Lesson 10: Love and Service

AGENDA

• Transitioning from Sources of Moral Theology to Its Categories
• Categories of Moral Theology
• Love and Service
• Love and Service as Witness

TRANSITIONING FROM SOURCES OF MORAL THEOLOGY TO ITS CATEGORIES

1. Transitioning from Sources of Moral Theology to Its Categories
1. To this point we have been talking about sources for thinking about moral matters in the tradition of Catholic theology. It is always helpful, when we are examining our own thinking about moral issues, to ask ourselves how we are prioritizing and weighing the various sources for moral thinking: scripture, tradition, reason and experience. We should ask about such weighing and prioritizing in the arguments that others put forth as well. Moreover, we should develop our capacities to examine how the meaning of these very source changes for us over time.
2. Yet it is also important to ask about the basic categories through which different communities think about the moral life. In this case we will find that different religious communities employ different terms to address both basic human problems and specific moral issues. The tradition of Catholic theology has its own set of basic categories or terms to help its members think through moral issues, and those will be the focus of the next section of the course. These include: love, virtue, happiness, freedom, law, conscience, truth, intention, justice, wisdom, and the common good.
2. As an initial exercise to help us become aware of the various ways that Christians think morally by interpreting particular sources in light of a tradition’s basic categories of thinking, consider the following example: reading the source of scripture through the category of law.
1. In one example, one might look through the Bible and pull out as many moral laws as one can find. One might look for all the times that the God of Israel or the Patriarchs or the Prophets are telling Israel to do this or not to do that. Or one might look for all the times that Jesus says “Blessed are you” if you have this particular interior disposition (Mt. 5); or “woe to you” if you do this or do not do that (Lk. 6). One might in effect be operating on the principle that one should always first read scripture (a source for moral thinking) in light of one particular view about law (as the operative category).
2. In another example, one might look for all the rules and laws on finds in the New Testament (scripture) and then try to extrapolate from those as many general principles as one can find (such as “do good and avoid evil”; or “do unto others as you would have them to do you”; or “turn the other cheek”), and then apply those general principles to particular cases
3. By contrast, one might look at the witness of the Christian community (which is a way of thinking about the sources of tradition and experience) and the particular qualities or character traits that have been formed in people who live in that community for a long time (in other words, the category of virtue). This intersection of sources and categories leads those in the community to a different kind of moral thinking, one not so directly based on identifying and following moral rules. It rather leads one to ask, if I am a member of this community and I am faced with a difficult moral problem, how do others who have attempted to live by these same standards approach such problems. What kind of person am I called to become?
3. It is worth nothing that throughout thehistory of Catholic moral theology, there has been no single way of integrating sources for moral thinking with categories for moral thinking that has held true for all Christians throughout all historical periods. Various approach emerged; some of which are still used today and some of which have been either replaced or supplemented.
1. For example, we have the arising of the tradition of casuistry (case based moral reasoning) from the penitential practice of the Catholic Church. From roughly the period of 500-1000 CE, moral theology occurred mostly in the context of Catholic confessional practice. Indeed the majority of education (and at that time, it was a small minority of the population that received any kind of education at all) went on in one of two places: either the local monastery school or the school associated with the local cathedral. When parish priests were trained to think about moral issues, they were trained with the idea that the two most important facets of morality for lay Christians were a clear set of rules to live by and the opportunity to be free from sins that could endanger their chances at final happiness. So as a result of this, these schools (and the best minds of these schools, many in Ireland and England) produced a series of moral manuals known as penitentials. They were basically lists of sins and the appropriate penances that would be assigned to thoseconfessing their sins. Often the penances were harsher for those who held what the authors took to be an elevated state of life. (So if you were a priest and you got drunk, forty days fast on bread and water; if you were a layman, seven days. (Seethe "Penitential of Cummean", c. 650 CE in McNeill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance [Columbia, 199o])] Penances were also ranked based on the perceived gravity of the sin (bestiality is counted as a more grave sin than drunkenness, for example) and also based on whether or not you had reached the age of reason (for those who were 15 years or younger, you usually received half the penance of someone who committed the same sin but was over the age of 15).
2. This was one of the earliest examples of what has more recently become known as the "case method" of moral thinking. Over the years, especially during one of the high points of Catholic moral theology (from roughly 1100-1300 CE), Catholic theologians began to think more systematically about whether this method was really the whole of moral theology. One subject that theologians such as Thomas Aquinas noted was that if one goes through one’s life focusing only on the sins that one commits and discharging the penances they have accumulated, two important subjects are left out:
1. First, this method focused Christians more on what they should avoid rather than on what they should do. It seems to miss the fact that the Christian gospel calls people not only to refrain from sin, but also to give themselves in loving service to others.
2. Second, this seems to miss one important issue in the moral life, namely that what we have done in the past exerts significant influence on what we will do in the future. In other words, it misses the fact that certain actions (good or bad) when repeated, become reified into traits of character (what have come to be called virtues and vices). This method of penance in confessional practice did not spend enough time on helping people to think about their own patterns of behavior and habits because it treated each sin as an isolated incident unconnected to past behavior.
3. There are certain aspects of this tradition that remain in place in authoritative Catholic moral teaching to this day. Certain actions counted as sinful simply by merit of the object of the action in question (something we will discuss in much greater detail later on). Even so, a person’s intention and the circumstances under which the person performs the act in question may mitigate one’s guilt even if such factors do not change the nature of the act itself. Similarly, a proper description of the act does involve attention to circumstances if we are to specify the object of the act properly (for example, the Catholic teaching will specify that murder is always evil, but that it is possible to describe an act of killing as self defense rather than murder, depending for example whether you broke into someone’s house and killed them to take their property or if you killed someone who broke into your house and attempted to kill your family and take your property.)
4. In each of these cases, it is important to note that the tradition drew on a more or less consistent set of sources for moral thinking, but integrated these sources with a range of categories. However, in each case the aim was to find a way of teaching the basic moral insight of the Christian community in a way that would be sensitive to personal struggle and growth in faith over time.
5. What we will treat now in this next section of the course is a sequence of basic categories of moral theology, first those most particular to the behaviors and formation of individuals and second those relating to the Christian community which seeks to live in fidelity to the Gospel and to love and serve its neighbor.

CATEGORIES OF MORAL THEOLOGY

1. What categories do we find operative in the Christian tradition throughout its history that help us to think about moral issues? (Or as we were discussing last time, how do categories help us to think about the weighing and prioritizing of sources for moral thinking?) We will be examining categories that pertain more directly to the human person and her or his deliberation and action; that is, how an individual Christian understands her or his moral life.
2. To this point we have been looking at cases that illustrate how we integrate different sources of moral knowledge. Now we are looking at what it means for someone to act out of a Christian context.
1. Love and Service
2. Happiness and Virtue
3. Freedom and Law
4. Conscience and Truth
5. The Moral Act

LOVE AND SERVICE--Discussion of Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est

Note how the document begins:

1. The first people of the Covenant and the first Christians had an experience of God which they kept alive in stories which later became texts. The encounter with God is not first about abstract rational arguments for the existence of God, but rather it is about the immediacy of an experience.
2. Pope Benedict himself acknowledges this at the beginning of his letter, saying in par. 1, “We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
3. However, it is not possible to pass on the immediacy of any experience, much less an experience of God, to another person. Any attempt to communicate the full content of an experience in words fails, and yet words and bodily actions are all we have to reflect that experience.
4. So we are left with two things: stories (about the response of the community, including the stories of its actions as worship) and concepts (or ideas) to try to make sense of our experience.
5. Consider the basic logic of the whole letter: In Part I—The Unity of Love in Creation and Salvation History
1. First, state in a concept what the center of Christian belief is (love).
2. Second, acknowledge both the ultimate undefinability of this concept and the fact that this has occasioned misreadings (especially here is the Pope’s named engagement with Nietzche, who suggested that Christianity is the thing that crushes erotic love).
3. Then offer a clarification of the concept by examining two senses of that term. (agapeanderos)
1. On the one hand, he is trying to react a tradition of criticism (he cites Nietzsche on this) that Christianity is the enemy of erotic life (that is, the love characterized by a desire to possess another and be united with her or him, in something like intoxication or ecstasy). Instead he is saying that Christianity has always valued eros, but not its counterfeit forms, the forms that pass away quickly and are not ultimately unfulfilling.
2. On the other hand, he is denying a traditional criticism of eros within Christianity which states that real Christian love is pure self-sacrificial love, agape, without any pollution of an erotic love.
4. Then examine what is meant by these two sub-terms by a retelling of how they appear in scripture in (a) Creation and (b) Salvation History (from Israel to the Early Church)
1. With respect to creation, the man and the woman of the first two chapters of Genesis are created to experience both dimensions: the desire fulfilled in their unity (eros), and of a giving of themselves to each other (agape). Moreover, they are to love each other as a mirror of loving God, where they experience in each other a shadow of the real eros (a desire to possess God alone) and a real agape (to give oneself totally to God without hesitation or withholding anything.
2. So too in history. The history of God’s interaction with humanity that the Bible chronicles is the history of God loving people with true eros(a desire to be in relationship, in union with God’s creation) and with true agape (to be forever giving the gift of Godself to them). This comes to fulfillment in the incarnation and the paschal mystery (the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus), because God both gives Godself fully to human beings and seeks to be united intimately with them.
3. Demonstrate through this retelling the unity of the two in God and in the Human Person
6. In Part II—Caritas—The Practice of Love by the Church as ‘A Community of Love’
1. The Holy Spirit is “that interior power which harmonizes their hearts with Christ’s heart and moves them to love their brethren as Christ loves them.” (par. 19)
2. Love is first a responsibility for individuals but also for the body of Christ.
3. That “corporate responsibility” is rooted in the common sharing of faith by the apostles but, through the necessities of culture and the particular history of the Church, now takes on a larger and more complex structure. Even so, its basic responsibilities have not changed.
4. There are three aspects of the Church’s responsibility: (1) proclaiming the word of God, (2) celebrating the sacraments, (3) exercising the ministry of charity. (par. 25)
5. These three responsibilities are always directed in two ways—to itself (the Church) and outside itself (the world).
6. Note that each is a distinctive way of bringing God’s love to the world.
7. Note the different functions of the state and the church—it is the fundamental role of the state to guarantee a just social order. Justice is thegoal of politics.
8. However, no state will ever be so just as to be without the need for Christian love, which it is the Church’s responsibility to teach and provide through its preaching, celebration of the sacraments, and works of charity.
9. Church’s charity work is distinctive in three ways: (1) simple response to immediate needs and specific situation, (2) independent of parties and ideologies (where theology is not an ideology), (3) should not be used as a means for proselytism.

LOVE AND SERVICE AS WITNESS

1. So the basic issue for the Christian seems to be how to communicate this truth about the love of God for human beings that is basically experiential (in terms of its recognition) but requires reason to communicate about it to others. This happens in two ways: witness and service (the first two categories of moral theology we will be exploring). Now these are basic categories of moral theology that we will be returning to for the remainder of the semester, but I want to note a couple of points about these.
1. First, although we have seen arguments about the role of right reason in arguing about moral matters, and its potential appeal to those outside the Christian community (think of the example we discussed about how the Bishops argued against legal recognition of homosexual unions), the way that Christians communicate what they take to be the truth about moral matters is not first of all through reason but by attesting to the truth of the gospel in action. The role of the bishop (and indeed all baptized Christians) is to point to that truth which they did not themselves create. The idea of witness is to testify to something publicly, as if at trial. In order to be convincing in one’s testimony, one needs to be able to communicate its relevance to the present circumstances. It requires us to be sensitive to circumstances and to communicate skillfully the implications of the gospel to the present age. This is a use of reason, but it is not an appeal to reason apart from the tradition of the church.
2. Second, one of the most effective ways of making this witness is often not by talking to people about the Gospel, but rather to live silently by its demands in service to others. This comes from a very real problem in proclaiming the Gospel, namely that behavior by Christians contrary to the Gospel interferes with the ability of non-believers to perceive its truth. There are two related problems with this reaction.
3. In the first place, one often hears something like the following critique of Christianity: If Christianity were true, why are there so few Christians living by the Gospel? If Jesus really were the way the truth, and the life (as John tells us), would you not think that people would actually follow what he said? But the existence of truth is not dependent upon the ability of human beings to perceive it or to live by it. If it were, the only possible truths would be each person’s own subjectively recognized opinions about the way the world is and the moral implications of those opinions (which would have a rather limited scope and so not really be moral in any recognizable way).
4. In the second place, even if this people were to realize this fact (that truth is not dependent upon one’s perceiving it), we would still be faced with the problem that the message of Jesus is often commodified (“if you believe in Jesus, you will have good financial fortune”—the so-called prosperity Gospel), made to look overly sweet and sentimental (“Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells be so”), or made so innocuous as to be hardly a moral guide at all (the image from the recent film “Dogma” about the “buddy Christ”).
5. So the silent witness through service tends to push in the minds of those who observe it the question: What is it that could motivate people to live that way, to renounce their possessions, to judge but always in the tenor of forgiveness, to sacrifice themselves for love of the less fortunate? This is what Pope Benedict is pointing to in the second half of his letter, when he says that the counterpart to the human love of God and God’s love for human beings (which, you will remember, involved both the love that desires union with another and also the love that desires to give oneself for the sake of another), is Christian service to the neighbor (caritas), where those two aspects of God’s love are realized concretely.
6. Throughout the history of the Christian Churches (and still to this day in some areas of the world), this basic attitude toward communicating the truth of Christianity and its moral judgments has led to Christians being killed (the model of the martyr). But a martyr’s life is not something one chooses; rather, it is one possible outcome of the life of witness and service if one lives as a Christian in social conditions that prove hostile to the Gospel. (Keep this in mind as we read along this semester, that martyrdom can happen in all contexts and can take many forms: from physical martyrdom, to a martyrdom of ideas.)