the groundwork for Maximus’ consideration of creation as a Trinitarian work: the divine actions belong to the divine essence without any other distinction. 17 Since the divinity of the Holy Spirit had been established by his masters, Maximus was concerned with establishing the Holy Spirit’s role in creation, such that “the Father gives the origin, the essence; the Son the difference; and the Spirit, life.”
18
Another aspect highlighted by Maximus was the Spirit’s role in the life of Christ. The whole Trinity is active in the Incarnation, in that the Father wills His loving plan, the Son in His own work of taking on flesh, and the Spirit by His cooperation. 19 Maximus was profoundly aware of the intimate and inseparable link between the theology and economy of the Trinity, “between the mystery of the trinitarian God
13 Ibid., 131.
14 Ibid., 149.
15 Luis Granados, “The Action of the Holy Spirit in Christ, according to Saint Maximus the Confessor,” in A Saint for East and West: Maximus the Confessor’s Contribution to Eastern and Western Theology (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2019), 115–33.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
and the mystery of the Incarnation and redemption.” 20 Following the Incarnation, Jesus Christ extends His possession of the Spirit to all believers through baptism as a new adoption in the Spirit. 21
This extension of the Spirit to all believers necessitates the Spirit’s involvement in the Body of Christ, in the divinization of man. It was in all aspects of Christ’s humanity that the Spirit “learned to dwell in humankind and divinize them.” 22 Pentecost marked the beginning of the Spirit’s action in the body of Christ, who, possessing the Spirit by His very nature, gave the Spirit to the Church with all His operations. Thus, it is through the Church that the Spirit “works now in our flesh according to the image of Christ.” 23
A final consideration of Maximus is the Spirit’s comprehension of the Father’s relationship to the Son. The Spirit has His origin in the Father primarily, but because the Father is eternally the Father of the Son, the Spirit comprehends that relationship through His relationship to the Father. The Spirit comes forth from the Father in such a way that the eternal relationship to the Son is not excluded. 24 Thus, the relationship between the Spirit and the Son is the Spirit’s procession through the Son, for as the mind (the Father) causes the mental Word (the Son), so does He cause the Spirit through the Word. 25
St. Augustine of Hippo contributes to this discussion of the relations among the Persons of the Trinity by explaining the two processions from the two powers of God, intellect and will: the Processions of the Mental Word and of Love. The Procession of Mental Word consists, in brief, of God so perfectly thinking Himself that the Word that is formed from His self-reflection possesses the fullness of God, and is therefore also God, but a distinct Person, eternally known. What He is and what He does are the same in God because He is pure Act, so this knowing is not bound by time, but a knower, knowledge, and one known can be identified. The procession of the Spirit, of Love, flows from the eternal self-gift of the Father and the Son. Love is not begotten but meant to unite the begetter and the
20 A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 73–86.
21 Granados, “Action of the Holy Spirit.”
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Siecienski, The Filioque
25 Ibid.
begotten. 26 The Person of the Spirit is distinguished from the Father and Son by the relation of origin: the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the relation between the Father and Son. This treatment by Augustine is deepened by St. Thomas Aquinas many centuries later.
Although these Fathers of the East and West contributed much to the development of the Church’s teaching on the Holy Spirit, the Church was primarily occupied with heresies concerning the Father and the Son for the first few centuries of her existence. In fact, “heresies entered more largely than Catholic Christianity into the Spirit’s relation to the Father and the Son” during this time. 27
The heresies of Sabellianism and Arianism in particular shaped the Church’s teaching on the Trinity. Sabellianism, which asserted that God presents Himself under the three modes or names of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, caused the early Church Fathers and Doctors to focus on the distinctness and unity of the three Persons of the Trinity, with Tertullian introducing the language of personhood. 28 Arius falls to another extreme by rejecting the Son as unbegotten, for God alone, he reasoned, is unbegotten and eternal. Being begotten seemed to imply material change in God for Arius, which was unimaginable. 29 The Son can therefore only be a creature of God, who becomes Father by begetting the Son. This was condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325. St. Athanasius combatted heresies against the Holy Spirit that denied His divinity, claiming the Spirit as another substance or angel. 30 Athanasius turned to the Scriptures to assert the Spirit’s divinity as a divinizing reality, which only God could be.
The first attempt to relate the Holy Spirit’s relation with the Son to that of the Son with the Father was by St. Ignatius of Antioch, who, as Athanasius did after him, drew upon the writings of St. Paul and the Gospel of John to assert that the Holy Spirit “is the rope which, attached to the Cross of Jesus Christ, lifts up the soul to its place in the Building of God.” 31 St. Athanasius would later use this principle
26 Gilles Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 137.
27 Henry Barclay Swete, On the History of the Doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit: From the Apostolic Age to the Death of Charlemagne (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1876), 10.
28 Emery, The Trinity, 60–61.
29 Ibid., 62.
30 Ibid., 64.
31 Swete, Doctrine and Procession of the Holy Spirit, 15.
to say that denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit leads to denying the Son’s.
32
The early Apologists, such as St. Justin, were concerned with the first procession of the Son from the Father, with little mention of the Spirit. 33 St. Theophilus distinguished between the processions of the Word and Wisdom of God from the Heart of God “as analogous and coincident but distinct. 34 The Fathers drew upon these early considerations to form more precise language about the processions of the Word and the Love of God as in order yet timeless, with the Spirit proceeding from the Father primarily and the Son, who is eternally generated by the Father.
While on the individual level many were contributing to the debates over heresies, the Church herself began to infallibly set forth her teachings in her creeds. In the Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, the Spirit is given three titles: “Holy, Lord, and Lifegiving.” 35 The Spirit is Holy because of His sanctifying action, for the Father and Son sanctify through the Spirit. The Spirit is Lord because He is God with the Father and Son, that is, not an instrument or creature but God by nature. The Spirit is Life-giver because His sanctifying work of grace, which communicates the very life of God, is a profession of His divinity. 36 This marks a critical point in the development of the dogma of the Holy Spirit, which will be further developed and assimilated by Aquinas many centuries later.
St. Thomas expands the treatment of the Holy Spirit, and three forms of such expansion will be explored here: the Spirit’s involvement in the Incarnation, in Jesus’ baptism, and in the sanctification of the Christian. The Incarnation was effected by the whole Trinity, but it is properly attributed to the Holy Spirit as the fitting cause, on the part of God and of the nature assumed, and by the term of Incarnation. Since the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and Son, it is most fitting that the Incarnation be attributed to the Spirit because “the Son of God took to Himself flesh from the Virgin’s womb . . . due to the exceeding love of God.” 37 This flesh, human nature, was assumed by the Son of God into the unity of the
32 Emery, The Trinity, 65.
33 Swete, Doctrine and Procession of the Holy Spirit, 21.
34 Ibid., 24.
35 Emery, The Trinity, 74.
36 Ibid., 75.
37 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, accessed via “Summa Theologiae,” New Advent (Kevin Knight, 2017), www.newadvent.org/summa, IIIa, q. 32, a. 1, corp.
Person through grace alone, which is attributed to the Holy Spirit. 38 Lastly, the term of Incarnation includes that “that man, who was being conceived, should be the Holy one and the Son of God.” 39 Just as by the Holy Spirit men are adopted sons of God through grace, so too was Jesus conceived in sanctity by the Spirit as the only natural Son of God. The Holy Spirit’s involvement in the Incarnation reveals how intimately He is involved in the lives of Christians. If it was through the powerful grace of the Holy Spirit that the Son of God took on flesh, how deeply does the divinizing grace of the Spirit touch the nature of man?
Another aspect of the Spirit that Aquinas explicates is the Spirit’s descent in the form of a dove at Christ’s baptism. According to Matthew 3:11, the One to come will baptize in the Holy Spirit and fire, and all who are baptized are so with the baptism of Christ. Therefore, it was fitting that the Holy Spirit should descend upon Him at His baptism. Jesus was never without the Holy Spirit, but He wished to foreshadow His body, the Church, at His baptism because the baptized receive the same Spirit in an adoptive manner. 40
Finally, the Christian cannot perform meritorious works apart from the grace of the Holy Spirit. Aquinas considers the meritorious work of man in two respects: free will and the grace of the Holy Spirit. In the first respect, man cannot merit anything of God because of the great inequality between his finite human acts and the divine life of God. In the second respect, the Holy Spirit moves the soul to meritorious acts by grace toward life everlasting, so the merit of the soul depends on the power of the movement of the Spirit. 41
The action of the Holy Spirit is ongoing in the sanctification of the Christian by the sacraments and meritorious good works. In the beginning, the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters of creation, and in like manner He descended upon Christ at His baptism “as a prelude of the new creation.” 42 At Pentecost, St. Peter proclaimed that those who repent and are baptized will be forgiven of their sins and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 43 The Sonship of Christ is extended to all by adoption through baptism, making us members of Christ’s body,
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., IIIa, q. 39, a. 6, ad obj. 1.
41 Ibid., I–II.114.3c.
42 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1224, Libreria Editric Vaticana, Nov 4, 2003, accessed via https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM
43 Ibid., no. 1226.
coheirs of the kingdom of God, and temples of the Holy Spirit. 44 The Spirit was involved in the whole life of Christ, and this fullness of the Spirit is communicated to all through Christ’s outpouring of the Spirit. 45 The life of grace in the Spirit is communicated particularly through the liturgical life of the Church. “The work of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy, by sanctifying us, seals us in the loving relationship of the Trinity which is at the heart of the Church. It is the Holy Spirit who inspires faith and brings about our co-operation. It is that genuine co-operation, expressive of our desire for God, that makes the liturgy a common work between the Trinity and the Church.” 46
In conclusion, the Holy Spirit is the Life-Giver, the One through Whom the world was created, the Son of God made flesh, and the Christian sanctified. Marked by a history of heresy and neglect, the dogma of the Holy Spirit is indispensable to the flourishing and salvation of all men. This Love that proceeds from the Father and the Son is intimately united to our goodness and final end, which we merit only by the grace of the Spirit.
44 Ibid., no. 1265.
45 Ibid., nos. 1286–87.
46 Paul Gunter, OSB, “The Liturgy, Work of the Trinity/3: God the Holy Spirit, CCC 1091–1109,” ZENIT Daily Dispatch, accessed March 24, 2025, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/liturgy-work-of-the-trinity3-god-the-holy-spirit5004.
Brueggemann on Prophetic Initiative
Joseph Carlson
Walter Brueggemann correctly identifies Moses as the prophetic archetype 1 and characterizes prophetic action as offering a kind of geopolitical freedom to those under the yoke of imperial regimes.
This is in fact inherent to the first prophetic criticism, whereby the Hebrews must be saved from Egypt’s yoke by coming to know the freedom of God. 2 His discussion, however, is about prophetic consciousness, which is timeless, even until this age. In his history of this prophetic imagination, there is a kind of Hegelian thesis and antithesis, whereby the role of the prophet is to curse the old regime (in the sense of the Exodus plagues) 3 through criticism, from which he energizes a new thesis centered on a “politics of justice and compassion.” 4 The simple reality of the freedom of God condemns the old static religion and offers an alternative consciousness. To Brueggemann, the monarchy, partially in David’s but certainly by Solomon’s reign, represents the new Pharaoh. 5 He suggests that the lack of prophetic action in Solomon’s reign implies the total wresting of religion from prophetic consciousness by the static religion of monarchy (though he neglects, perhaps intentionally, Nathan’s and Samuel’s roles in the construction of the temple and the Davidic dynasty). Isaiah, especially, is a type of energizer, one who can redefine a dead royal-consciousness by offering old/new symbols and kindling hope amid despair. 6
In Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann makes two critical errors. The first is that he does not seek to prove his view of history but instead takes it on faith. Inevitably, it is difficult for any reader who might disagree on a point to engage with him. The book is a collection
1 Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 18.
2 Ibid., 16–17.
3 Ibid., 22.
4 Ibid., 6–7, 19.
5 Ibid., 31–32.
6 Ibid., 14, 34, 66.
of reflections and opinions. This is the genre in which he is writing, of course, but for that reason it cannot be called properly academic. So, while his characterizations of Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah are deadon, his view of Solomon is just a claim. His only source for this claim is the Deuteronomistic historian’s criticisms of the monarchy (though Brueggemann makes no mention of this; it is just implied for his academic audience), which neglects all the sources that look positively on the Davidic dynasty as a covenant.
The second error is in his paradigm of history. It is rather unJewish. The Israelites, in their texts, in their religion, in their very origins, believe in their history as one of divine action. The prophets are representatives of God, who is taking the initiative to inaugurate His covenant, or to remind an Israel that has forgotten the covenant, by either their sin or despair, that God remains their God, that his love is abiding and everlasting for them, and that he will always take the initiative to bring them back to himself. Brueggemann does not mention covenants. His thesis, that all prophetic action consists in criticizing and energizing in offering an alternative consciousness to an Egyptian one, translates well into this covenantal language, but on his own he makes no mention of the covenantal theology of the Israelites.
Hopeful Imagination better maintains the Jewish understanding of God as primary actor, particularly in its treatment of Ezekiel. Looking at the “freedom of God,” which is so central to Brueggemann’s analysis in Prophetic Imagination, in light of his later analysis of Ezekiel in Hopeful Imagination, we realize that by “the freedom of God” he means something like God being primary actor; He is, as Ezekiel declares, faithful “for the sake of his own name” (Ezekiel 36:22). 7
There are two major objects of prophetic criticism, united in their essence but different in their accidents. These exist in every prophetic book, though different prophets have different emphases. The first, as we will examine in the prophet Amos, is crime against neighbor, especially in socioeconomic life and in acts of wanton self-indulgence, including sins of both lust and gluttony. The second, as we will examine in the prophet Ezekiel, is idolatry, in geopolitics and in the occult, with its blasphemy, child sacrifice, and cult prostitutes. For the prophets, these two objects are the same, and both represent idolatry by Israel in Brueggemann’s language, an Israel still under the yoke
of Egypt. In these cases, the prophet’s goal is to remind Israel of the covenant by criticizing their sin.
There is one major motive in prophetic energizing, which Brueggemann calls the “revival of old symbols.” 8 If criticizing is looking at Israel from the point of view of the Mosaic covenant, energizing is looking at God from the point of view of the covenant. Energizing finds its roots in the call narratives of the Old Testament, which always contain theophanies (revelations of God’s nature), which inevitably require some participation in divine action by Israel and the prophet. We shall survey this in Ezekiel and in Second Isaiah.
Both criticizing and energizing are prophetic actions because they are, first of all, divine actions. When the prophet speaks, God speaks. When the prophet reveals the “freedom of God,” 9 he is revealing the freedom of belonging totally to God, of being set apart, of being loved with God’s whole self. In the old covenant (as opposed to the new covenant established by Christ), there are always physical signs of internal realities; the geopolitical slavery of Israel is first of all slavery to sin. God criticizes this regime of sin over His people because He loves them, and He desires their freedom. God energizes His people with reminders of His faithfulness because He loves them.
Amos’s criticism of the Northern Kingdom is summed up in the climactic close of his oracles against the nations (Amos 2:4–8): “Thus says the LORD: For three crimes of Israel, and now four, I will not take it back” (2:6). The prophet is pronouncing God’s charge against His people, using a typical Near Eastern figure of speech (three, now four, etc.). 10 “Because they hand over the just for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; They trample the heads of the destitute into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way” (2:7a). Oppression of the poor is the prophet’s gravest criticism. “Son and father sleep with the same girl, profaning my holy name. Upon garments taken in pledge they recline beside any altar. Wine at treasury expense they drink in their temples” (2:7b, 8). Oppression of the poor is seldom separated from idolatry, sexual debauchery, and drunkenness in prophetic criticism; they have their same source in the fundamental self-seeking characteristic of sin.
8 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 66.
9 Ibid., 16.
10 “The slight variation in number (three and four) is an example of parallelism applied to numbers. The poetic technique is attested even outside the Bible.” Donald Senior, John Collins, and Mary Ann Getty, eds., The Catholic Study Bible, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 877, n. on Prov. 30:15–16.
Though it seems that God’s revelation to Amos may simply be that He is upset over immoralities, there is a theophany here, too. The divine name is repeated over and over again, and David Fleming argues that “The name alone requires a special manifestation of Yahweh.” 11 In Amos, Yahweh is powerful, and willing to bring on every curse promised to Israel in Deuteronomy 30 should they break the covenant (Amos 5:18). This runs counter to the Israelites’ view of God, since the very nature of their actions seems to suppose a God who does not care, or is not able to react. Amos sets out to prove this image false.
In Ezekiel, says Brueggemann, there are the same criticisms as in Amos:
1. A warning about idolatry (18:6a)
2. A warning on sexual and martial responsibility (18:6b)
3. A warning on economic responsibility (18:7-8a). 12
From Brueggemann, we may say that the “twofold agendas” of Ezekiel are to criticize “sexual morality and economic justice” as “rooted in the issue of idolatry.” 13
The duel narratives of God’s departure from the temple (Ezekiel 8–10) and God’s raising, rejecting, and taking back of Judah, His harlot wife (Ezekiel 16), demonstrate God’s freedom, God’s immanent otherness, where “God is so utterly holy as to be mostly unapproachable.” 14 Thus Ezekiel does not represent the kind of disputing with God which Moses and Jeremiah engage in. 15 There is a deep bringing low of Israel before the Lord in Ezekiel; Ezekiel makes clear that Judah has never been so undeserving of God’s mercy in their whole history. There is maintained a call to repentance (Ezekiel 14:6), but as Brueggemann so accurately puts it, the point of the text is for Judah “to relinquish the old city which is now gone” (Ezekiel 1–24) and “to receive the newness of God” (Ezekiel 33–48). 16
It is only after Judah has been laid low that God invites them to restoration. He makes a promise to Judah, the same promise of the same covenant. Whereas in Amos and in the first half of Ezekiel, God demonstrated that he would take the covenant in Deuteronomy
11 Daniel E. Fleming, “The Day of Yahweh in the Book of Amos: A Rhetorical Response to Ritual Expectation,” Revue Biblique 117, no. 1 (2010): 20–38.
12 Bruggemann, Hopeful Imagination, 56.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 53.
15 Ibid., 51, 53.
16 Ibid., 52.
seriously (Deuteronomy 30) in bringing on all the curses promised to Israel should they disregard the covenant, now, in the latter half of Ezekiel, God declares that He will remain faithful to the covenant even as Israel has not been faithful. Thus, there are the great “I will” statements, maintaining God as primary actor: I will take you/ I will gather/ I will bring you/ I will sprinkle clean water/ I will give a new heart/ I will put a new spirit/ I will take out the heart of stone/ I will give a heart of flesh/ I will put my spirit in you/ I will summon grain/ I will make increase. 17
God does not declare this because of His great “pathos” 18 but rather because it is His nature, and because He “has no other arena in which to show the nations his positive sovereignty” 19 besides Israel. Brueggeman is faithful to Ezekiel and argues that newness is made possible only by God’s holiness, which God gives to Judah in manifesting even greater power in resurrecting Judah than in destroying her. Hence the dry bones; God has slain, and God has given new life to those he has slain (Ezekiel 37).
Brueggemann does well in showing that, to the prophets, hope is found in holiness and in the very nature of God. This is the nature of prophetic energizing. Second Isaiah is capable of offering genuine hope to Israel because of “the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom.” 20 Particularly important to prophetic energizing is the use of images. There is truth to his line, “when the new king rules, it is new song time” (Isaiah 42:10). 21 New songs are important because, in exile, the old songs are soured by mockers (Psalm 137:3). Songs reflect hope in the covenant, so Isaiah offers new songs for the new covenant entailed already in Ezekiel. The second image Isaiah offers is “birth to the barren one (Isaiah 56:3–5).” 22 We see this image taken up all across the Old Testament and in Luke. The third image is of “nourishment,” famously in the opening of Isaiah 55: “I will make with you an everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 53:3). 23 Last of all, prophetic energizing, unsurprisingly, entails speaking to a people who are fatigued: “they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah
17 Ibid., 78.
18 Ibid
19 Ibid
20 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 70.
21 Ibid., 75.
22 Ibid., 76.
23 Ibid.
40:30–31). These are old symbols the covenant has always been sung (Exodus 15:1–19). Abraham, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel were all barren at first; and it was always the land that would be “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8). The old symbols required new life, since the old promise, as it stood, seemed to have ended in failure. One of the prophet’s roles is to give Judah hope in the same Yahweh, by resurrecting the people’s “poetic imagination.” 24 This poetry “is not simply code for political events” 25 but rather, to hark back to our theme of God’s being the primary actor, comes from outside the system. Israel’s hope comes from the Israelites’ special relationship with God, and this relationship is tuned into by the prophets. It is not the inevitable result of Babylonian captivity.
Through it all, there is a primacy of the call narrative, of theophany, in all prophetic experience. If, as Brueggemann says, Moses is the prophetic archetype, and all prophetic action is cast in his mold, we might say that Exodus 3:1–12, God’s simultaneous apparition to Moses, revelation of His nature, and inviting of Moses to participate in His nature and mission, make up the seminal structure of prophetic revelation in the Old Testament. 26 Ezekiel and first Isaiah both have call narratives in which they are caught up in God’s presence in the Holy of Holies. Through each prophet, God says again, “Be holy, for I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), echoing Exodus 19:6, where God, in revealing Himself to the Hebrew people, asked them to become new, to become like Him. It is not only when God criticizes the Israelites’ immoralities and idolatry that He is inviting them to be holy as He is holy, but also when He gives them hope to be children of the promise. The hope He offers is to have a participation in His fidelity; hope is the virtue that knows who God is and that He is always faithful. This is prophetic energizing.
Brueggemann’s treatment of the prophets in Prophetic Imagination and Hopeful Imagination are different. Though they both value the freedom of God, the first is far more of a social critique than the second. One might say that Brueggemann is trying to use the prophetic imagination himself, but there is something lost when the prophets, and therefore God, are reduced to social forces. Rather, he harks back to the covenant more often in his later work, and thus the
24 Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination, 96.
25 Ibid.
26 John I. Durham, Exodus, Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2014), 30.
two works act as a kind of counterbalance. The prophets criticize and energize their people because of who God is. They invite them to remember the covenant, whether that means correctly subversive behavior or remembering who God is and trusting in Him.
An Authentic Being-Toward-Death: Heidegger,
Terror Management Theory, and Death Anxiety
Owen Eby
The work of the German phenomenologist and ontologist Martin Heidegger towers over twentieth-century continental philosophy and exerted a considerable influence on existential thought via the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Jaspers. Marred by his affiliation with the Nazi party and targeted for his incomprehensible writing style by analytics, his work nonetheless contains observations about the human condition that remain highly relevant. Heidegger’s thinking concerning the concept of death, including the notion of the condition he calls being-toward-death, is particularly conducive to analysis alongside later psychological traditions that study the relation of individuals to their own demise. The Heideggerian notion of being-toward-death and suppressed anxiety concerning our ultimate demise is corroborated by contemporary psychological approaches, particularly terror management theory, which provides empirical evidence for unconscious death anxiety.
Analysis of Heideggerian thought concerning death requires a brief exposition of Heidegger’s project in general. Heidegger’s greatest work, Being and Time, is concerned principally with the meaning of Being. In phenomenological fashion he reverses past philosophical systems, creating one where it is “everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is the most ‘ontological.’” 1 In Heidegger’s philosophy, “[u]sefulness comes before contemplation”; he privileges “Being-in-the-world and Being-withothers before Being-alone.” 2 Heidegger designates the type of Being that human beings are as “Dasein,” which translates roughly as “being-
1 Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York City: Other Press, 2016), 65.
2 Ibid.
there” and denotes a being that is concerned with Being. Heidegger takes this kind of being as his starting point, with his project consisting of an analysis of the being of Dasein in order to understand the meaning of Being.
Heidegger identifies Dasein as always being constituted by a sort of being ahead of itself: “‘As long as it is,’ up until its end, it is related to its potentiality-of-being.” 3 As such, death, “The transition to nolonger-being-there,” lifts Dasein “right out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced.” 4 Dasein can grasp the death of others objectively, yet “every Dasein must itself actually take dying upon itself.” 5 Given this constitution, death is an immanence in the being of Dasein. The feeling of anxiety discloses the fact that Dasein “exists as thrown being-toward-its-end.” 6 And yet, reminiscent of Kierkegaardian despair, this immanence is not experienced by most. This shows not that death is not an immanence in the being of Dasein; rather, it “only proves that Dasein, fleeing from it, initially and for the most part covers over its ownmost being-toward-death.” 7 In other words, we flee from the recognition of our own demise, facilitated by “the they,” Heidegger’s characterization of the influence of others which structures our choices and robs us of our authenticity. For Heidegger, “[d]ying, which is essentially and irreplaceably mine, is distorted into a publicly occurring event which the they encounters.” 8 The pernicious force of the they does not permit one to have an authentic relation to one’s death. Heidegger then goes on to probe what an authentic beingtoward-death looks like, characterizing it as a “passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself.” 9
Heidegger’s pinpointing of a widespread inauthentic relationship to death is corroborated by the modern psychological approach of terror management theory (TMT). In an existential fashion, terror management theory recognizes human beings as distinct in the animal kingdom. Their capacity for abstract reasoning “inevitably makes
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 300.
4 Ibid., 302.
5 Ibid., 304
6 Ibid., 318.
7 Ibid., 318
8 Ibid., 320
9 Ibid., 335.
human beings realize that they will someday die, and death can come at any time for any number of unpredictable and uncontrollable reasons.” 10 TMT explains that in order to mitigate the anxiety that results from this, humans cling to creations that provide “(1) a theory of reality that gives life meaning, purpose, and significance; (2) standards by which human behavior can be assessed and have value; and (3) the hope of literal or symbolic immortality to those who believe in and live up to the standards of their cultural worldview.” 11 There is a considerable amount of literature that empirically verifies what TMT would predict: that reminders of death should increase the need for affirmation of one’s own worldview and should have an anxiety-buffering function. Studies since the early 1990s have correlated a variety of human behaviors with reminders of death, including harsher punishments for moral transgressors, more negative evaluations of those outside of one’s culture, increased support for violence in ethnic and religious conflicts, and increased disdain for disrespect of cultural icons. 12
The similarities between Heideggerian thought around death and what TMT empirically tells us are rather stunning. Culturally constructed buffers to mitigate death anxiety have a remarkable similarity to “the they” of Heidegger, which does not allow an authentic being-toward-death. Both TMT and Heidegger, while recognizing the near impossibility of it, urge one to come to a more authentic awareness of our eventual and inescapable demise.
10 Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, “Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 52, no. 1 (2015): 7.
11 Ibid., 7–8.
12 Ibid., 11.
“In thy right hand are pleasures for evermore”: Psalm 16 and the Promise of Eternal Life
Michael Moore
Psalm 16 of the Psalter presents us with the psalmist’s declaration before God and man of his never-ending trust in the Lord. Understanding this psalm is important not only for understanding book I of the Psalter but for understanding two key moments in Acts of the Apostles, 2:25–32 and 13:34–37, where it is portrayed as a prophecy of both Christ’s resurrection from the dead and the eternal life promised to all believers. Before moving to a close analysis of the Psalm to see how it does indeed stand as a promise of eternal life, it will be helpful to see how Psalm 16 stands in its immediate context in book I of the Psalter.
Falling just under halfway through the Psalter’s first book known as the “Laments of David” which comprises Psalms 1 4–1, Psalm 16 comes directly after Psalm 15’s exposition of the type of man who will “sojourn in the Lord’s tent” (Ps 15:2, 15:1). 1 This is a fitting placement, as Psalm 16 speaks of these people but is focused on “the psalmist’s joyful attitude . . . and speech” rather than the straightforward explanation found in Psalm 15. 2 Psalm 16 can also be considered in relation to Psalm 17, which immediately returns to a lament in which the psalmist cries for deliverance from his enemies, who are “like a lion eager to tear” him down (Ps 17:12). Despite this shift in tone, Psalm 17 “becomes a concretization of the statements of confidence” made in the preceding psalm. 3 Thus, we see that Psalm 16’s placement helps to reframe the laments that make up the rest of
1 John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 566. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Scripture will come from the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition.
2 J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “Psalms” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol IV: 1&2 Maccabees; Introduction to Hebrew Poetry: Job, Psalms, edited by Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 736.
3 Alphonso Groenewald, “The Ethical ‘Way’ of Psalm 16” in Psalmody and Poetry in Old Testament Ethics (New York: T&T Clark, 2012), 52.
book I as prayers made not solely in agony and distress but also in confidence. Having considered Psalm 16’s context in the Psalter, we can now turn to look at the psalm itself. 4
Though Psalm 16’s opening phrase, “Preserve me, O God” (v. 1a), is typical of lament psalms, the body of this psalm has an overarching tone of “gratitude and joy in God and in his salvation,” which would mean it is better characterized as a Confidence or Trust Psalm. 5 Furthermore, when this opening is taken into consideration with the second half of verse 1 and all of verse 2, we find a similar structure with a pagan prayer proclaiming trust in and acceptance of one deity that was common in ancient Canaan. 6 Thus, we can see that the psalmist’s intent here is to declare to God that he has completely accepted Him as his own with full confidence in His protection (v. 1). 7 The psalmist’s recognition in verse 2 that God is his Lord (v. 2a) and his ultimate good (v. 2b) ends the first of three major movements in Psalm 16, which alternate between address to God, address to others, and then back to God, with the general address functioning as an explanation of the psalmist’s newfound confidence. 8
This explanation of the psalmist’s confidence begins with the declaration that he fully rejoices in “the saints in the land” (v. 3). Due to damage in the original texts, there is a dispute as to whether “the saints” in this verse refers to other believers in the one God or to the pagan gods of the day “in a kind of “hypocritical profession of faith” which is used as a foil to the psalmist’s own profession that makes up the rest of the psalm. 9 Given how the RSV: CE renders this verse and how the psalm continues, the first interpretation appears to be more likely. 10 To give a full account of what his confidence in God entails, the psalmist creates a parallel to show that in trusting God, his earthly relationships change as well. He now accepts and rejoices in those who do the same (v. 3) while rejecting the sorrows of idolators (v. 4a) and
4 See Groenewald, “The Ethical ‘Way’ of Psalm 16,” 52–54 for a fuller discussion of how the rest of book I of the Psalter can be read in terms of Psalm 16.
5 Artur Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962), 173.
6 Richard J. Clifford, Abington Old Testament Commentaries: Psalms 1–72 (Nashville: Abington Press, 2002), 96; Mitchell J. Dahood, The Anchor Bible: Psalms I: 1–50 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1966), 87.
7 Clifford, Commentaries, 96.
8 John Goldingay, Psalms: Volume 1, Psalms 1–41 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 228; Geoffrey W. Grogan, Psalms (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 62.
10 In his commentary, Goldingay also expresses the belief that the “noble” of verse 2 refers to other believers in God, in response to a third and less widespread interpretation of those nobles as being the followers of the false gods. See Psalms, 229 for the full discussion.
their false sacrifices and prayers (v. 4b). Having established his separation from the false gods, the psalmist next moves to explain how he relates to the God of the saints with whom he now associates.
The psalmist begins by declaring, “The Lord is my chosen portion and cup” (v. 5a). This verse utilizes the same language used in Joshua to assign every Israelite his share of the Promised Land, which “represented the possibility of sustenance, life, future.” 11 Despite evoking images of land and a physical inheritance where one may rest, the psalmist here claims God not land as his enduring dwelling place in which he will find all fulfillment, which is an immense act of trust. The short prayer that follows, “thou holdest my lot” (v. 5b), shows that the psalmist has confidence that, just as he has accepted God as his own, God has accepted him as His own. 12 It is in the context of this relationship, then, that the psalmist is able to declare that “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage” (v. 6). Given the references to the material heritages of Israel, this “goodly heritage” could very well be material (e.g., land, money, food), but, given the psalmist’s insistence in verse 2 that “he has no good” apart from God (v. 2b) and that God is his portion (v. 5a), it is not likely that he is rejoicing in material goods. Rather, it is more likely that any material good that came to the psalmist after his acceptance of God would be taken as a sign of God’s goodness to him and of God’s intrinsic goodness, which is the true heritage in which the psalmist finds his joy. 13
As the explanatory section of Psalm 16 draws to a close, the focus shifts to the interior aspects of the psalmist’s relationship with God to shed even greater light on the mutual relationship between the two. The psalmist declares, “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me” (v. 7). Here we see that the Lord gives the psalmist such intimate counsel that his heart the very core of his entire person directs him to God even while he is asleep in a type of prayer, for “the way the heart instructs is by causing the person to put [God] before the eyes at all times.” 14 Because of this constant intercourse, the psalmist is able to keep the Lord before him at all times (v. 8a) and declare that “because he is at my right hand, I shall
11 McCann, “Psalms,” 736.
12 Ibid.
13 Weiser, The Psalms, 175.
14 See “Heart,” in M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary and Treasury of Biblical History, Biography, Geography, Doctrine, and Literature (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893); Goldingay, Psalms, 232; Weiser, The Psalms, 175–76.
not be moved” (v. 8b). The right hand, being understood as the ancient designation for the “place of support,” encourages the psalmist to always follow God despite any hardship he might encounter. 15
The final major movement of Psalm 16 (vv. 9–11) is once again addressed to God and begins with the psalmist saying that his whole person is secure (v. 9) because God does not give him up to “Sheol, or let [his] godly one see the Pit” (v. 10). This verse is generally interpreted in two ways. The first takes this promise of preservation from Sheol and the Pit to mean that God will preserve the psalmist from sudden death, which would make the abundant pleasures spoken of in the eleventh verse (particularly v. 11c) an abundance of material things that he will receive thanks to God’s goodness. 16 As the above discussion of this psalm’s genre bears out, though, this interpretation lacks internal, contextual evidence, as it is a psalm of confidence that does not speak to a direct threat on the psalmist’s life. 17 This leads to the second interpretation, which claims that this verse, because of the missing perilous context, should be read as confidence in being delivered from harm after death. 18 Instead of his natural death being the final word, the psalmist’s total acceptance of and trust in God means that God will take his whole person, soul, heart, and body (v. 9), into heaven. 19 The “path of life” (v. 11a) that God shows to the psalmist, then, is not merely an enjoyable temporal life. Rather, it is a life where the psalmist experiences “the fullness of joy” (v. 11b) in God’s right hand (v. 11c), where he will be safe from all hardships and death “for evermore” (v. 11c).
Therefore, while the second movement of Psalm 16 certainly speaks of earthly life in God and how God will greatly bless those who trust Him, it is clear that this life is not the psalmist’s final destination. It is precisely because of the good counsel and security with which the Lord blesses him abundantly in this life that the psalmist can say with confidence that death is not the end. Rather, he is confident in his knowledge that God will rescue him and welcome him into a new life that found its beginning when the psalmist claimed God as his one
15 Goldingay, Psalms, 232. For more detail on how “right hand” is used in the Old Testament, see the entry “Right, Right Hand” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
16 Goldingay, Psalms, 233.
17 Grogan, Psalms, 63; cf. Weiser, The Psalms, 176.
18 Grogan, Psalms, 63
19 Weiser, The Psalms, 177.
refuge and only good while on earth a new life in which the psalmist’s entire person, body and soul will be held in God’s own hand, the only place he can safely experience all the joys and pleasures that God wishes to give him for all eternity.
Psalm 16’s eternal orientation is a perfect example of how the Old Testament points to the New and the New Testament is hidden in the Old. In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter uses Psalm 16 to proclaim that it is in the voice of Christ that David is speaking, for David “both died and was buried” and was not raised again (Acts 2:29). Because of this, David could not be the one who is speaking of being saved from Hades (Acts 2:31). Far from making a David a liar, giving people a false hope in an eternal life that does not exist, this Psalm makes him a prophet who “foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ,” to which St. Peter and the rest of the Apostles testified as eyewitnesses (Acts 2:30–32). The hope of Israel is fulfilled in Christ, for He is not the only one who shall be raised from the dead; rather, He is the “first fruits” of all who will be raised due to their believing and trusting in Him (1 Cor 15:20–23). This confidence that all the faithful can have in the resurrection is directly quoted from this psalm by St. Paul in Acts 13:35.
This unshakeable confidence in God’s saving us from eternal death, however, takes more than just words on our part, as Psalm 16 also teaches us. After telling God that he has chosen Him as his own, David promises to delight in his fellow believers and to reject all the false idols the world offers for worship (Ps 16:1–5). Likewise, if we are to follow God now and into the next life, we must also care for our neighbors and remove from before our eyes all that leads us to sin and away from God. In return, God will give us intimate instruction in the depths of our hearts at all times, leading to the confidence to know that nothing, not even death, will conquer us (Ps 16:7–10). We find each of these moral principles lived out perfectly by Christ in the Gospels. He delighted in sharing meals with His followers, rejected the allures of Satan in the desert, and followed the Father’s will to the cross, for He knew it would not be the end (Mt 9:10–17, Lk 4: 1–13, Mt 26:36–46). Thus, we see that if read in light of the New Testament, the Old offers the opportunity to possess a fuller and richer understanding of the Christological mysteries and thus leads us ever closer to eternal life.
