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God and Goodness:

A Theological Exploration

Setting the Problem

Then someone came to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.” When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said. “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” (Matt 19:16–26)

Jesus does not answer the question as posed. The young man asked him about what good deed he must do to gain eternal life. He seems to be asking a question we might identify as “ethical.” Jesus, however, restates the question in a manner that suggests metaphysical issues are at stake, that is, “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus’ response to his own question, however, makes matters even more confusing because he suggests that the question is not about the “what” but “who.”

I confess I find this exchange between Jesus and the young man, a young man who will turn out to have many possessions, puzzling. But that is probably the way it should be. Iris Murdoch’s observation that “goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture” certainly seems right.¹ Was Jesus trying to help the young man understand how difficult it is to “picture goodness”?² It is tempting to think Jesus was trying to make a philosophical point, but something more seems to be at stake. For Jesus tells the young man if he wishes to enter into life, which seems a more inclusive concept than the young man’s question about “eternal life,” he should keep the commandments. There must be some relationship between goodness and the keeping of the commandments, but it is not immediately clear what that relationship might be.

The young man reasonably responds by asking which commandments he should keep. Given Jesus’ reframing of his question we might have expected Jesus to begin with the first commandment of the Decalogue. For surely God is “the only one who is good.” But instead Jesus names the commandments of the Decalogue that deal with our relations with one another.³ If the only one who is good is God, why does Jesus not begin with the commandment that we should have no other God than the One who brought Israel out of Egypt?

Even more puzzling, Jesus adds to the list derived from the Decalogue that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Paul writes to the church in Rome (Rom 13:8–10) suggesting that the same commandments Jesus commends to the young man are summed up by “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but that was Paul and this is Jesus. Later Jesus is asked by a Pharisee to identify the greatest commandment. Jesus answers with the commandment that we should love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:34–40). And so it seems strange that he makes no such linkage in his reply to this young man. Even if such a linkage had been made one wonders what the connection is between loving God, keeping the commandments, and loving the neighbor.

Matters become even more complex with the young man’s declaration that he has kept all the commandments Jesus enumerates, but he still thinks he must lack something. Jesus tells him to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and then come and follow him. Is this a condition for being good applicable only to this young man? Or is Jesus suggesting anyone who wants to be good must be dispossessed? Moreover what finally does following Jesus have to do with the one alone who is good? Jesus’ declaration to the disciples concerning the status of the wealthy seems to suggest that goodness depends in some way on God, that is, “for God all things are possible.” Is Jesus suggesting that he is the “who” that alone is good?

Christians are sure there is a relationship between God and goodness, but we have never been sure how to spell out that relation. Platonism has often seemed like an attractive way to display the relation between God and goodness. Christians have read Plato’s account of the impossibility of “picturing” the good to be an anticipation of the Christian insistence that only God is good. Plato’s account of the good, moreover, suggests that there is a mystery about how someone may actually be good that suggests something like the Christian understanding of grace.

One cannot help but hear, for example, the Platonic resonances in Augustine when he says in The City of God:

Thus we say that there is only one unchanging Good; and that is the one, true, and blessed God. The things he made are good because they were made by him; but they are subject to change, because they were made not out of his being but out of nothing. Therefore although they are not supreme goods, since God is a greater good than they, still those mutable goods are of great value, because they can adhere to the immutable Good, and so attain happiness; and this is so truly their Good, that without it the creatures cannot but be wretched.⁴

Such a view can and has led some to think that Christians, and in particular Augustine, subordinate all earthly loves, including love of neighbor, to the love of God. However, as Eric Gregory has recently argued, Augustine’s distinction between that which is to be enjoyed and that which is to be used is finally not determined by Augustine’s Platonism, because Augustine’s Platonism is christologically determined.⁵ There can be no love of God, according to Augustine, apart from love of neighbor, but that is not to say, as Gregory observes, “that explicit love of God involves nothing more than love of neighbor.”⁶

But what does it mean for goodness, even understood as love of the neighbor, to be christologically determined? How is the love of God, the love that determines how goodness is understood, inseparable from what it means to “follow me”? To follow Christ, moreover, has meant that Christians have at times found it necessary to sacrifice life itself, all worldly goods including life itself, rather than betray what they took to be necessary to follow Christ. Whatever it may mean to be good from a Christian perspective cannot avoid the possibility of martyrdom.⁷

That there is some essential connection between death and goodness is not a thought peculiar to Christians. Raimond Gaita, a philosopher, who does not share my theological commitments, has argued that there is a necessary connection between how good people regard their deaths and how they understand how they should care for the neighbor. By directing attention to Socrates’ contention that nothing can harm a good man, Gaita develops an account of goodness that challenges modern accounts of altruism that conflate harm and suffering. When harm and suffering are not properly distinguished, Gaita suggests, this leads to a condescending stance toward those whose suffering cannot be eliminated.

Before turning to Gaita, I need to make clear that I am not trying to argue that any satisfactory account of goodness requires belief in God. Such a project I take to be a theological mistake. It is a mistake often made by Christians faced by the loss of the status and intelligibility of Christian convictions in recent times: thus the attempt to show that, if you do not believe in God, the world will go to hell in a hand basket. I think we are long past the point that, as Troeltsch thought, the truth of what Christians believe should depend on Christianity being necessary to sustain the ethos of our “civilization.”

By engaging Gaita, however, I hope it may be the case that the analysis of goodness I develop will be of interest to those who do not share my theological convictions. That I write for myself and Christians, however, is an attempt to respond to a problem identified by Charles Taylor. Taylor observes that Platonism and Christianity, in spite of their considerable differences, shared the view that the good was known through the self-mastery made possible by, in the case of Platonism, reason and, in Christianity, the transformation of the will by grace. Yet each tradition, according to Taylor, has been secularized primarily by being identified with the ideal of altruism.⁸

According to Taylor, most modern people assume that the highest form of ethical idealism is altruism. Because altruism is assumed to be the ideal, selfishness is then assumed to be the lowest form of morality. Such a high view of altruism means that those identified with dedication to others or the universal good are regarded with admiration and even awe. Such dedication has obvious roots, Taylor suggests, in “Christian spirituality,” and no doubt is compatible with Christianity, but “the secular ethic of altruism has discarded something essential to the Christian outlook, once the love of God no longer plays a role.”⁹ Though Taylor does not explicitly draw the conclusion, I think his account of our lives makes clear that the current identification of Christianity with altruism hides from most Christians that they have learned to live as if God does not exist.¹⁰

That is a position I hope to render problematic. My strategy is not to argue that what it means to be good depends on belief in God, but rather to show how goodness and God cannot be distinguished in the life of Jean Vanier. “Showing” is the heart of the matter. Gaita argues that if we are to see what goodness looks like it will depend on the unanticipated ability of some to be present to the afflicted without regret. Without a people who have so learned to be with the afflicted, we are unable to see the humanity that their affliction threatens to hide. I hope to show how such a “seeing” is made possible by the work of Jean Vanier.

Raimond Gaita on Goodness

I am attracted to Raimond Gaita’s account of goodness because his analysis betrays the influence of thinkers from whom I have also learned much, that is, Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, and Iris Murdoch. As might be expected by one so influenced, Gaita develops his case slowly and with attention to what we say. He attends to what we say because there cannot be, according to Gaita, an independent metaphysical inquiry into the reality of good and evil that could underwrite or undermine our most serious ways of speaking.¹¹ So he begins his investigation of what we might mean by good by directing attention to Socrates’ address to the jury in the Apology: “You too gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence and fix your minds on this one truth—that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.”

Gaita observes this passage is seldom discussed by Plato scholars because they assume that Socrates’ claim about harm and what it means to be good is not relevant for understanding Plato’s more developed metaphysics of the good. But Gaita lingers on Socrates’ charge to the jury, arguing that Socrates did not mean that people who live virtuously could not suffer, but that Socrates thought, even in their suffering, people who see their life in the light of a certain kind of love, a love of philosophy, could not be harmed.

Socrates’ understanding of goodness, Gaita suggests, astonished Aristotle, who thought Socrates’ claim to be irresponsible. For Aristotle, who certainly thought a person of virtue could endure great suffering, recognized that there may come a time in the life of a person when their suffering is so great they could not help but think it would have been better never to have been born. Gaita characterizes Aristotle’s reaction to Socrates as the “most serious in the history of philosophy.”¹² Yet Aristotle understood that he could only react to Socrates because no argument in and of itself could count against Socrates’ claim.

Aristotle objected to Socrates’ view because he assumed that at stake was a certain kind of humanism. It is a humanism Gaita characterizes as a “non-reductive naturalism,” which is committed to the view that what a person counts as harm depends on their ethical perspective. Aristotle, in contrast to Socrates, was attempting to defend what Gaita describes as an urbane humanism. From Aristotle’s perspective, a Socratic point of view is but “highminded indecency” if it fails to acknowledge that there are some lives so steeped in appalling and ineradicable affliction that they are irredeemably ruined.

In order to explain why he thinks Aristotle represents such a view, Gaita raises the question of “whether we can see those who have no share in what gives our lives sense as our moral equals.”¹³ We would like to think we do so, but, drawing on Simone Weil, Gaita suggests that our reaction to those who we do not believe share our moral lives is one of condescension. Weil observes:

We have the same carnal natures as animals. If a hen is hurt the others rush up to peck it. Our senses attach to affliction all the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime. Except for those whose soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no-one is conscious of it.¹⁴

Gaita is not questioning the fact that most of us do not believe that the afflicted should be despised or condescended to, but the question is whether we understand ourselves in believing it. He suspects we share with Aristotle the rejection of Socrates claim that a good man cannot be harmed because we do believe it is possible for misfortune irredeemably to ruin a person’s life even if they are virtuous. Such a view, according to Gaita, is based on the “sense of necessity which is internal to the judgment that there are lives such that it would have been better for those who suffer them if they had not been born.”¹⁵

Gaita, however, argues that it is just at this point we see the profound difference between Socrates and Aristotle. For Aristotle did not see, as at least Plato seemed to gesture, that “there was goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice.”¹⁶ Such goodness Socrates not only possessed, but saw in others. In contrast to Aristotle, Socrates thought no amount of suffering could negate the good. Thus Socrates’ claim that a good man cannot be harmed. Such a view of the good, Gaita observes, is essentially mysterious given our limited epistemic and logical powers. The task of philosophy is to provide conceptual space for the acknowledgement of such a mystery.

There are three requirements philosophy must meet, according to Gaita, if a space is to be left for an account of the good that respects this mystery. First, the concept of what is essentially mysterious must be connected to a certain conception of experience; secondly, the concept of experience must be connected with that of being bound in testimony; and, thirdly, “we must give a serious place to the concept of love, Goodness and purity.”¹⁷

All Gaita can do, therefore, is to provide examples that display the pressure to claim as Socrates did that a good person cannot be harmed.¹⁸ The example he provides is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He does so because it is said of her that she showed to those who were appallingly afflicted “a compassion that was without a trace of condescension.” That her compassion was without condescension means Mother Teresa was able to care for the afflicted “without a trace of the thought that it had been better if the person for who she felt compassion had never been born, even if they suffered affliction of the most protracted, severe and ineradicable sort.”¹⁹

Her compassion was a denial that the affliction could, or even at a certain limit must, make a person’s life worthless. Mother Teresa’s love had a purity that can only be characterized as a gift. So it is not an achievement that on Aristotelian grounds might be found in a virtue such as courage, but rather her love is born of a humility that makes it a different order. We stand in awe of such a love, but our wonder is not determined by her achievements but by the light her love throws on the afflicted. “The wonder which is in response to her is not a wonder at her, but a wonder that human life could be as her love reveals it.”²⁰

Gaita argues that it is a mistake, however, to try to retain the sense of what is revealed by the love Mother Teresa exhibits by constructing a metaphysics that would secure it.²¹ He argues his account of her compassion requires no metaphysical underpinning and in particular the “metaphysical underpinning that is often associated with Christianity.”²² He does not deny that Mother Teresa says she would not be able to do what she does were it not for the love of Jesus, but Gaita says he does not even have to ask what that means much less believe it. Rather we can retain a sense of what is revealed by her compassion by attention to like things which are absolutely good. “We know them only as they are revealed in the light of pure love.”²³

That is not, however, Gaita’s last word on the matter. He returns to the question of goodness in his book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice, first published in Australia in 1998.²⁴ He begins a chapter entitled “Goodness beyond Virtue” with a story of his work as a seventeen-year-old as a ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital.²⁵ It was in the early 1960s and the ward was more like a prison than a hospital. The patients were judged incurable so they were often subject to inhumane treatments such a being washed down with mops after they had soiled themselves. Friends and relatives had long ceased to visit them and they were often treated brutishly by those charged with their care.

There were some psychiatrists who worked to improve their condition in the name of the inalienable dignity of even patients. Gaita admired the psychiatrist’s commitment to their patients, but, he observes, it probably did not help to appeal to the inalienable dignity of the patients because such an appeal depends too much on appearances. The appeal to someone’s “dignity” is too easily undermined by the complete loss of any “humanity.”

However, Gaita reports, one day a nun came to the ward whose demeanor toward the patients—the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body—was in marked contrast to even the psychiatrists Gaita admired. For like Mother Teresa she was without condescension.²⁶ She was able to interact with the people suffering from mental illness without any thought that it might be better that they had never been born.

Gaita says he does not know how important it might have been that she was a nun. Her behavior might have been a function of her religious belief but, because he argues beliefs can explain behavior independently of their truth or falsity, nothing follows from how her behavior was connected to her beliefs. More important is how her behavior was shaped by the reality which it revealed, that is, the full humanity of those whose afflictions had made their humanity invisible. Therefore no justification of her behavior is required because “the purity of her love proved the reality of what it revealed.”²⁷

Such love, according to Gaita, depends on the conviction that there exists goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice. True love requires that every human being, as Hannah Arendt argues, be regarded as “infinitely precious.” To learn to love and regard others as infinitely precious, Gaita suggests, requires training exemplified in the lives of the saints.²⁸

Gaita acknowledges that religious traditions have spoken most simply and deeply about such a view by declaring all human beings sacred. But he contends that the language of love nourished by the love of saints can stand independently of speculation about supernatural entities. What grew in one place can flourish elsewhere. He reports, however, that there is one question put to him by a theologian whose answer he is not sure of.²⁹ The theologian asked him whether the kind of love shown by the nun could exist in the prolonged absence of the kind of practices that were part of her religious vocation. In response Gaita says:

Iris Murdoch said that attention to something absolutely pure is the essence of prayer and is a form of love. If she is right, then the answer to Hauerwas’ question will depend on whether with the demise of religion, we can find objects of attention that can sustain that love, or whether they will always fail us. I don’t know the answer.³⁰

Nor do I know the answer. I certainly have no reason to suggest that Gaita’s account of goodness as non-condescending love is unintelligible if God does not exist. But then the question has never been about God’s existence—but ours. Gaita is quite right to think that if Mother Teresa and the nun he encountered at seventeen did not exist we quite literally would be less human. They did exist, however, and it at least makes sense to ask if and how they and the goodness they reveal makes sense if the God they worship does not exist.

That may well be a far too abstract way to put the question. For the God they worship is not some abstraction but rather a reality known though participation in a community across time and space. What I suspect Gaita misses is the role that friendship plays in lives like that of Mother Teresa and the nun he so admires. In particular, Mother Teresa and the nun Gaita admired were not afraid to be befriended by those they served. To suggest why friendship is so important for the development of such goodness I want to introduce another life that exhibits the kind of love Gaita thinks so defining of goodness.³¹ The name of that life is Jean Vanier.

Jean Vanier on Being Befriended by the Disabled

Jean Vanier is the founder of the movement known as L’Arche. L’Arche is now a reality around the world in which people who are called mentally handicapped live with those who are not. A L’Arche home is first and foremost just that, a home. The core members of the home are the mentally handicapped. Those who are not mentally handicapped are called assistants. Assistants do not live in the home to care for the mentally handicapped. Rather they are there to learn to be with the core members in the hope that they can learn to be friends.

In a lecture at Harvard entitled “Through Their Wounds We Are Healed,” Vanier told the story of how he, the son of a prominent family in Quebec, came to live with the mentally disabled. This is his story:

I was thirteen when I joined the British navy during World War II. My adolescent years were taken up in the world of efficiency, controlling and commanding others. I was a technician of destruction. My last ship was the Canadian aircraft carrier, “The Magnificent.” However, after a few years, I felt called by Jesus to take another path, the path of peace. I left the navy and did a doctorate in philosophy in Paris. I started teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto. Then through a priest-friend, I had the good fortune of meeting people with mental disabilities.

In 1964 I took from an asylum two men, Raphael and Philip, and we began to live together. I did not know I was founding the first of many L’Arche communities. I simply felt called to live with these two men who had suffered rejection and a lot of inner pain and perhaps with a few others like them. When I had begun living with them, I soon started to discover the immense pain in their hearts. When we talk of the poor, or of announcing the good news to the poor, we should never idealize the poor. Poor people are hurt; they are in pain. They can be very angry, in revolt or in depression.³²

Vanier wrote his dissertation at the Catholic Institute of Paris on Aristotle. He would later write a quite favorable book on Aristotle’s ethics but he was quite critical of Aristotle’s understanding of his characterization that friendship was possible only between equals.³³ He was critical of Aristotle’s account of friendship because Aristotle failed to provide the resources necessary to account for what Vanier felt living with the mentally disabled had given him. Limited though they may be, unable to read or write, moving slowly or clumsily, many unable to speak, walk, or eat on their own, according to Vanier they have been an incredible gift to him. For if you are open to them, if you welcome them, “they give us life and lead us to Jesus and the good news.”³⁴

Vanier reports that when he began to live with Raphael and Philip he discovered their deep cry for communion. From their loneliness and pain they cried for love and friendship. Such a cry is often present when we visit people in institutions. Through the look in their eyes the men and women say to us, “Will you be my friend? Am I important to you? Do I have any value?” Some may be hiding away in a corner, hiding behind bars of self-hatred, still others banging their heads on the wall, but they are crying for love, friendship, and communion.³⁵

According to Vanier, when these people are welcomed from their world of anguish, brokenness, and depression, when they gradually discover they are loved, they are transformed. Their tense and angry bodies become relaxed and peaceful. Such discoveries Vanier says have helped him understand what it means to live in communion with someone. “Communion means accepting people just as they are, with their limits and inner pain, but also with their gifts and their beauty and their capacity to grow: to see the beauty inside of all the pain. To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.’”³⁶

Vanier confesses that communion did not come easily to him. Taught from an early age to be first, it is not easy to be asked by Jesus to share you life with those who have little culture. Only as he began to live with Raphael and Philip did he discover the hardness in his heart. They were crying out for friendship and Vanier did not know how to respond because of the forces in him that, as he put it, “would pull him up the ladder.” Yet he tells us that over the years, the people with whom he lives in L’Arche have been teaching and healing him.

That he has been undergoing such training leads Vanier to observe that the people who come to L’Arche because they want to serve the poor are only able to stay once they discover that they are the poor. They must discover that Jesus came to bring good news to the poor not those who serve the poor. According to Vanier if you are called to live with wounded people you must discover that God is present in the poverty and wounds of their hearts. He continues:

God is not present in their capacity to heal but rather in their need to be healed. We can only truly love people who are different, we can only discover that difference is a treasure and not a threat, if in some way our hearts are becoming enfolded in the heart of the Father, if somewhere God is putting into our broken hearts that love that is in God’s own heart for each and every human being. For God is truly in love with people, and with every individual human being. This healing power in us will not come from our capacities and our riches, but in and through our poverty. We are called to discover that God can bring peace, compassion and love through our wounds.³⁷

Vanier reports that he is always moved when he reads the Gospels by how Jesus lives and acts, how he enters into relationships with each person he encounters. He asks, “Will you come with me? I love you. Will you enter into communion with me?” But his invitation to follow him is an invitation that forces us to make a choice. If you choose to follow him it means a refusal to go in a different direction. If you choose to follow Jesus you will receive the gift of love and communion, but at the same time you will discover you must say “no” to the ways of the world and accept loss.³⁸

Gaita wonders at the compassion Mother Teresa displays because it is without a trace of condescension. He is quite right, moreover, that to be free of condescension is remarkable because as Weil insists we do despise the afflicted though we are seldom conscious we do so. We despise them I think because, as Vanier suggests, we fear them. We fear and hate them for revealing our own weaknesses, our powerlessness, to “make them strong.” Some are even led to think in the face of our helplessness it would be better that such people not exist. Compassion, particularly when it takes the form of altruism, can become murderous.³⁹

Showings

“The wonder,” that is, the wonder Gaita suggests Mother Teresa should elicit in us, is not to be directed at her but rather is the “wonder that human life could be as her love reveals it.”⁴⁰ Jean Vanier would not wish that we “wonder” or react with awe in response to his life. Any wonder would rightly be in response to the humanity revealed through those who have befriended him. He and his friends reveal our humanity, a goodness, that we could not have known possible without their “showing.”

Jesus did not answer the young man’s question concerning what deed he must do to inherit eternal life. Instead he commanded him to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow him. To learn to follow Jesus is the training necessary to become a human being.⁴¹ To be a human being is not a natural condition, but requires training. The kind of training required, moreover, has everything to do with death. To follow Jesus is to go with him to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.

To learn to live without protection is to learn to live without possessions. To be dispossessed, however, cannot be willed. To try to be dispossessed is to be possessed by the will to be dispossessed. Rather, as Jean Vanier’s life reveals, to be dispossessed comes by being made a friend of those who have no possessions. They have had to learn to live without possessions. Jean Vanier had to learn from them how to live without the protections we think possessions provide. To learn so to live is to learn that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. The worst thing that can happen to us is to never have challenged our presumption that it would be better that Jean Vanier’s friends should have never been born.

Iris Murdoch observes that the “notion that ‘it all somehow must make sense’” seems necessary to preserve us from despair. The difficulty, according to Murdoch, is how to entertain such a consoling notion in a way that does not hide from us the pointlessness of our living. She argues, therefore, that “as soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind.”⁴² I do not think that belief in God somehow makes “it all make sense.” I do believe that the life and work of Jean Vanier makes sense of believing in a God who alone is good.