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-à-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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