Aesthetics and Ethics

I think one of the major problems with the modern teaching of ethics is the tendency to divorce ethics from aesthetics. Yes, they are distinct; they are nonetheless closely interlinked. And sharply severing ethics from aesthetics falsifies most of the history of ethics, and most of the major historical positions in ethics. The argument for this can be made long indeed, but a few basic considerations that show why aesthetics sometimes needs to be brought in if we are to properly understand certain historical ethical positions that are commonly taught in Ethics classes:

(1) One of the things I've occasionally had a problem with when discussing utilitarianism is that even utilitarians often don't grasp that utilitarianism can be -- and classical utilitarianism was -- applied quite broadly, so as to include aesthetics. This is rather obvious even a priori -- if you are genuinely concerned with maximizing utility or the greatest happiness of the greatest number, you have to be concerned with art, which provides utility (in the utilitarianism sense of a factor conducive to subjective happiness) on a massive scale, and likewise with the beauty of nature, which does the same. And the classical utilitarians did. This is especially true of Mill, who made Aesthetics one of the branches of the Art of Life and whose criticism of Bentham in the Essay on Bentham is in part that Bentham does not do enough justice to the aesthetics of human actions themselves:

Every human action has three aspects,---its moral aspect, or that of its right and wrong; its aesthetic aspect, or that of its beauty; its sympathetic aspect, or that of its lovableness. The first addresses itself to our reason and conscience; the second to our imagination; the third to our human fellow-feeling. According to the first, we approve or disapprove; according to the second, we admire, or despise; according to the third, we love, pity or dislike. The morality of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences; its beauty, and its lovableness, or the reverse, depend on the qualities which it is evidence of.

(2) But it is also in a way true of Bentham, despite the fact that Bentham himself has a reputation for lacking much in the way of aesthetics. In his Chrestomathia, under the extraordinary curricular name of Hedonistic Aplopathematic Pathology (the arts that concern aggregation of pleasure), he includes the fine arts, thus at least recognizing their direct concern to the matter he considers most important. Bentham himself was actually an enthusiast for literature (although not a fan of literary critics), and considered all aesthetic matters to have a utilitarian account. Indeed, it's actually from such a discussion in Rationale of Reward that Mill drew the famous comment about pushpin and poetry, and shortly after making the point (which is primarily to argue that lesser arts like heraldry or coin collecting get their value in the same way the fine arts do), he says:

All the arts and sciences, without exception, inasmuch as they constitute innocent employments, at least of time, possess a species of moral utility, neither the less real or important because it is frequently unobserved. They compete with, and occupy the place of those mischievous and dangerous passions and employments, to which want of occupation and ennui give birth. They are excellent substitutes for drunkenness, slander, and the love of gaming.

(3) Kant makes a sharp distinction between ethics and aesthetics (in the sense of being concerned with sublimity, beauty, and the like), but this is not to say that he thinks they have no relations to each other at all; while pure morality stands above anything that can be called aesthetic, in actual human life we have to combine the sensible and the moral, and this brings us up directly to aesthetics. Thus, we have Kant's famous argument that beauty is the symbol of the good, in the sense that, while beauty and good are themselves very different, our experience of the good involves things that are broadly like our possession of the moral Idea, albeit in a limited form. And, of course, the moral law turns out to be the thing that most truly inspires awe. Cultivation of taste is for him part of moral cultivation -- not the only thing, but a genuine part.

Lent XXXVI

If, in fact, the brightness of the visible sun is not affected by the gloom and darkness of the grave, if it is not defiled by filth from the sewers, is there any wonder that the most high and infinite Spirit should touch ever so lightly with his splendor the dark and squalid hearts of certain men, only to remain clean and unsullied in his own purity? Anyone who ordains, therefore, and is guilty of any crime--whether he is proud, or lustful, whether he is a murderer, or even a simonist--he is, indeed, tainted and undoubtedly steeped in deadly leprosy, but the gift of God that is passed on through him is defiled by no one's corruption, nor infected by anyone's disease. That which flows through the minister is pure, and passes to a fertile soil, clean and limpid. Holy Church, to be sure, is a garden of delights, a spiritual paradise, watered by a river of heaven's choicest gifts. Let us assume, therefore, that wicked priests are like channels made of stone; in channels of stone water makes nothing grow until after flowing through them it pours out on fertile, cultivated fields. Even though the passing years should successively produce many unworthy priests, so that both they that ordain and they that are ordained are found equally corrupt, this living fountain is, nevertheless, is not restrained from flowing through the glade of the Church to the end of time, and from this fountain not only the ranks of the priesthood but all who are reborn in Christ raise to their lips the cup of salvation. Through priests, to be sure, baptism and holy oil come to us, as well as every dispensing of the sacraments of the Church.

[St. Peter Damian, Letter 40, Peter Damian: Letters 31-60, Blum, tr., Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 1990) pp. 139-140. This letter is more commonly known as the Liber gratissimus, a title given it by St. Peter himself, and it is the most important Latin discussion of ordination prior to the thirteenth century.]

The image of stone channels is drawn from St. Augustine, although St. Peter is deliberately generalizing the point, since Augustine in context is only considering the integrity of baptism. Whereas Augustine was addressing people who were insisting on rebaptism of those who had had Christian baptism, Peter is addressing people who were insisting on reordination of those who had become ordained through simony; earlier in the work he argues that baptism and orders are closely connected in how they distribute grace. From Augustine's Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 5.15:

[H]e who is a proud minister is reckoned with the devil; but the gift of Christ is not contaminated, which flows through him pure, which passes through him liquid, and comes to the fertile earth. Suppose that he is stony, that he cannot from water rear fruit; even through the stony channel the water passes, the water passes to the garden beds; in the stony channel it causes nothing to grow, but nevertheless it brings much fruit to the gardens. For the spiritual virtue of the sacrament is like the light: both by those who are to be enlightened is it received pure, and if it passes through the impure it is not stained. Let the ministers be by all means righteous, and seek not their own glory, but His glory whose ministers they are; let them not say, The baptism is mine; for it is not theirs.

The Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris

The crown jewel of French Gothic architecture is burning to the ground today; the causes are as yet unknown. The spire has collapsed, and the wooden frame is likely unsalvageable. The church was nearing the end of a long restoration; a number of statues from the spire are unharmed, because they were taken down for renovation. It's unclear whether anything else will survive. The famous stained glass is certainly gone. Nobody seems to know yet whether the Crown of Thorns or anything else was evacuated.

[ADDED LATER, 3:30 pm Central Time: The current word is that in fact a great deal was evacuated, including all of the relics. Firefighters are currently focusing on trying to prevent the art at the back wall of the cathedral from being entirely destroyed.]
[ADDED LATER, 5:05pm CT: It seems that the frame was less damaged than was thought -- an astonishing thing if you've seen just how serious the fire was -- so it may be salvageable.]

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame:

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are still pending — -pendent opera interrupta (the interrupted work is discontinued); they go on again quietly, in accordance with the change in the art. The altered art takes up the monument where it was left off, incrusts itself upon it, assimilates it to itself, develops it after its own fashion, and finishes it if it can. The thing is done without disturbance, without effort, without reaction, according to a law natural and tranquil. It is like a budding graft—a sap that circulates—a vegetation that goes forward. Certainly there is matter for very large volumes, and often for the universal history of humanity, in those successive weldings of several species of art at different elevations upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, disappear upon those great masses, leaving no name of an author behind. Human intelligence is there to be traced only in its aggregate. Time is the architect—the nation is the builder.

Lent XXXV

For the priestly office is indeed discharged on earth, but it ranks among heavenly ordinances; and very naturally so: for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete Himself, instituted this vocation, and persuaded men while still abiding in the flesh to represent the ministry of angels. Wherefore the consecrated priest ought to be as pure as if he were standing in the heavens themselves in the midst of those powers. Fearful, indeed, and of most awful import, were the things which were used before the dispensation of grace, as the bells, the pomegranates, the stones on the breastplate and on the ephod, the girdle, the mitre, the long robe, the plate of gold, the holy of holies, the deep silence within. But if any one should examine the things which belong to the dispensation of grace, he will find that, small as they are, yet are they fearful and full of awe, and that what was spoken concerning the law is true in this case also, that "what has been made glorious has no glory in this respect by reason of the glory which excels." For when you see the Lord sacrificed, and laid upon the altar, and the priest standing and praying over the victim, and all the worshippers empurpled with that precious blood, can you then think that you are still among men, and standing upon the earth? Are you not, on the contrary, straightway translated to Heaven, and casting out every carnal thought from the soul, do you not with disembodied spirit and pure reason contemplate the things which are in Heaven?

[St. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, Book III.4. The quotation is from 2 Corinthians 3:10.]

Anselm's Account of Satisfaction

There has been some discussion recently of this interview with Elizabeth Johnson; it was actually done late last year, but has been getting more attention now, since 'tis the season. Much of the interview is more a matter of provocative phrasing than substantially wrong claims, but some of it goes very awry. And pretty much all of the discussion of Anselm's view on satisfaction in Cur Deus Homo is wrong. It's wrong in entirely avoidable ways; but, I find, ways that are often not avoided, so it is worthwhile to say a few things about them.

Let's start with the basics. Johnson says, in response to the question of how Anselm came up with his position:

Very simply, the way all of us come up with our ideas: from his own experience in his own world. Anselm lived in a feudal society, where there was no police force nor armies. The word of a lord was law, and this kept the civil order. If you broke a law that disturbed the order of the society in which you lived, you had to pay back something to the lord in order to restore that order. That payback was called satisfaction. You had to make satisfaction when you broke a law in order to restore the honor of the lord, on which all civic peacefulness rested.

Anselm took that political arrangement and made it cosmic.

This is a bad start, because it is all completely wrong. There's been some work in past decades showing that it is, in fact, wrong. Nicholas Cohen's Feudal Imagery or Christian Tradition? (PDF) and David Whidden's The Alleged Feudalism of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and the Benedictine Concepts of Obedience, Honor, and Order are good examples, and develop parts of the argument at length. But we can summarize the points for our purposes here, and say that

(1) 'Feudalism' is too vague a term to do the explanatory work it is supposed to be doing here;
(2) but if we take the 'political arrangement' Johnson and others assume when they appeal to it, such political arrangements did not have practices of the sort that is suggested, which seem to be an imaginative fiction;
(3) and even so, Anselm didn't live in an area of the world that had that sort of political structure yet;
(4) and Anselm also rarely if ever uses any terms that can be given any feudal gloss at all;
(5) and when he talks in ways definitely shaped by his society, it is the society in which he actually spent most of his life, namely, the Benedictine monastery, not any secular political arrangement.

Anselm held that to be a monk was to go part of the way to being the way a human being should be; monks are not the only ones who are saved, but to be a monk is devote oneself to a life of loving God and neighbor, without being weighed down by the ways in which the world interferes with these. To love God is in part to serve and honor, i.e., respect or revere, God in His goodness, a service God does not need but that we do. And the whole of monastic life consists precisely in practices that are for honoring God. This is the model that Anselm is generally held to have in mind: we human beings can only be just by loving God, which requires serving and honoring Him. (Likewise, we can only be just by loving our neighbor, which requires honoring our neighbor, which is also a way of honoring God.) But there is a problem: we have, in fact, failed to serve and honor Him. Sin is sin because it is a dishonoring of God; this can only be fixed by restoring honor.

This is why God's forgiveness does not answer the question of how the problem of sin can be resolved -- the problem of sin is not that God has failed to forgive us but that human beings have sinned and keep sinning. Divine forgiveness on its own does not address that problem at all. Thus the problem of sin, by its very nature, requires that there be some way that leads to human beings honoring God, and to do so justly requires that we not only honor God but that, because we have sinned, we somehow honor God even more to make up for it, which is satisfaction -- the difference between unjust and just people is that the just, when they have done wrong, do what is required for satisfaction. This is where the basic dilemma in Cur Deus Homo comes from: to counter sin, for their own sake human beings have to honor God in a way that is beyond the ability of human beings to do; God alone can render honor to God in that superabundant way; so the only way we can honor God as we have to honor Him is if there is a Deus Homo, a God-Man, so that human beings are by Him so exalted that we can render the honor we owe to God and make up for what we have failed to render before. And what does Anselm say the honor we owe to God is? The service to God that constitutes justice and makes us just people. The honor we owe to God is to do what is right so that we may be truly just.

Satisfaction in a sense restores the order of the universe, but Anselm is very clear that it restores the order and beauty of the universe because it restores us so that we are just people acting in just ways. And on Anselm's account, we are not merely restored by Christ; we are exalted, so that we will become in a way the equal of the good angels. And, of course, we cannot be the equal of the good angels if we continue to sin; only by satisfaction can we be made the equal of holy beings. (In reading Cur Deus Homo, I think, people often just skip by the discussions of how human beings will complete the number of angels, but it is, I think, quite important to Anselm's actual argument, since it is his way of discussing what it means to be made holy, to become saints.)

Thus Anselm's argument is not that Jesus had to die for God to be merciful; God is always merciful. But the problem that is specifically in need of addressing is that we are sinners and need to stop being sinners. This we cannot do by except by becoming just people; but just people do not only do what is right, they make up for wrong that they have done. So divine mercy gives us a way to make up for wrong that we have done. God becomes Man, and therefore He can be a man who will honor God as we need to be able to honor God, that is, to give God the honor we need to make to Him and to give him the satisfaction for our failures to honor Him, as we also need to do. And Christ does this by giving His sinless life to God, even dying in God's honor, which latter went beyond what He Himself owed, and so took human honoring of God to the next level. What is more, it is not God who demands the death -- it's actually essential to Anselm's argument that God does not demand Christ's death, because if God did demand it, it would be owed and not supererogatory. Anselm is clear that it is human beings who decided to kill Him. But God foreknew that this would happen, and also that, because His death was made a gift to God, it would be a gift that could make up for even the sins of murderous human beings, and, further, would serve as an example of love for others to follow. And Anselm argues that a just person's satisfaction can, through the bonds of love, be satisfaction for another; so Christ's give can be ours, if we are united with Him in love.

Johnson, I think, sees herself as following in the line of Thomas Aquinas; she usually thinks of herself as a sort of Thomist in a broad sense of the term, and mentions explicitly in the interview that, "People, including Thomas Aquinas, criticized Anselm for making it necessary that Jesus do this, for taking away God’s freedom to be merciful." But while St. Thomas does deny that divine forgiveness depends on satisfaction (God's justice and mercy, unlike our justice and mercy, do not require that there be satisfaction; see, e.g., ST 3.46.2), I don't think this can actually be read as a criticism of St. Anselm, either in reality or in intent. As to intent, I think St. Thomas is really just defending an idea he finds in St. Augustine, and not particularly thinking of St. Anselm at all, although, granted, one could perhaps dispute this. But as to reality, Anselm is also quite clear that divine justice and mercy don't depend on our satisfaction -- our justice does. As Anselm at one point puts it, God had no need to conquer the devil; we did.

Johnson later notes that Anselm doesn't mention the Resurrection, which is true (although some things he says can be said to hint at it); but it's clear from both Anselm's comments at the beginning and Boso's comments in the final chapter, that the whole point of the dialogue is to argue to the God-Man as we find him anticipated in the Old Testament and depicted in the New Testament, and not to assume anything from those more than was strictly required to discuss the problem. Johnson is right that there would be no Christianity without the Resurrection, but Anselm is not explaining Christianity; he's arguing that the Incarnation is a reasonable doctrine. And far from what she suggests, it does not follow from his account that we need only one chapter from each gospel (i.e., the Crucifixion itself); it is essential to Anselm's whole argument that Christ's life was holy so that His death could be a matchless honoring of God.

Fortnightly Book, April 14

I have quite a bit going on the next two weeks, so I thought I'd pick something short, and that is Gunnar's Daughter, by Sigrid Undset.

The first, and always greatest, literary love of Sigrid Undset's life were the Icelandic sagas. She was introduced to Njal's Saga one day, and it changed her life. So when she started writing, she tried to write new sagas, something that would capture the spirit of the sagas in a way that would be more accessible to modern readers. She polished and polished, and in 1905 sent it in to be published, and received a rejection from the publisher that she should not try writing any more historical novels. She went on to write ordinary modern novels, which did well enough, but she didn't let go of the idea. She published Gunnar's Daughter in 1909 and Kristin Lavransdatter in 1921 and 1922, and finally in 1925 reworked her original attempt into The Master of Hestviken. Gunnar's Daughter, though a short work, made her major masterpieces possible by showing that it could be done.

Undset did not become Catholic until 1924. Gunnar's Daughter does not have the increasingly Catholic sensibility her later sagas do, but it does have the same interest in the clash between pagan and Christian views of the world. It takes place in Norway in the late tenth and early eleventh century; Christianity is only just on the scene, and is mostly regarded as a foreign weakness. Haakon the Good had tried and failed to introduce it to Viking society; Olaf Trygvasson has converted to Christianity but is mostly receiving resistance because of it; St. Olaf has not yet started his rocky career. Norway is still very much a pagan society, and it sees the Christian notions of mercy and humility and compassion as subversions of honor. The tale is told in saga style, but Undset is usually thought to have a modern movement in her sights, represented by the literary great of her day, Knut Hamsun, and the various volkish movements, which she saw as a return to the worst features of paganism. The story of Vigdis as she tries to navigate such a pagan world is a story of violence, and rape, and vengeance, and love irrecoverably blasted in its bloom by the frost.

I Also Had My Hour

The Donkey
by G.K. Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.