The Pain in the Gift and the Gift in the Pain

Grace, Nature and the Fall

To be a creature is to need God. ⁴ Yet the Christian life, Meilaender underscores, is not simply continuous with our natural inclinations. Rather, we are summoned to a ‘sheer immoderate self-forgetfulness’. ⁵ Genuine human fulfillment is found only in ‘loving union with God’. ⁶ Yet this is properly not a desire to possess but to praise God. ⁷ Discovering that our deepest desire is a desire to worship requires a self-forgetfulness that is not natural to us. ⁸ Sin makes that self-forgetfulness all the more difficult, as we long to dictate the terms of our own happiness rather than receiving it as gift. ⁹ Even once we have recognized that it is God that we seek, our desires remain disordered, and hence the path to the fulfillment of our heart’s desire will often be experienced as a way of painful self-sacrifice. So while God alone can satisfy the deepest desire of our heart, the process of recognizing this and of journeying to our rest in God will often require a great deal of uprooting of desires that often feel like our deepest desires.

Since God truly satisfies the deepest desire of our heart, truly makes us happy, we can say that all seek God, since all seek to be happy. ¹⁰ Yet Meilaender patiently reminds us that there is a distorted way of affirming this truth, one that risks defining God ‘in our terms, after our own image’ by seeing God as that which answers a longing for happiness that is simply built into our nature. ¹¹ One problem he notes here is the assumption that there is anything like a ‘core human experience’ that, however differently expressed in a range of cultural and personal idioms, is fundamentally the same. For this flies in the face of the reality that experience is not independent of the categories, symbols and stories through which it comes into being. ¹² On the other hand, it is in those very particularist categories, symbols and stories through which Christians have grounds for affirming that, in fact, all are indeed engaged, in however inchoate a fashion, in a search for happiness that can properly, from within the life formed by faith, be named as a search for God. ¹³ It is, then, only from within the life of faith that we can properly describe the grace of God as satisfying the deepest desire of the heart. From without, it is the self-sacrifice, the pain, that are visible.

I offer this much, then, simply by way of an attempted restatement of Meilaender’s wisely nuanced stance on this question. I find it deeply insightful. We might, though, puzzle over it a bit further. For it remains unclear what we ought to designate as the ‘deepest desire of our heart’. Is this our desire(s) as created, our desire(s) as fallen, or our desire(s) as re-created through grace? Meilaender’s response is that the grace of God uproots our desires as fallen, and satisfies our desires as re-created through grace. Since we are, though, at once both fallen and in the process of re-creation through the gift of grace, we experience the grace of God both as life-giving and as a kind of death. All this seems fairly clear, and correct. The question of grace’s relation to our created desires is more obscure. It is obscure in part, of course, because we have no unmediated access to pure created nature. Instead, nature as we experience it is always nature-fallen-and-in-the-process-of-being-redeemed-and-drawn-toward-eschatological-consummation. Hence any empirical account of human nature and its desires must necessarily be ambiguous. ¹⁴ Any account we give of created nature is a reconstruction constrained by our efforts simultaneously to do justice to the goodness of creation, the surd of the Fall, and the gratuity of being called into the fellowship of the divine life.

It makes sense, then, that it would be only from the standpoint of faith that we can clearly see what in our created and/or fallen nature is in need of transformation and thus see when to expect grace to come clothed as pain. It makes sense, further, to affirm in light of this that grace cannot but call us to a kind of fulfillment that is at the same time a form of self-sacrifice and unselfing. That said, I think we do well to attend to the ways in which even this process of often painful transformation can be experienced as natural and thus as itself a kind of surprising fulfillment of our natural desires.

This is, in fact, what eudaemonist virtue ethics should lead us to expect, even if it is not Christian. Even where God is not known as the deepest desire of the heart, happiness can be grasped as coming by way of painful upending of desires. Those who do not yet know how to name God as the happiness they seek may grasp well that they may not determine the conditions of their own happiness. I want in what follows to unpack this suggestion. I shall do so, first, by looking in a rather unlikely direction, at the surprising distance the ancient Stoics were able to go in grasping this truth, as well as at their remaining blind spot. Second, I will briefly turn to modern ecological consciousness, and its appreciation of the ways in which ecological processes are sustained only as individuals and life forms successively succumb to disease and death and give way to others. There is a kind of thinking that glosses over conflict and sacrifice, as though an easy harmony lies close to hand of my good with that of my loved ones and that of my community, the world at large, and God’s will and purposes. Conflict and sacrifice are, though, painfully real. To be sure, acquiring the virtues makes acting well enjoyable, free of inner discord and the need for the continual effort involved in continence. ¹⁵ Under favorable conditions, a person’s wellbeing, their sense of satisfaction with their lives and how they are going, will be enhanced by the perfecting of their character and agency. Circumstances, though, are often not favorable. Acting well requires all sorts of things that are painful and difficult, and in that sense requires a kind of self-forgetfulness. A courageous doctor may without hesitation sign up with Doctors Without Borders and travel around the world to care for Ebola patients. But she wishes that the virulent outbreak had not happened, is sorrowed by the sick and dying, and surely is regretful if she herself becomes infected. The virtuous are capable of taking delight in acting well in the midst of difficult circumstances. But to the extent that they are virtuous, they will also regret that circumstances are such as to require those who act well to sacrifice some of the things they care about most deeply for the sake of other such things. ¹⁶ We can rightly say that they have lived well and thus happily, but this is a happiness born of self-forgetfulness, and ‘intermingled with sorrow and vulnerability’. ¹⁷

Stoic Oikeiosis

First, we might say that anyone who has loved knows something of the ‘sheer immoderate self-forgetfulness that characterizes a bond of love’. ¹⁸ The ancient Stoics were particularly attentive to concentric circles of relationality that expand and, in rational creatures, decisively transform the character of the drive for self-preservation. They identified oikeiosis, or appropriation, as an instinctive impulse, common to human beings and other animals, to reach out for that which is necessary for self-preservation. ¹⁹ They approved this impulse as one in accordance with nature. Fascinated by evidence of animal self-sacrifice for offspring and kin, the Stoics saw this as a further development and expansion of oikeiosis rather than as an inhibition of it. However, in human beings, they insisted, ‘reason supervenes as the craftsman of impulse’, and appropriation is qualitatively transformed. ²⁰ For reason grasps that a human being is naturally affiliated not just with her own body and its parts, not just with her own offspring, or families, or peoples, but with all of humankind, all rational creatures, and indeed with the rational order of reality itself. Hierocles captured the dynamic character of appropriation with the image of concentric circles—the mind at the center, then body, family, neighbors, one’s people, nation, humanity itself. He urged that we draw the outer circles closer, coming to regard everyone as kin, sharing in the cosmic reason that orders reality. ²¹ Oikeiosis as care for the self thus takes on a radically extended sense. Animal oikeiosis is not properly contrasted with rational oikeiosis as self-regarding versus other-regarding, for animals, too, instinctively care for their young, and rational appropriation remains a form of care for the (radically expanded) self. ²² But reason does decisively transform oikeiosis, in that it allows us to grasp that what we value and seek to protect in ourselves is finally reason itself, and teaches us to extend that protection to all those who partake in reason. ²³ More intimate relationships are to be transformed by our recognition of a broader kinship. ²⁴ Reason transforms natural affection by leading us to recognize that no one should count for more than another; it is contingency that places us in special relationships, and nearness does not imply greater worth.

The Stoics appreciated that there was nothing easy or automatic about the transformation involved in this advent of rational agency. While a parent may instinctively push her child out of the path of an oncoming vehicle at the cost of her own life, much of the time we are not acting instinctively but are engaged in the muddy process of discernment: Ought I head out to the theater, exhausted and in need of a break as I am? Or ought I rather spend the evening with my kids, playing yet again that intensely boring board game that they love? Or, rather, spend the evening reading the paper that a colleague has just sent me out of the blue, and for which I will otherwise find no time? This process is often difficult, even painful, in multiple dimensions: because it may not be clear to me what should take precedence when; because it may be painful to forego pleasures that I enjoy; because I may be right to think that I have special responsibilities to those near and dear, and indeed right to think that it is good for loved ones to care about themselves being the source of good to one another, because I may find it difficult to accept that here the claim of the distant neighbor ought to prevail, or my desire to be the source of good to those I love ought to be put aside.

The Stoics, then, affirmed the need for a process of transformation that would in some sense painfully uproot natural desires while in another sense satisfy the deepest desire of a rational creature, to align his or her agency with cosmic reason. The process of perfecting human agency is not simply one of continuity but also one of disruption. Hence the need for the disciplined philosophical life. Yet amidst the many insights of the Stoic account of the ways in which the advent of rational agency builds on, while decisively transforming, the behavior of non-rational animals, a blind spot remains. For even as the Stoics saw how challenging and painful the process of rational oikeiosis would be, they were persuaded that there need not, indeed ought not, be anything here that is painful for the sage. For the Stoics, virtue is displayed in preserving mastery over the loss of anything indifferent, even if the presence of these indifferents is preferred as conducive to merely natural well-being. The sage is someone who has grasped that nothing genuinely matters, or has worth, that is not under one’s own control, and who has also grasped that only our character is under our control. But this means that in an important sense the Stoics, for all their appreciation of instinctive self-sacrifice, actually failed to grasp the ‘sheer immoderate self-forgetfulness that characterizes a bond of love’. ²⁵ There was nothing self-forgetful about the sage’s mastery over self and circumstance. The Stoics, then, both grasp and fundamentally do not grasp the ways in which we are called to a form of fulfillment that is at the same time a kind of self-sacrifice and unselfing. And Augustine saw this, decisively rejecting the Stoic aspiration to self-sufficiency and instead acknowledging the permanent neediness of the self for God, together with the recognition that union with God requires the relinquishing of our own plans and projects, our own determination to control the terms of our existence. ²⁶

Embracing Decay, Decline, and Death: Ecological Piety

Yet, while we can certainly diagnose in the Stoic sage a desire to dictate the terms of his own happiness, it does not follow that only a Christian naming of sin and grace makes possible the sacrifice of that desire, too. Think for a moment of an attitude we might see as arising quite naturally from a certain kind of ecological consciousness. From the science of ecology we have learned that decay, decline and death are pervasive features of the natural world and indeed integral to the natural order. While death decisively concludes the individual organism’s efforts at self-preservation and flourishing, the natural systems that sustain life forms require the death of the individuals that compose them. All organisms inevitably depend on and benefit from the deaths of other organisms, and their deaths will in turn benefit the lives of others. ²⁷

In other words, self-sacrifice and loss of self are hardly an exception in the natural world. Quite the contrary; they are constitutive of the ecological process. This does not mean, of course, that natural organisms typically welcome their own decay and death, or their contribution to the web of life. When they do sacrifice their own lives for others, they do so, as the Stoics noted, instinctively, rather than knowingly and voluntarily. Nevertheless, appreciating these ecological realities can be transformative for moral agents, for those who do not simply apprehend and pursue by instinct particular goods but who are able, as Aquinas would put it, to grasp and act for the sake of good in general (universale bonum), who are inclined to good ‘with a knowledge whereby they perceive the aspect of goodness’. ²⁸

This does not mean that rational agents in fact do a good job of deliberating, nor does it mean that all of their desires are pliantly responsive to reason. It does mean, though, that such creatures are potentially capable of grasping their own impending death and the death of all of those near and dear to them as an ecological good. And this means in turn that they are at least potentially capable of affirming a kind of unselfing and self-sacrifice as natural, necessary and proper for all organisms, and thus as something to be accepted and perhaps even celebrated by rational creatures, painful as they are. And we do in fact find persons who embrace and cultivate such attitudes with sheer immoderate self-forgetfulness. ²⁹ Think, perhaps of the nature poet Mary Oliver. Much of her work can be seen as instantiating this ecological poetry, and as having, too, some claim to be a discovery that happiness is found in worship. However deep our misery, she reminds us, each day we encounter a new creation.

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning ³⁰

·

Some who accept finitude and loss of self from such a vantage point may be aspiring to something like Stoic sagehood, wrestling a kind of sovereignty over their existence by way of unblinking acceptance of its finitude and material embeddedness. But then again, they may not claim any such sovereignty, but rather simply affirm the gift as well as the pain of existence, and indeed the pain in the gift and the gift in the pain.

Beyond an Ethic of Continuity

Where do these musings on ancient Stoic oikeiosis and contemporary ecological consciousness leave us? Christians are, I think, still left affirming that it is only from within the life of faith that we can properly describe the grace of God as satisfying the deepest desire of the heart, for it is only within the life of faith, following Christ, that Christians have learned to name God and God’s grace. Yet this does not mean that those who have not yet learned to name God, or who name God differently, will see in this only self-sacrifice and pain, the uprooting of natural desire, and so find it unintelligible.

Neither the Christian nor the non-Christian eudaemonist is left with something usefully described as an ethic of continuity. ³¹ The transformation that perfects the self also requires painfully giving up many things we care about. Learning to love ourselves well (which is, whether recognized as such or not, to love ourselves as God loves us) is a painful as well as a joyous process. Those whose virtues are imperfect find it difficult to act well; we are often at cross-purposes with ourselves. What is required of us is not, though, that we embark on a campaign of self-immolation, nor that we consistently subordinate self-love to respect for the moral law, or the affection for advantage to the affection for justice. ³² For there is no determinately given ‘love of self’ that is in need of being sacrificed or subordinated. Rather, there are a host of particular loves that point us in every which way: a love of long conversations over breakfast, of getting up at the crack of dawn to write, of working together to protest injustice, of family reunions, of welcoming strangers. There are many ways in which, in our attempts to hold all of these together coherently in a well-lived life, we may fail to love self and neighbor as God loves; we may in some senses love ourselves too little as well as too much. There is in the process involved in acquiring the virtues and learning to live well no baptism of some omnipresent, indefatigable, natural self-love, but rather an ever-deepening pursuit of the good, of that worth giving everything up for and over to, in the course of which all of our loves are transformed. Practical thinking is, as Talbot Brewer suggests, ‘a continuous straining to see the point or value of activities that are already underway, including one activity that is always implicitly underway as long as any practical question is alive for us—that is, the activity of attempting to live a fitting human life’. ³³ Our way of engaging in this activity constantly changes, as does our grasp of its point: ‘the engagement itself tends to produce a clearer and more ample appreciation of the goods internal to the activity, hence of what would count as a proper expression of the appeal of these goods’. ³⁴

Where God’s grace has brought the love that is charity, this activity is undertaken out of love for God and in response to God’s loving self-communication and invitation to friendship. ³⁵ Only grace makes this possible. Even without the eyes of faith that grasp the goodness we strain to see as the goodness of God, though, it is possible to affirm the goodness and not just the painfulness of such an un-selfing, self-forgetful love, and to aspire to live such a love, however imperfect and partial both the aspiration and its realization. We may find what Barth called ‘secular parables’ of faith in every such love and in every such acceptance that we cannot dictate the terms of our own happiness, only receive it as gift, even when natural piety knows not how to name the giver. It has been part of the genius of Gilbert Meilaender’s writings, particularly in the arena of bioethics, that they succeed in articulating his characteristically dialectical wisdom in ways that are, in their very unapologetic confessionalism, capable of evoking the echo of secular parables, capable of arousing, in those who have not yet learned to name God’s grace, the desire to have their desires both uprooted and fulfilled by something the terms of which they cannot dictate.