Abstract
In this important, ambitious book, Joshua Hordern argues for a positive understanding of the affections and for their essential functions in political life. His argument throughout is theological and apologetic. What he says positively is, in this reviewer’s judgment, persuasive; what he says negatively, for instance, against virtue theory, seems less compelling. And one wishes his exposition were more elegant and less lumberingly academic. Nevertheless, the positive argument deserves wide attention.
The first chapter introduces us to the emerging philosophical and scientific consensus that emotions are intelligent appraisals of reality that manifest intentionality and are open to rational critique. This ‘cognitivist turn’ rejects any purported sharp distinction of reason and emotion. Martha Nussbaum’s work provides an example of the relocation of emotions into political thought; she famously makes compassion pre-eminent. When we recognise our fellow-citizens as vulnerable, she says, we are led to ‘mature interdependence’ (p. 45). Hordern’s detailed exposition and critique show how his alternative, which will make joy the most important affection, can just as well serve political thought (and life). Here we see his apologetics at work as well: Nussbaum, also famously, has claimed that Christian thought undermines political life. Hordern shows otherwise.
The second chapter, the conceptual core of the book, develops a positive theological account of the affections. They are ‘participative beginnings of understanding’ (p. 62). We don’t begin without affections and then acquire them; we are born into a context wherein they are given to us—a human context where people have common objects of love (which Hordern translates ‘value’). This is the affective analogue, rarely identified, of the now-common observations that: we don’t start as individuals who enter into communities; and we don’t start as agents who then take moral principles and deduce consequences for actions. Affections are an ineluctable aspect of our character as social beings. There are things which our affections grasp before we engage in discursive reason; these ‘values appear to the affections as the first ethical facts, the half-light of ethics’ (p. 77, emphasis original). They are not conclusions of reason, yet neither are they devoid of reason. When shared, they are ways people ‘engage with and awaken together to the world as it appears to a community’ (p. 81). They require discussion; through discussion they may be verified or altered.
If there is such a thing as ‘affective understanding’, ‘a worldly, half-lit penury’, then there would have to be ‘an intelligible relationship’ between what affections give us, namely ‘a changing worldly, shared order of value (ordo amoris)’ and the cosmos itself—‘the world as it is’ (p. 81). The possibility of such a relationship calls forth in us ‘epistemological humility’—the recognition that our values are but the beginnings of understanding, and even as beginnings are subject to revision and change. But Hordern is not merely saying that there is an objective moral order out there to which our affections can point in some dim way. Rather, Hordern draws the much more radical conclusion that, since our affections can grasp the cosmos at all, the cosmos itself must be permeated by affectivity! He notes approvingly Augustine’s belief that the current penury of our affections—that they are merely the beginnings of understanding—is a consequence of the fall; that both ‘pristine’ creation and the hoped-for redeemed creation will be shot-through with affective knowledge. That knowledge is joy. The best parts of the book are Hordern’s scriptural exegeses on this theme.
But before we return to that joy, there is much work to do with regard to our fallen world. We need to answer such questions as: What help do our affections give to our political existence? The answer has to do with the stability they can provide within the moral subject. This stability is rooted in memory—theologically, in ‘remembered participation in pristine, fallen, and new creation’ (p. 119). Chapters 3 and 4 work through the details. An exemplar is given in the festivals of Israel—‘common practices’, Hordern says, that ‘coordinate’ ‘social, cultic, and political institutions’ (p. 147). In these festivals, affections play the role of evaluating things of communal concern. One finds a variety of such affections, such as fear, shame, hatred, and more, but the central affection is joy. The
Hordern also helpfully exegetes Lucan texts to show how Jesus is ‘the representative leader’ who will fulfil ‘institutional types and practices’ as he inaugurates ‘a new institutional representation in accord with the law of God’ (p. 159). Affections abound in the New Testament as well; joy again is central. Jesus fulfils and exceeds expectations, we might say, enabling his people to ‘form intersubjective bonds of affection as they recognise together the dawning of the great King of the kingdom who vindicates’ the moral order (p. 160; although I’m not sure we should say the king has a dawn). These theological insights aid the understanding of political loyalty. With joy as both the first and the last word of our moral and political life, we can in the meantime have proximate loyalties and hopes that need not bear ultimate weight.
Hordern thus speaks of ‘locality’—that broad group of affections for what is near and known to us. He demonstrates that Christian political theology need not lead to the erasure of less-than-cosmic loyalties. Although he does not often cite Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, his argument in effect provides the affective analogue to O’Donovan’s treatment there of empire. Hordern’s more immediate targets are cosmopolitanism and, in general, the claims that local affections must inevitably give way to wider and wider social configurations. He thinks that such movements of thought have done harm in our politics today—that they are the deep causes of a general sense of alienation from politics and what is called the ‘democratic deficit’. In an extended dialogue with Habermas, Hordern shows appreciation for Habermas’s refusal of ‘the position of a transcendent theorist’ (p. 209) and his working out of a place for the local. But the affections, Hordern insists, do not move in ‘abstract ways’ but are ever connected to ‘objects’ and are ‘mediated by memory, tradition, and familial life’. The ‘rootedness of participative affectivity’ is ‘the essence of political solidarity’ (p. 232).
Chapter 5 is a rousing theological call for the renewal of political affections. Here, Hordern engages with Bernd Wannenwetsch’s Political Worship—an earlier volume in the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics Series that Hordern’s volume now joins. He also takes on Stanley Hauerwas at length. The sections of this chapter are focused and clearly argued. We see how Christian practices (a word which, alas, Hordern now wants to eschew, although he has used it earlier in his Deuteronomic exegesis) can be a gift to our earthly political societies. As he comes to the end, his text moves into elegance, and finally becomes sheer praise. It is beautiful.
This reviewer is not competent to judge claims made about Nussbaum or Habermas or, indeed, a number of the other writers who have arguments that Hordern considers and differs with, but I could not shake the feeling that he is not altogether fair to virtue ethics. He seems at one point to assume that virtues always involve the will (p. 113), whereas, in the usual understanding, one virtue (justice) is taken as an excellence of the will, the other virtues being excellences of other human capacities. The archetypal excellences of the affections, temperance and courage are precisely affections that are operating well. There is no need to assume that that means the agent has ‘pleasurable feelings’, as Hordern seems to take Aristotle to say (p. 67). Nor is there a need to construe virtue ethics as anthropologically positive, as if it necessarily claimed we just have to work harder to become better human beings. On the contrary, Aquinas’s claim that there are infused cardinal virtues is the claim that excellences of things like courage and justice can be God’s gifts to human beings. I think the key to virtue ethics is the definition of happiness as ‘activity in accordance with virtue’, i.e. with human excellence as a whole. We are happy as we live well as human beings; that living well is a synthesis-in-act of affection, will and intellect taken up (yes) into the joy of the
It is good to remember that the positives are more important than the negatives. What we affirm is more important than what we deny. To take this stance is to embrace ‘epistemological humility’ and to realise that what we see as good is a bit more likely to be correct than what we reject as wrong. Hordern’s negative disputations may not be decisive, but what he has positively seen, and what he would positively affirm, is very good indeed. May there be a recovery of joy, for the good of the church, the world, the state, the town, the neighbourhood, the family, and for each of us as beings who, please God, may join the cosmic choir of praise.