Cantus Firmus: Wisdom, Reason and �Love�s
Congruence�
Paul D Janz,
King�s College London
1. In the concluding section of A Long Rumour
of Wisdom,[1] David Ford offers an
imaginatively rich and highly compressed vision for
the place of wisdom as a centre of academic
integrity, and as a possible locus of academic
congruence in the face of the continuing encroachment
of fragmentation. The vision is committed deeply to
the particularities and polyphonies within which
human life is experienced and expressed. Yet despite
this emphasis, it is concerned likewise to present
wisdom as offering the prospect of what might be
called a kind of �normative� centre of integrity,
indeed even of a certain kind of �principledness�,
and accordingly as offering the hope of a locus of
genuine academic meeting and shared
responsibility.
Broadly speaking, it presents wisdom in the
academy as intrinsically responsive to two basic
kinds of demands, or to demands on two basic fronts.
It recognizes on the one hand the inexorable
heterogeneity of the real world, and the failure of
many homogenizing �enlightenment� accounts to do
justice to that heterogeneity and indeed their
frequent violation of it. Yet at the same time it
wants to uphold equally the indispensable requirement
of a genuine commonality within the academy, by which
it is drawn together in mutually recognized
responsibilities. Or again, it acknowledges on the
one hand the �deep particularity� and
non-universalizability even (or especially) of wisdom
and responsibility themselves. Yet on the other, it
deplores the broadscale abandonment today of any
�energetic academic pursuit of the big
questions�.[2] It resists the idea
therefore that the only choices must be between the
�presumption� and �violence� of many of the
totalizing and universalizing enlightenment options,
and the �despair� and superficiality of many more
recent views which, on the basis of past failures,
withdraw from the �big questions� altogether. It is
wisdom which is then presented as offering the
promise of holding together both heterogeneity and
commonality, both deep particularity and genuinely
principled responsibility, both �the fierce vigil of
contingency� and the hope of �congruence�. Ford then
offers a particularly helpful analogical image around
which he sees this promise of wisdom as coming to
expression. This is his appeal to the image of a
cantus firmus for providing a kind of
normativity for wisdom both in theology and then also
in the academy more broadly.
In his magisterial new book, Christian
Wisdom,[3] Ford makes clear that
he is not attempting to address exactly what he calls
the �epistemological� or �systematic� questions which
will at some point need to be broached in the fuller
articulation of such a vision. His own concern in
this later work is rather with more substantive
questions relating to the dynamics of transformation
in Christian wisdom, as well as with pedagogical
issues. Nevertheless, the book indirectly achieves a
great deal with regard to epistemological questioning
as well, by laying out substantively vital features
and parameters of wisdom to which any such
questioning will have to be attentive. Two of the
most prominent among these orientational features are
(a) an engagement with scripture, and (b) a
fundamentally this-worldly attentiveness, even when
asking about the wisdom of God. Or as Ford as
expresses this directly, in a statement which is many
ways is pivotal for the whole book: �Christian
theology requires an engagement with scripture whose
primary desire is for the wisdom of God in life
now�.[4]
What I wish to do in this essay, under the
piloting guidance of the desire�for the wisdom of God
in life now�, is to explore how it might be possible
for wisdom to come to expression as a cantus
firmus at all under the �fierce vigil of
contingency�. In other words, how exactly can wisdom
operate with the kind of �principledness� that Ford
envisages, without violating the fierceness of that
contingency? In a certain way therefore, I hesitate
to call what follows an �epistemological�
investigation per se. For epistemology is concerned
intrinsically with questions of rational authority,
with rational classification and thematization, with
questions of significance or �meaning�, and thereby
ultimately also with �definitions�. And the wisdom
which Ford envision, as we shall see, will prove to
be quite resistant to assimilation within any such
epistemological demands.
The better place by far to begin is with
Aristotle�s important dictum that �regarding�wisdom
we shall get to the truth by considering who are the
persons we credit with it�.[5] Or as Ford concurs,
wisdom �is more appropriately associated with people
than with texts�.[6] We will be returning to
this injunction repeatedly throughout the essay as a
crucial source of orientation. But to begin with, I
want to try to gain a foothold into the
epistemological question itself by asking it in a
certain way. In the simplest of terms, I want to ask
how wisdom is to be distinguished from reason,
or from the right use of reason. Or more precisely, I
want to ask what, if anything, there might be about
the exercise of wisdom � within the basic parameters
of Ford�s project, and as we look to the persons to
whom we credit it � that cannot be captured or fully
accounted for by either epistemology or ethics.
2. Now as wary as we should rightly be of placing
wisdom within the constraints of any exact
definition, there are nevertheless a few things we
can say without hesitation about wisdom
�definitionally�, the most basic among which is the
following. It will be freely acknowledged as
analytically true (i.e., true by virtue of the basic
meaning or definition we attribute to the word itself
in using it) that when we speak of human wisdom we
mean it as a manifestation or an exercise of
discernment. Of course such a statement, while
incontrovertibly true (because analytically true),
does not yet really say anything illuminating or
ampliative. Indeed, as it stands, it expresses a mere
truism which, far from helping to answer the question
before us, does little more than to repeat it in
different terms. However, even as a truism it already
allows us to move one step further as we ask about
wisdom�s relation to reason. For human reason also
has a single and most basic definition under which it
comes intrinsically to expression in any of its uses.
Our whole intellectual history, from the
pre-Socratics onwards, and as expressed most directly
first in Plato but with especial explicitness in
Aristotle, has held as �self-evident� that human
reason just is the human power of judgment, or
the �judging faculty� in humans.[7] Much of what
follows therefore will be an investigation into what
it is about wisdom�s �discernment� that can be found
to distinguish itself from reason�s �judgment�. In
order to pursue this, let us first look somewhat more
closely at what is meant in identifying reason as the
�judging faculty� in human beings.
Throughout most of our intellectual heritage,
reason, understood as the human �judging faculty�,
has been seen as exercising itself in two essentially
different ways, pertaining specifically to two
fundamentally different human faculties or powers on
which reason can bring its ordering judgment to bear.
The first is the faculty of cognition or
cognitive apprehension (cognitiva in Aquinas),
which in Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant, for example,
includes both sensible percepts and concepts
generated in thought. Now to be sure, cognitions as
such are indeed always already mental
entities, but they are not by that measure alone yet
necessarily rational, since thoughts or
thinking procedures themselves can of course also be
irrational or incoherent. In order to qualify as
rational, the faculty of cognition must itself be
brought under the higher judging and ordering
scrutiny of reason in order to ensure the correct
exercise of this faculty. And the use of reason in
this �cognitive� direction is in all three thinkers
called the speculative use of reason � or what
is also otherwise variously called the �discursive�
or �theoretical� or use of reason. (�Speculative�
here is not meant in the sense of the imagination
running away with itself, but rather in the sense of
an activity of reason which operates or judges solely
as what Aristotle calls �a spectator of truth�. In
other words, it takes the theoretical demands of
truth as its sole point of orientation as it seeks to
order thought �rightly�, or to bring about right
thinking.) The second faculty or power on which the
judgment or ordering of reason can be brought to bear
is the faculty of appetition or desire
(appetitiva in Aquinas). Desires, in other
words, are not, at their origin, concepts or percepts
but appetites. And because it is desires or appetites
(and not cognitions) which are always also the basic
motivations for bodily movement in space, that is,
for action or praxis, therefore the rational
ordering or judging that is brought to bear on the
faculty of appetition or desire is called the
practical use of reason.
3. All of this of course requires much greater
clarification which present space limitations do not
permit. But the important point for present purposes
is that both Aristotle and Aquinas now also bring
�wisdom� to bear on exactly these two faculties: as
(a) �speculative wisdom� (sophia and
sapientia, respectively, which is to say
wisdom for the cognizing or thinking power); and (b)
as �practical wisdom� (phronesis and
prudentia, respectively, which is to say
wisdom for the appetitive and motive power). We can
explain the significance of this briefly by saying
that what �wisdom� essentially designates in respect
of each use of reason is quite simply something like
a �perfection� or the �excellence� of that use of
reason. Sophia or sapientia denote the
right use, or excellence, of the speculative
intellect with regard to its �first
principles� (chief among which, at least
operationally are the law of non-contradiction and
the law of identity); and phronesis or
prudentia denote the right use or perfection
of the practical intellect with regard to its
�first principles�. It may already be evident
therefore that even though it is common in current
discussions to use sophia and sapientia
roughly as synonyms for what we understand by wisdom
today, in their archaic uses they had a quite
different meaning. In their designation as an
excellence of speculative reason, it is disciplines
like geometry, pure mathematics and formal logic
which, in their speculative purity � i.e., in their
abstraction from the concerns of sensible life �
begin to approximate the demands of sophia and
sapientia intended here. Our own current
understanding of wisdom has therefore in fact much
more in common with what Aristotle and Aquinas
describe under phronesis and prudentia.
For these, in their practical focus, are indeed
concerned essentially with matters of human life,
with matters bearing directly on decisions, actions,
motivations and behaviors etc. which pertain to this
life.
However, there are several vital reasons why even
the prudentia (�practical wisdom�) of Aquinas
and Aristotle will not suffice for the kind of
discernment required of a wisdom �in life now�,
especially as Ford lays this out. And these
insufficiencies will invariably find their root in
one single fundamental source, a single defining
characteristic which resides intrinsically at the
very heart of the operative structure and orientation
of reason as the human �judging faculty�. Let me
explain this.
It is a logical corollary of reason as the human
power of ordered judgment that it is a
demonstrative faculty. �Reason is
demonstration�, as Aristotle says. And this means
simply that no human judgment can be manifested and
warranted as rational unless it is able to
provide a rationally demonstrable justification of
its procedures in arriving at that judgment. What
this means more precisely is that there will always
in a rational judgment be the expectation of a
unified traceability of reasons in the arrival
at any judgment, by which that judgment is deemed to
gain its legitimacy as a �rightly ordered�
judgment. If a judgment is not able to support itself
or account for itself on the basis of rationally
visible connections, such a judgment will be deemed
by reason itself to be merely �arbitrary� or
specious, and hence not a demonstrably right judgment
by rational standards. But this now brings us to the
really decisive and central feature of what reason
is. What reason most essentially reveals itself to be
� as a demonstrative power which demands the
traceability of its connections � is, as Kant puts it
succinctly, a �faculty of unity�.[8] On the
one side, in its speculative or cognitive
(theoretical) exercise, the unity for which reason
intrinsically strives is expressed as �coherence�,
which is to say the right relation of mental images
(percepts or concepts) in thinking to their
�referents� or objects, with a view to the truth of
these referential relations. (To �refer rightly�
means to �cohere�, and this is why even any
�correspondence theory of truth�, as recent thinkers
like Hilary Putnam recognize, already depends on a
�coherence theory of truth�.) Likewise, in its
practical exercise, reason is also a faculty of
unity, in that it functions to bring means
together with ends, or more exactly, to bring
means into a right relation with desired ends for
action, and conversely ends also with means.
This does not mean of course that reason in its
right exercise always achieves the resolution or
unity it seeks, as it claims to do in idealism.
Indeed, in its properly critical exercise, reason
will invariably have to acknowledge that at certain
points it finds itself confronted with limits and
resistances that are not resolvable into reason.
(Material reality, especially in the form of the
reasoner�s own body, constitutes such a limit, since
human reason does not produce the body but recognizes
its own causal origin and ground in it.) Nevertheless
the fact remains that in order to count as genuinely
rational limits, even these limits � which reason
fully knows it does not engender and therefore which
it encounters as a kind of resistance to rational
resolution � must be limits that reason itself is
able to recognize in some way as limits to its own
rightful jurisdiction. Otherwise they will not be
able to be authoritative limits for reason at
all. In every case therefore � even when oriented to
limits, as in Kant or Aristotle � reason will demand
a rational traceability of its reasons in its
intrinsic orientation to unity.
4. It is at this point that certain fundamental
distinctions between the unifying requirements of
reason and the discerning requirements of wisdom, as
Ford envisions this, begin to emerge. For when we
come to the discernment required by wisdom under the
vigil of contingency (or also the discernment we
witness under this vigil in the persons to whom we
credit wisdom) we find that such a traceability of
reasons within a rationally justifiable unity,
whether epistemological or ethical, is precisely what
is lacking. Consider, for example, an array of
radically �contingent� questions cited by Ford, which
he calls some of �the leading questions of our time�,
questions which have been faced with especial
severity of particularity and difficulty by Jean
Vanier and the L�Arche communities, which are built
around people with disabilities. These are questions
relating, for instance, to the articulation of a
unified �international federal polity� for L�Arche
�that allows each region to have a full say and
guards against the distortions and abuses of power�;
questions about the handling of money in such a
global federation, �where there are great
inequalities of wealth among the communities�;
questions pertaining to the regulation and
bureaucracy of developed countries, a bureaucracy
which finds it difficult to accommodate such
communities and which does not easily conform to
their standards; questions as to the amount of energy
which should be given to gaining political support
for the disabled; questions pertaining to the
handling of sexual relations in a residential
community of unmarried people; questions of work and
overwork, leisure and so on.[9] Now what is clearly
evident here is that virtually none of these problems
can be adequately addressed by what the practical and
theoretical judgments of reason alone are capable of
providing, nor do they avail themselves of the
rational assurances which moral or cognitive
justifications are able to deliver. They remain
precisely questions which often require precarious
and sometimes even risky decision-making, decisions
which cannot take comfort in the securities provided
by a neat traceability of reasons within a unified
justificatory structure. And it precisely in their
nature as such that they have required what we have
come to recognize in the L�Arche communities over
years and decades, as the wisdom of a kind of
discernment that is not contained within what can be
accounted for through purely rational criteria.
But here we must also immediately insert an
important caveat. For although we are compelled to
admit as such that the wisdom which we witness in the
decision-making and actions of the L�Arche
communities over years and decades is not a
discernment which can be accounted for or secured
entirely through the justificatory mechanisms of
reason (whether practical or theoretical), we will
nevertheless want to resist strongly any suggestion
that such decisions have been made in an entirely
unprincipled way, that is, in an entirely
arbitrary, ad hoc or capricious way. For if it were
entirely unprincipled, that would mean that the
wisdom we credit to them is not something rooted in a
genuine discernment or insight at all,
and therefore that it is not genuinely a wisdom at
all, but rather that the exemplariness which we find
so honorable and desirable is really only the product
of a string of good fortune or luck. And the question
which now confronts us in a sharpened way therefore
is the one with which we began. How can wisdom be
principled and thus somehow normative commonly across
all its expressions, if the discernment we witness in
it is not fully explainable or held secure by the
right judgment afforded by reason as a faculty of
unity? In order to address this question, I want to
return to an important aspect of Aquinas on wisdom,
building on this in some ways and departing from it
in others.
5. It is no accident that Thomas�s main
discussions of wisdom come in his treatise on the
�virtues�. We have already distinguished above
between, on the one hand, the naturally endowed
powers of reason as the human faculty of
judgment and, on the other, the excellences to
which this natural power of faculty orients itself in
its right operation, whether speculatively or
practically. Now the �virtues� as Thomas addresses
them just are these �excellences�. In their
English translations, �virtue� and �excellence� are
used interchangeably in both Aristotle and Aquinas,
and it is in recognizing the essential equivalence of
the terms that we can understand better how the
speculative intellect can for both thinkers also be
considered as �virtuous�, that is, as it orients
itself to the �excellences� expressed in its �first
principles�. But our main concern here continues to
be with the moral virtues or excellences and not with
the speculative.
Now in order to understand the character and
function of the virtues properly here, we must
remember the twofold finding above that, (a) the
speculative intellect is concerned with the right
operation of the human cognitive capacities or
powers � i.e., the thinking and perceiving powers
which thereby operate intrinsically in the relation
of �intention and reference�; whereas
(b) the practical intellect is concerned with the
right operations of the human appetitive
capacities or powers � i.e., the desiring and motive
powers which operate intrinsically in the relation of
�means and ends�. The moral virtues,
then, just are the excellences which perfect the
intellect in its appetitive and motive exercise as
such, just as what Aristotle and Aquinas call the
speculative �virtues� are the excellences which
perfect the intellect in its cognitive exercise.
Moreover, just as the cognitive faculty for both
thinkers has both an intellective and sensible (or
empirical) component,[10] so also the
appetitive faculty has both an intellective and a
sensible component. The intellective component of the
appetitive faculty or power is the will (the
will just is the �intellectual appetite� in Thomas�s
words); and the sensible component of the appetitive
faculty is found in the bodily passions. Now
for Thomas, as we have seen, a virtue or an
excellence is that which �perfects� any power which
human beings have.[11] And while there are a
great many individual virtues, Aquinas, following
Ambrose and Aristotle as well as scriptural sources,
identifies four among these that are the �cardinal
virtues� � two each for the intellective and
sensible-passional components of the appetitive
faculty. The two cardinal virtues perfecting the
intellective component of the appetitive nature are
prudence (prudentia, i.e., �practical wisdom�)
and justice; and the two cardinal virtues perfecting
the sensible-passional component are temperance and
courage (or fortitude). All other virtues are seen as
in one way or another sub-ordinate to these.
Firstly then, prudentia (�practical
wisdom�) is deemed an �intellectual� virtue for the
appetitive faculty (and indeed the �principal� virtue
for this faculty as such) because it designates the
very �form� in which practical reasoning occurs �
i.e., it is the �form� of reasoning concerned with
the right ordering of means to rightly desired ends.
Or better, it denotes simply the perfection of the
practical exercise of reason as it operates �rightly�
according to its first principles, principles which
are themselves defined by prudentia. (It will
be noted that there is an evident and somewhat
disconcerting circularity which begins to emerge
here, and we will address this further below.)
Secondly, justice, for Aquinas, is likewise found to
be an intellectual virtue for the appetitive faculty
inasmuch as its defining concern for �due action
between equals� can also be determined solely through
the operations of the practical intellect without the
aid of sensibility � i.e., as something basic in the
right relation of means to ends in the purely
intellective consideration of an �other�, apart from
any sensible encounter with a real embodied human
other in space and time.
When we come to the sensibly passional appetites
however � which by their origin in sensibility are
deemed to be �non-rational� � a further distinction
must be made, for these sensible appetites are seen
as dividing further into two kinds. The one is what
Thomas calls the �concupiscible� appetites which, as
the name suggests, designate passions whose basic
character is that of a natural attraction,
such as those experienced in the physical pleasures.
The other is the �irascible� appetite, by which is
meant those passions whose basic character is that of
a natural avoidance, such as pain or fear. And
the virtues of temperance and courage are seen as the
two cardinal excellences in the right ordering of all
the sensibly passional appetites, whether irascible
or concupiscible, with all other sensible virtues
falling under the guidance of these.
6. But now we come to what will prove to be
something pivotal for our own question of finding a
�principledness� for wisdom as discernment. For
normally when we think of an excellence or a
perfection of anything, we consider it in the sense
of a destination of maximal magnification, or as the
extreme or the ultimate point of any endeavor. But
the excellence of the virtues, as anyone familiar
with Aristotle will know, is of an importantly
different character. The perfection sought in a
virtue is not, for Aristotle, an excellence in the
sense of an �extreme�, but an excellence in the sense
of a �mean� or of an �intermediate�. Courage, for
example, is the mean or excellence between cowardice
and rashness; temperance the mean or excellence
between self-indulgence and insensibility, and so on
with all the virtues. In all cases, the virtues or
excellences are �destroyed by excess and defect, and
preserved by the mean�.[12]
Now if we look carefully at this particular
characteristic of any virtue as the excellence of a
�mean�, we will find that in it we encounter an
important opportunity for distinguishing between the
�discernment� exemplified in wisdom and the �right
judgment� which defines reason. The crucial point
here, put simply, is this. The virtues or excellences
do not serve as points of coherence or unity
at all, as reason intrinsically demands this, but
rather fundamentally as measures of discrimination or
division, which is precisely to say as
measures of �discernment�. And before explaining this
further, let me take the opportunity in this light to
correct, in a certain way, what was actually an
insufficiently precise differentiation made initially
above between reason as the faculty of �judgment� and
wisdom as an exercise in �discernment�. What can be
said now more correctly is that both reason and
wisdom can be seen as exercises in judgment, but with
the crucial difference that the former is always a
�unifying judgment�, whereas the latter is a
�discerning judgment� or a dividing judgment. Again,
this difference itself will still need to be made
clearer, and as a preparation for that let me first
bring Aristotle and Aquinas under a more critical
scrutiny. For under such scrutiny it will emerge that
although both writers in their treatment of the
virtues do indeed provide the opportunity for
locating a �principledness� for wisdom in life now,
neither of them follows through on it. And in fact in
the end they go back to collapse the dividing mean
back into the unity of reason after all.
We have already witnessed this explicitly above in
the account of prudentia. For in the one
direction, the excellence (i.e., prudentia) to
which the practical intellect strives is first simply
defined in terms of the right operation of this use
of reason with regard to its �first principles�; and
then in the other direction, the right operation of
the practical intellect is conversely also simply
defined by the excellence (prudentia) to which
it must strive. And we can see a similar kind of
rationally unifying circularity in the justifying
account which is given for the sensible-passional
virtues. It is true that both Aristotle and Aquinas
acknowledge that the sensible virtues do not
originate in reason but in sensible life. But the
seeds of the subsumption of this back into the
universalizing guarantees of rational
self-justification are sown in the further
identification of the sensible virtues (courage,
temperance, fidelity, friendship and so on)
essentially as empirical �habits�. Let me explain
this. The obvious question here would be to continue
to ask more exactly about what is the actual
source of these virtues in the
sensible-passional life. What is it about the
sensible-passional life that serves as something like
an �ontic� source which grounds these habits and
authenticates them as sensible habits? But no such
question is asked by either writer. And the reason
that the sensible and contingent source remains
essentially unproblematized is at least in part
because there is still a sufficient residue of
Platonism in both Aristotle and Aquinas to cause them
to suppose that the authority even of the
sensible-passional virtues cannot be held secure
as �genuine� virtues, except as they are
brought back after all under the jurisdictions and
self-guaranteeing protection of rational calculation,
or under the unity of reason. And they do this again
through what shows itself to be a fully circular and
rationally self-guaranteeing form of reasoning.
In the one direction, the �origin� of the virtue
of courage or temperance� having been defined as a
�habit� � is found solely in the cultivation
of this habit through the practice of it. That is,
the origin of the virtue is found only in the
�acquisition� of it through the �practice� of the
habit which the virtue is. But now likewise in
the other direction, the �practice� of the habit is
itself made possible only through the acquisition and
cultivation of it.[13] In every case
therefore � in prudence, justice, courage and
temperance � the integrity and authority of the
cardinal virtues are held secure through forms of
reasoning which justify themselves through a perfect
and self-guaranteeing circle, and therefore a
theoretical circle. In the case of prudence and
justice it is a fully �tautological circle� in that
the explanation and justification of these as virtues
is contained in their definition vis-�-vis practical
reason analytically. In the case of the sensibly
passional virtues it is a �vicious circle� in that
the exercise of the habits of courage and temperance
requires their prior cultivation or acquisition, and
the acquisition or cultivation of these habits or
virtues requires their prior exercise.
7. But we should not be too severe in the critique
of the Aristotelian-Thomistic models here, for they
can be seen to have indeed provided something
crucially important even for wisdom in Ford�s sense,
in their emphasis on virtues as a mean, and an
excellence as such a mean. And I want to suggest in
that accommodating light that their reversion back
into the unifying securities of reason rests on what
we would recognize today, especially from Christian
perspectives, as a kind of oversight in Aristotle,
which Aquinas follows. The point is that both
Aristotle and Aquinas effectively miss what
Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth and Bonhoeffer
and others have understood to be a further �power� or
faculty with which human beings find themselves
naturally endowed. This faculty is moral
consciousness or ought-consciousness. And the root of
the problem here for both Aristotle and Aquinas is
that in their reasoning �downward�, from the purity
of the intellectual virtues of prudence and justice,
they commit themselves to the strange position that
moral consciousness itself effectively derives
in some way from practical reason, as this use of
reason orients itself ultimately to the rational
ideal of �the good�. Or at least there is the
supposition that moral consciousness acquires its
integrity and validity as ought-consciousness, only
as this consciousness is secured in and by reason.
But such a supposition in no way accords with the
reality of human moral awareness. For I am aware of
the consciousness of good and evil within myself no
less immediately, constitutively and non-derivatively
than I am immediately aware of the power to think in
mental images, or the power to move in space, as
originary or constitutive faculties or powers. Now
the place we encounter the immediacy of
ought-consciousness as moral consciousness most
directly, of course, is in conscience. We do
not encounter conscience within ourselves originally
as something which emerges through careful
deliberation on the first principles of pure
practical reason (prudentia). We know
conscience rather as that which condemns and commends
immediately, on its own terms, and often precisely in
a way that persists uncomfortably even in the face of
the most elegant rationalizations.
We have no choice therefore but to say that moral
consciousness confronts us with the immediacy of
something like a law within us. It is a law,
moreover, which speaks from within us, never as
something unifying, but intrinsically and always as
something dividing, that is, as something which
always discriminates as it immediately either
commends or condemns. Moral consciousness is
therefore a third human faculty or power beyond
Aristotle�s two, inasmuch as it does not itself
derive from a rational �the right ordering of
desires�, but in fact already stands in immediate
judgment of many desires without the aid of rational
reflection, condemning some as vices and commending
others as virtuous. Nevertheless, just as we have
seen above that the faculty of thinking is not yet
rightly principled or rational merely by virtue of
its being �mental�, but that it requires the judgment
of reason to come to its principledness: so also the
faculty of moral consciousness, which we encounter as
something like a dividing law within us, needs a
principledness which can guide it. We can see this
clearly again in conscience. For although we
experience conscience as one of the most immediate
signs of moral consciousness, we recognize just as
well that it by no means yet carries within it the
kind of principled guidance or discernment which is
able to address difficult decision-making in the
complexities of life.
But the essential point here is that it is above
all our moral consciousness� and not most
fundamentally our appetitive or cognitive
consciousness � which in its search for guidance
cries out for the discernment of wisdom, a
discernment which no amount of speculative reason
(for cognitive consciousness) or practical reason
(for appetitive consciousness), for all the
importance and necessity of these, can provide. But
where then do we look for such discerning guidance if
not fundamentally to practical reason? In answering
this question, one could really do no better than to
point directly back to Ford�s Christian Wisdom
and repeat a great deal of what is said there. For
the discernment that moral consciousness or the human
heart cries out for is answered there precisely with
a wisdom which �is inextricably involved with the
discernment of [such] cries�.[14] Nevertheless, for the
�systematic� or �critical� task at hand, I want in
conclusion to risk something else briefly, something
which moves in an entirely different direction, and
which may initially appear to be somewhat dissonant
with what Ford is doing, but which will show itself
in the end to conform to it.
I want to suggest that something important can be
gained for a �critical� or �constructive� questioning
of wisdom through a certain kind of attentiveness to
law.
8. We have above spoken of moral consciousness as
confronting us with the immediacy of something like a
law within us; a law more, moreover, which most
fundamentally divides as it condemns and
commends, and therefore of the inability of reason as
a faculty of unity to engage adequately with
its demands.
Now the scriptures themselves reveal something
vital about this �dividing� moral consciousness,
something that no epistemology or ethics could ever
do. Indeed the scriptures single out this
consciousness especially, by giving it a particular
name. In order to amplify this properly, let me
approach it briefly through the narrative in Genesis
2 and 3. It will be fully clear to begin with that
moral consciousness just is the consciousness
of good and evil or knowledge of good and evil. And
as we know from the Genesis narrative, it is this
consciousness of good and evil (i.e., moral
consciousness) which is precisely the �mark� within
us of the fall away from God into sin. In other
words, the fall away from God into sin � that is, the
fall into the knowledge of good and evil � is nothing
less than a fall into moral consciousness,
which is to say a fall into a state within which
human beings have become a law unto themselves. It is
for this reason that the scriptures call or name this
moral law within us �the law of sin and death� (Rom.
8.2). The �law of sin and death� in other words is
not of course, as it is sometimes treated, the Mosaic
law � which is itself �holy, righteous and good�
(Rom. 7.12) � but rather the moral law within us, by
which we have become a law unto ourselves. But a
further vital point must now also be recognized. For
although the consciousness of good and evil, into
which human beings have fallen, is through that
falling away indeed a reality at the very
heart of human existence and self-awareness:
nevertheless, as Romans 5 makes clear, it is
impossible for human beings by themselves to be
conscious of this reality. Or as Romans puts
it directly, although sin really, �ontically�,
reigned from Adam to Moses, nevertheless it was not
recognized as such, or it was �not taken into
account� (Rom. 5.12-14). And as Romans also states,
it is only in the revelation of the divine law in
Moses that the reality of being in sin � i.e., of
being a law unto themselves � first becomes
consciously �visible� to human beings. For it is
�through the law [that] we become conscious of sin�
(Rom 3.20).
It is in this light then that I want to suggest
that not only Jewish but also Christian attentiveness
to the discernment desired in wisdom must at some
point � when placed under the scrutiny of critical
reflection � come to be focused through the divine
law, through the command. For even �the law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus� is not the annulment
of the Mosaic law but its fulfillment, and indeed
as this fulfillment, a kind of radicalization
of the law, as Matthew 5-7 makes clear. But let me
quickly add here that I am of course not going to be
suggesting that we should turn to anything liken
ethical �divine command theory� for the principled
guidance we seek in wisdom. Far from this, it is the
divine law itself which stands in an ultimate
discerning judgment of the pretensions of any such
theories to be able to provide the wisdom for which
the human heart in its moral consciousness cries
out.
Now there is one command which for both Christians
and Jews stands at the head of all other commands, a
command apart from which none of the other commands
are apprehended genuinely as divine law, and
apart from which they will become only a human
legalism. This is the command expressed in the Jewish
Shema, and which Jesus also identifies as the
command on which �all the law and the prophets hang�:
�You shall love the LORD your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
might� (Deut. 6.4). Now it is precisely this command
which Ford also makes entirely indispensable for any
�principledness� in Christian wisdom, i.e., in the
fundamental centrality he gives to the command that
�God is to be loved for God�s sake�.[15] And it
is this command as such which is also at the heart of
what he envisions in the earlier work as the
normativity of �love�s congruence� for wisdom.
But now what exactly does wisdom�s declaration in
the form of law achieve in the way of such a
congruence? Let me address this indirectly by
returning again to something similar, yet also
different, which takes place in Aquinas. Aquinas also
gives full primacy to love in these matters, making
it the highest possible aspiration of the human
�appetitive� faculty in the will, or in the practical
intellect. Indeed, love for Aquinas stands as the
greatest even among the trio of what he calls the
�theological virtues� � faith, hope, and love � which
are all divinely �infused virtues�. Thus, in the
theological virtue of faith, �man receives [in
his �intellect�] certain supernatural principles,
which are held by means of a Divine light�; and in
hope �the will is directed to this end [i.e.,
to the Divine light] as something attainable� by
faith; and in love �the will is�transformed
into that end� (into the Divine light) in �a certain
spiritual union�, by which it attains to a
�supernatural happiness�.[16] But now it is crucial
to recognize that throughout this discourse,
what even these theological virtues most
essentially still �correct� and �perfect�, in the
wisdom or excellence they convey, is reason,
whether practical or speculative. And the perfection
and excellence aspired to here therefore, despite the
great beauty of its formulation in Aquinas, remains
something which critical reflection must always in
the end approach as a kind of ideal, which as an
ideal remains remote and distant to real life.
But the love expressed by way of the command does
not declare itself in this way. It does not declare
itself in the remoteness of a presently unreachable
supernatural ideal of happiness in the regions of a
pure sublimity and perfection. It declares itself in
the command rather directly into the deepest depths
of that which every particular human being knows
herself or himself to be in the knowledge of good and
evil. That is, it addresses itself by the command not
to the excellence of an ideal perfection, but
precisely to the depths of the imperfection into
which humans have fallen away from God and have
become a law unto themselves. This, for Christian
wisdom, is the beginning of discernment. For it is
through the law � in which the command to love God
for God�s sake stands at the head � that we become
conscious of sin. That is, we become conscious that
the law which we are unto ourselves stands under the
discerning judgment of another law � the law of
grace. And this is in turn also the heart of both the
universality and the deep particularity of its
wisdom, or of both the �normativity� and the �fierce
contingency� of its discernment. For again, the
command to �love God for God�s sake� declares itself
not in the �likeness of a supernatural perfection�,
which must always be in the remoteness of a distant
ideal, but rather in the nearness that is immediate
to every human heart � i.e., �in the likeness of
sinful flesh� (Rom 8.3). Or as Deuteronomy also
echoes this likeness and nearness exactly, in
speaking expressly also of the same �great
commandment�: �this commandment that I am commanding
you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far
away. It is not in heaven, that you should say �who
will go up into heaven for us, and get it for us so
that we may hear it and observe it?� Neither is it
beyond the sea, that you should say �Who will cross
to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for
us so that we may hear and observe it?� No, the word
is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your
heart for you to observe� (Deut. 30. 11-24).
ENDNOTES
[1] A Long Rumour of
Wisdom: Redescribing Theology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), hereafter LRW.
[2] LRW, pp. 11, 24.
[3] David F. Ford,
Christian Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), hereafter CW.
[4] CW, p. 52.
[5] Nichomachean
Ethics, Book VI.5.24-25, hereafter NE.
[6] LRW, p. 21.
[7] See e.g., Aristotle, On
the Soul, Book III.3 and III.9.
[8] See e.g., Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, A680/B708.
[9] CW, p. 352.
[10] � and most of our
cognitive or thinking activity will indeed be
concerned with things we encounter in sense
perception, although some thinking can also be the
speculative intellect reflecting purely on itself and
its principles, through which we come to speculative
�wisdom� in Aristotle and Aquinas.
[11] Summa Theologica,
I-II, Q 56, A 1.
[12] NE, Book II.2.20-25;
II.7.9-10
[13] See NE, Book
II.5.33-38.
[14] CW, p. 14.
[15] CW, p. 225 and 225-272
passim, original emphasis.
[16] ST, I-II, Q.62, A.3.
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