Abstract
Oliver O’Donovan,
Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology Volume 1
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2013; 138 pp.: 9780802869210, £16.99/$25.00 (pbk)
Having notoriously, in his increasingly demanding works Resurrection and Moral Order, The Desire of the Nations and The Ways of Judgement, made ethics look dauntingly difficult, Oliver O’Donovan sets out, in this first of a projected three-volume sequence, to render ethics elegantly simple. Ethics exists within the triangle of self, world and time. The self is the agent, the world is the context in which that agent acts, and time is the dimension in which the action takes place. The wrong turnings ethics takes come from a misapprehension or neglect of self (mere problem-solving), world (the technological imperative that makes ends fit means rather than vice versa), or time (the idealism that remains abstract and can’t translate into action). The error of non-theological ethics is to attend to these three poles without noticing what lies beyond them.
O’Donovan identifies neither with those who think ethics is another name for theology nor with those who perceive no distinctive Christian ethic. He consciously steers a course between two poles: ‘the statistical columns of the social sciences and a dogmatic theology newly confident on Trinitarian or sacramental foundations’ (p. viii). He constantly returns to his concern to set ethics on appropriate, sustainable grounds. Not content to settle for a simple, working formula (such as doctrine concerns God’s action, ethics concerns human action) he finds pitfalls and qualifications in a host of erudite but occasionally arcane places. Reading O’Donovan is always an exercise in admiration for his range of knowledge, absorption in his deft and incisive ability across Scripture, philosophy and doctrine, and appreciation for moments of insight to which he gives a sub-clause but another writer would give a whole book. Not only the book’s greatest quality but also perhaps a weakness is that it needs reading two or three times to get its measure. Don’t be deceived by its brevity.
I have two forms of discomfort. The first is that it seems a lonely book. I only picked up one reference to ‘church’ – and the term doesn’t appear in the index. O’Donovan believes ‘Moral Theology is a practice located within the church; the church is its form as well as its context, its questions are the church’s questions’ (p. 86). But these convictions don’t seem to play any significant role in the book or in the argument as a whole. Since the terms ‘self’, ‘world’ and ‘time’ largely concern context, it seems incongruous that ‘church’ – which one might imagine incorporates a very great deal of what one might want to say about self, world and time – gets no discussion at all.
The other discomfort concerns the tone of voice. At one point O’Donovan speaks of the pervasiveness of managerial flexibility (rather than principled conduct) resulting in ethics becoming ‘as Mrs Kenneth Kirk is said to have described her husband’s business, a matter of “finding arguments to justify what everyone knows is wrong”’ (p. 88). An excellent observation – indeed one worth more sustained and systematic treatment – is jeopardized both by a lazy assumption that a once prominent Anglican theologian is still widely known, and by an unnecessary employment of an antiquated style of female address whose use is almost bound to antagonize the majority of readers.
Thus a book crammed with rewarding insights, probing questions and promising lines of enquiry seems to hold itself in significant ways in isolation from the debates of the Church at large and from the etiquette of the contemporary academy.