The Analogy of Love

With the kind permission of Fr Dr Demetrios Harper and St Vladimir's Seminary Press, here is a preview from the first few pages of his forthcoming book: The Analogy of Love: St Maximus the Confessor and the Foundations of Ethics.

The battle between the vitality of the human spirit and a sinister force determined to quench or restrain it is an age-old theme, one that has been played out upon the stage of history in various ways and portrayed by a multitude of characters. Paradigms and culturally conditioned associations have shifted and transformed over time, but the essential and qualitative sense of conflict remains, embedded inextricably in the human consciousness. A lengthy dialectical argument is not really needed for proof of such an assertion, the evidence for which can be found in the mundane and daily aspects of human existence; in the tensions that exist between family units, cultural demographics, religious confessions, nations, and abstract ideas; and, most profoundly, in the conflicts between the various elements of the self. This primal tension, of course, would once have been unequivocally summarized or defined as the psychological sense of a conflict between good and evil. In the postmodern era, however, some eschew the labels of what they believe to be the creation of Judeo-Christian ressentiment, preferring to seek definitions of the human plight unfettered by the obsolete and archaic criteria of what they perceive to be a bygone era. Nevertheless, it seems, regardless of the terminological form in which it is presented, the human subject and his or her existence are still defined in terms of a conflict, whether to be or not to be something or someone. Indeed, whether or not the good/evil binary is employed, agents seem to always behave as though such a dichotomy exists and the fundamental conflicts of their lives may be justified in terms of “right” and “wrong.”

Inasmuch as moral or ethical theory primarily consists of the study and systemization of rules and patterns of human action, it might be argued that the primal tension to which I refer is ultimately central to the question of morality. This would suggest that, despite some of the contemporary repugnance for the notion, morality is perennially and inescapably relevant. Practically speaking, even the most hardened Foucauldian inevitably develops “rules” of practice or habit, solipsistic though they may be, according to which he or she interfaces with others and with movements of his or her own natural urges. The difficulty with morality, then, lies not in its relevance as such, but rather with the establishment of moral criteria according to which at least some measure of coordinated action can be achieved. The defining feature of “morality” in the postmodern era is not so much its gradual disappearance, as it is popularly believed, but rather the increasingly fragmented way in which it is determined. The “good” and “being good” are increasingly defined according to one’s own narcissistic and emotivistic responses to the other, arguably resulting in a war of moralities in which moralisms are used as weapons to attack and belittle anyone who challenges the hegemony of one’s private moral criteria. There have indeed been modern attempts to prevent this problem and establish categorical principles for human actions. John Rawls and his modified Kantianism is perhaps the best example of such an attempt. Nevertheless, all such attempts have arguably failed, inasmuch as the content of the “objective” principles continues to be disputed, thus perpetuating the emotivistic fragmentation. This devolving fragmentation infects Christian communities as well, the place where objective morality is celebrated and one might expect to find greater concord with regards to the criteria and nature of moral practice. The determination of the nature of the good and the criteria for being good has in many ways reached an impasse.

This moral impasse has been noted and studied by many contemporary “virtue theorists,” who, despite their respective differences, agree that the moral crisis stems from the perpetuation of moral criteria that remain divorced from humanity’s real concerns. Such an account would certainly explain the tendency of rational agents to retreat inevitably to moral expressions based upon emotivistic responses. In other words, it is a natural human response to seek the ground of moral truth in the real, in the ontological framework of human life. The mere acknowledgment of the problem, obviously, does not in itself offer a way through the difficulties. Yet, it takes the first step and identifies the fact that in order for morals to be viable to human concerns, they need to be defined by the very thing that makes a human being what it is: nature. It is the impetus to approach morality from a more “naturalistic” standpoint that stands as the inspiration for contemporary virtue ethicists like Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Iris Murdoch, and Bernard Williams, all of whom have argued for some form of retrieval and implementation of a more classical and/or teleological approach to morals—systems that focus on the cultivation of character and the habituation of virtue. Even more daring are those who tacitly or even explicitly suggest that some of the answers to contemporary difficulties lie specifically in traditional Christian approaches to ethical and metaethical difficulties. While continually reminding the reader throughout her Sovereignty of the Good that she is an atheist, Iris Murdoch nevertheless concedes that Christianity offers many of the criteria and the right sort of metaphysical structure needed to correct the trajectory of contemporary morals. Moral philosophy needs something like God in order to function properly: “a single perfect non-representable and necessarily real object of attention” (Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 54). Similarly, MacIntyre suggests that a St Benedict-like character should serve as an exemplar for a contemporary renewal of virtue ethics. To quote him: “We are not waiting for Godot but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict” (After
Virtue (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2001), 263).

It is the clarion call to the retrieval of virtue ethics and, more specifically, to moral paradigms conditioned by Christian concerns that are ultimately the inspiration for this present study of the ethical dimensions of St Maximus the Confessor’s great theological synthesis. While thinkers like Anscombe or MacIntyre have perhaps diagnosed the difficulties associated with the trajectories of contemporary morals, whether systematic or psychologically endemic, and made some proposals toward a way forward, the project is far from complete. This is especially true in the context of Christian ethics, where the need to reformulate or reconsider contemporary moral criteria in light of the search for authentic Christian values is particularly poignant. [...]

In an effort, therefore, to address this apparent gap in contemporary scholarship as well as to participate in the retrieval of an authentically Christian sense of virtue, this study will seek to extract and highlight the ethical dimensions of St Maximus the Confessor’s synthesis, putting forward the criteria inherent in his mode of expression as an alternative to contemporary approaches to morals—both those suggested by theorists as well as the notions that are psychologically endemic to the typical member of modern Western society. This study will also serve as an attempt toward a corrective of what I consider to be a faulty hermeneutic in relation to morals and ontology amongst many Christian theorists, a hermeneutic that is often imposed upon Maximus himself. It seems to be an unfortunate given for many of the prominent theologians and patristics scholars of the last century that human ontology and morality exist in separate, and sometimes unconnected, spheres. The result of this disconnection is the tendency to see morals as abstracted imperatives, divorced from or at odds with the flow of human existence. Though the theoretical outworkings of this presupposition vary, the roots of it seem to stem from the post-Enlightenment tendency to bifurcate morals and ontology, views that are represented par excellence in the writings of Immanuel Kant. In short, it is the confusion within contemporary Christian morals that serves as the primary impetus behind this project.