Abstract
Nicholas Wolterstorff has presented an account of justice that has important implications for disability. He does not ground rights in intellectual capacities. Instead, rights are justly owed by virtue of the inherent worth bestowed by God to humanity, thereby protecting those with severe intellectual disabilities. Wolterstorff’s aesthetics, I claim, offer a vision for how these rights are rendered. By describing art as a social practice wherein justice can be rendered, and by describing justice as essential to Christian liturgy, Wolterstorff allows liturgy to be a site where justice can and ought to be rendered to the disabled. Liturgy then becomes a social practice where one can learn to see those with disabilities differently, not as inherently ugly but as beloved by God and owed certain goods by right.
Introduction
This article hopes to show the relevance of aesthetics for disability ethics. I will develop this in critical conversation with the American Reformed philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. While Wolterstorff does not often directly engage with questions of disability, a central aim of his account of justice is to affirm and protect the rights of those with limited capacities for reason (e.g., infants, the elderly, and those with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive conditions). When taken together with his aesthetics, Wolterstorff’s coordination of beauty and justice offers a way to render to humans with disabilities what they are owed through the practices of the church.
Before proceeding something must be said about what my desiderata are for considering disability. Quite simply, to echo Hans Reinders, I aim to say that people with intellectual disabilities are people like other people. 2 Any account of anthropology, beauty or justice which fails to affirm this, or the benefits which follow from this affirmation, will be deficient. As for what constitutes a disability, I am convinced by Elizabeth Barnes’s defense of disability as ‘mere difference’ rather than ‘bad difference’. 3 This means disability is a value-neutral category stating that one has a minority body, not a defective body. 4 This is not to say that humans with disabilities do not suffer. Disabled bodies, like any other body, will sustain ‘local bads’, but this does not mean that the person counts her life as a ‘global bad’. 5 In fact, the disabled report high levels of satisfaction and happiness in their lives. A majority report that they would not have their disability taken away if this was possible, and a majority of those would say that the main reason is the various social pressures and prejudice they encounter. 6 The desiderata I seek in conversation with Wolterstorff are, then, a) an account of justice that renders distinctions between different sorts of human beings—for example, ‘abled/disabled’—theologically insignificant, b) one that supports the claim that humans with disabilities have the same claims to justice that any other human does, and c) an account of aesthetics that funds practices which sustain a) and b).
On Connections Not Immediately Obvious
Before proceeding, it is important to briefly show what beauty has to do with disability and what it has to do with ethics, connections that are not immediately obvious. My claim here is that judgments about the relative goodness of disabled bodies are, in an important sense, also aesthetic judgments.
First, what of ethics and beauty? In her short and illuminating book On Beauty and Being Just, philosopher Elaine Scarry perceives a formal connection between justice and beauty. 7 She argues beauty draws us toward justice because there is an analogy between the symmetry which constitutes beauty and the equality constitutive of justice. Being able to perceive beauty entails being able to discern justice. Injustice is disunity, inequality and asymmetry in social relations; beauty is unity, equality and symmetry in aesthetic relations. 8 For Scarry, being struck by beauty leads to the pursuit of justice while proper vision allows one to see the ugliness of injustice. While one can remain skeptical about how Scarry draws this out, she helpfully shows that aesthetics and ethics are not foreign inquiries, but can be considered together. This has not been lost on Reformed thinkers. In this treatise The Nature of True Virtue, Jonathan Edwards—another sort of Platonist like Scarry—casts virtue as moral beauty and virtuous acts as tending toward harmony and symmetry. 9 Contemporary examples can also be given. American Presbyterian theologian Belden Lane develops resources from the aesthetics of Calvin and Edwards to develop environmental ethics, while South African Reformed theologian John W. de Gruchy has used art and theological aesthetics to articulate a theology of discipleship and public witness. 10 Fruitful ethical inquiry can come from considering beauty, and Reformed theologians have pursued this.
Wolterstorff—himself a thinker from the Reformed tradition—also connects beauty and justice, albeit through a focus on the social practices annexed to art and their connection to social critique instead of the more ontological focus Edwards and Scarry desire. 11 The value of Wolterstorff’s aesthetics is that by privileging social practice he avoids grounding beauty in analogical claims that can obscure the beauty and humanity of the disabled. 12 This is to say, by looking to disinterested contemplation or analogies between creaturely and transcendental beauty, traditional aesthetics risks setting up a hierarchy of human beauty and perfection within which humans with disabilities are at a disadvantage, being judged as disfigured or grotesque. 13
While a connection between ethics and aesthetics may be discerned, the link between these topics and disability is likely harder to see. However, Roman Catholic moral theologian Miguel Romero draws a direct connection between considerations of beauty and disability. Romero is worried that too many theological anthropologies presume an idealized human person who is neither vulnerable nor dependent when they consider the human good.
14
Such accounts necessarily assume that disability is ‘ugly’ since it is a corruption of creaturely goodness. As Romero formulates such a view,
since beauty is a matter of a thing’s integrity (or perfection) and proportion (or harmony), and since ‘disability’ refers precisely to those bodies that manifestly lack some manner of perfection and harmony, it follows that the bodies of disabled persons are objectively ugly.
15
Many theologies, in short, assume that disabled bodies are corrupted and that therefore they are ugly. The value judgment about the body’s goodness is at the same time a value judgment about the body’s beauty.
Romero finds a response to this view in Thomas Aquinas, for whom a thing’s beauty and fittingness must be seen from the perspective of the artisan who creates it. 16 A saw made of glass may be more beautiful than a saw made of rusty iron in the sense that glass is more pleasing to the sight than rusted iron, but a glass saw is not fitting for the purpose saws are made and used for. So too with humans, whose bodies are inherently vulnerable, dependent and variously defective. Despite these imperfections, human bodies have an apt disposition because an invulnerable body would be an obstacle to humanity’s final end: the resurrection of the dead. God thus created humans with bodies that are vulnerable yet fitting, defective yet apt, decaying yet beautiful from the perspective of the artisan who is their origin and end. The invulnerable body, like the glass saw, is seemingly more beautiful but is unbefitting for that which it was created for. Aquinas thus shifts consideration of beauty from the created thing and its accidental features to the creator who is its origin and end. This calls us to see disabled bodies as God does, as beautiful precisely because they are vulnerable and dependent, a condition that is shared not just by the disabled but by all. Romero helps reveal the relevance of aesthetics for theological considerations of disability. What he does from a Roman Catholic perspective in conversation with Aquinas, I hope to do from a Reformed perspective in conversation with Wolterstorff.
Let me conclude this section by making the connections between aesthetics, disability and ethics more explicit. Stanley Hauerwas and Hans Reinders show how liberal societies presume the lives of the disabled to be more difficult, and thus less worth living than the lives of the abled. 17 This is a claim about the goodness of disabled lives and is thus also an aesthetic judgment. This point is brought out explicitly in Reinder’s book Disability, Providence, and Ethics, where he explores narratives of humans with disabilities and those who live with them, showing how they came to renarrate their stories from ones of tragedy to ones of grace and transformation. 18 I interpret Reinders here as showing how individuals came to regard humans with disabilities not as inherently difficult and ugly, but as sites of grace and beauty just as much as so-called ‘abled’ bodies.
Such aesthetic judgments of bodies and their goodness are important in a society that increasingly wants to do away with those whose lives are deemed ugly and necessarily full of suffering. The presumption that disabled lives ought to be judged negatively leads to the conclusion that the prevention of disabled lives is the more ‘ethical’ decision, simultaneously implying that parents who choose to raise disabled children have made an immoral choice. Hauerwas deconstructs these presumptions, showing how human life is inevitably shot through with suffering, whether one’s body is ‘abled’ or ‘disabled’. The problem Hauerwas perceives is that the suffering experienced by the disabled is seen as being of a different order, thereby creating a language of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’. 19 This works to narrate the lives of the disabled as tragic, their bodies as ugly in relation to ‘us’ who are ‘abled’. 20
I want to stress here the importance of aesthetic categories such as narration, perception and sight to the sort of social criticism I have been recounting. For Hauerwas and Reinders, our assumptions about the disabled create a narrative in which we perceive the lives of the disabled as lives of suffering, simultaneously being blinded to the suffering experienced by those who are ‘abled’. The Christian narrative, Hauerwas says, shifts our sight to see the world as it really is and the disabled and abled alike as we really are: as creatures who are necessarily dependent on one another and God. 21 How we regard lives and perceive bodies is connected to judgments both aesthetic and ethical. The task of a Christian ethic of disability is, then, to see humans with disabilities correctly within the Christian narrative as subjects of the love of Christ, who regards them as beautiful.
Wolterstorff on Beauty and Justice
The preceding section argued that aesthetics is an important concern for disability ethics. Judgments of beauty are also judgments of goodness, and negative aesthetics judgments of disabled bodies lead to problematic outcomes. I will now turn to Wolterstorff, showing that his coordination of beauty and justice offers important resources for considering disability.
Justice
For Wolterstorff, justice is constituted by inherent rights. A society is just insofar as those who participate in it enjoy those goods which they have a right to. 22 Rights are grounded in respect for a person’s worth and dignity. A just relationship is one in which the goods to which an individual has a right to by virtue of her inherent worth are rendered. The goods to which humans have rights are ‘all goods in one’s life or history, states or events that contribute to making one’s life and history a good life and history’. 23 These goods include not only those which contribute to an experientially satisfying life, as some eudaemonists claim, but those which contribute to a flourishing life; for instance, grieving can be considered a good to which one has a right. 24
Wolterstorff does not think that a secular grounding of rights is possible and thus argues for a theistic grounding. His reason for this is important for my purposes. Wolterstorff believes that most accounts of rights cannot ultimately account for infants, the elderly or the disabled. Dignity-based and social contract accounts alike start from human capacities, while social practical views such as that of Richard Rorty risk making the recognition of rights dependent on contingent practices. 25 Many theistic groundings of rights fall into similar faults. For instance, accounts of rights as grounded in imago dei too often end up locating the imago with human capacities such as reason or will, to the exclusion of those with limited rational capacities, such as humans with intellectual disabilities. 26
For Wolterstorff, the worth from which rights arise is bestowed by God’s love and attachment. Rights are inherent to human beings, but they are inherent only because they have been bestowed by God. Wolterstorff finds the roots of this in the Old and New Testaments. Isaiah or Amos’s jeremiads on behalf of the poor belie a presupposition that the poor, widow, orphan and resident alien have inherent dignity bestowed by the LORD and therefore have rights that are not being honored. 27 The Gospels are to be seen within this tradition, with Matthew 12 and the Magnificat (Luke 1) being in the prophetic tradition of justice. 28 In both testaments, ‘righteousness’ is roughly the same as ‘justice’: the state of being in a normative social relationship by rendering to the other what is owed by right due to the dignity bestowed by God.
I must note that appeals to right-language to protect the disabled generally, and Wolterstorff’s in particular, have been the subject of criticism. Such critiques come from those who argue that an account of justice as ‘right-order’ is superior to ‘rights-based’ accounts such as Wolterstorff’s. To put it simply, right-order theorists—such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan—claim justice is constituted by a rightly ordered society wherein each is given her due by virtue of the relationships within which she stands. The right-order theorists claim that an understanding of justice as inherent rights emerges either in the Enlightenment or in late medieval nominalism. The result of conceiving justice as inherent rights, they continue, leads to an asocial individualism, wherein individuals are bearers of rights whose claims come into conflict when these rights are opposed. Think of debates surrounding abortion, where claims to the rights of the fetus come into conflict with the claims of the mother, or of American political debates, where claims of rights to social services come into conflict with claims of rights to religious liberty.
Hauerwas is particularly critical of Wolterstorff’s proposal because Hauerwas thinks justice for the disabled is more likely to be sustained by communities living out scriptural narratives of care for the lowly than through a theory of inherent rights. 29 Hauerwas’s worry is that Wolterstorff is insufficiently Christian, looking for an account of justice to make sense of scripture rather than focusing on the practices of care for the disabled which emerge in communities shaped by the biblical narrative. Out of these practices and narratives, right-order and thus justice emerge, not the other way around.
Reinders is skeptical of rights-based accounts for the disabled in general because he is worried they can only do so much. Rights can restrain wrongdoing and sustain calls for social distributed goods; but rights have little power to enable humans with disabilities to fully participate in society, to establish and maintain friendships and a sense of belonging. 30 What humans with disabilities need is not just the protection of rights through social constraint, but the positive relationships which social belonging brings. Reinders’ book is thus a call for friendship with disabled humans which, as Hauerwas notes, brings Reinders into line with something like the right-order account of justice. 31
As the allegations against Wolterstorff go, rights-talk is too often grounded in human capacities at the risk of excluding the disabled, is limited in what goods it can offer humans with disabilities and misconstrues where true justice emerges. My goal is not to defend Wolterstorff, but his genealogy of rights being grounded in scriptures does much to assuage worries of being reliant on an individualistic account of rights foreign to the Christian narrative. I will also note that despite his protestations, Wolterstorff’s account ends up looking like the sort of right-order account Hauerwas and others want, albeit a low-flying one, with Wolterstorff repeatedly describing justice as ‘normative social relationships’. 32 What’s more, Justice ends with Wolterstorff’s worry that his theistic grounding of rights may not be acceptable in the public square, only being applicable within the social practices of religious communities. 33 If justice is a right relationship that takes place within a community’s social practice then Wolterstorff’s view of justice is a low-flying right-order account. Rights and right-order come packaged together rather than being fundamentally opposed. I have made what may seem like a digression in order to suggest that Wolterstorff’s view of rights is not rotten at the start concerning humans with disabilities and that it is closer to the sort of view Hauerwas and Reinders want despite what Wolterstorff may think.
Beauty
Wolterstorff has been concerned with aesthetics throughout his career, with two important early works as well as his more recent Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art. 34 Throughout Wolterstorff’s treatment of aesthetics is a critique of seeing beauty in terms of disinterested contemplation. Wolterstorff terms this the ‘Grand Narrative’ of art, which springs from the seventeenth century and from aestheticians—such as Kant, Hegel and Herder—who see the fulfillment of art in the viewer’s disinterested appreciation of a work of art. 35 This narrative, Wolterstorff argues, renders many forms of art unintelligible. It doesn’t make much sense to disinterestedly contemplate social protest art, memorial art, or art for religious veneration. All of these forms of art involve people engaging with the art interestedly and actively, not disinterestedly and passively. Art is thus best understood in terms of social practice, meaning what is primary to considerations of art and beauty is what people do with works of art. Even works meant for disinterested contemplation, such as the master painting displayed on its own in a museum gallery, is caught up in any number of social practices: the social practice of painting, of displaying the work, and of viewing the work. All art is social practical, and considering judgments of beauty apart from social practice does injustice to many forms of art.
For Wolterstorff, art’s social practical nature is connected to the pursuit of justice. If one focuses on fine art or the Grand Narrative, then the connection between art and justice will be difficult to discern, but it becomes clearer with respect to art’s social practical nature. Recall that for Wolterstorff, to do justice is to render what is owed to another by right. Social protest art plays into this by calling attention to where justice has not been rendered and calling for justice to be given. Memorial art does this by rendering the honor that is due to some person or persons. 36 Likewise, from an Orthodox perspective, art for veneration renders due honor to Christ or the Saint in question when the devotee engages with the art. 37 Wolterstorff finally notes work songs as a case where, by singing, workers affirm their dignity amid conditions that are often oppressive and demeaning. 38 What Wolterstorff’s examples show is a connection between the social practices of art and justice. Through practices of art and beauty, communities render to others what is due by right.
What, then, is owed by right to the disabled and how can aesthetics render this? We can enumerate any number of goods here which contribute to the flourishing of humans with disabilities and to which they have a right: non-discrimination, medical care, etc. But let me focus on a more basic claim: that distinctions between the abled and disabled are theologically insignificant, that judgments of disabled lives as ugly are thus unjust, and that this places a claim on Christian communities to render friendship and fellowship as goods that are justly due to humans with disabilities. 39
The advantage of Wolterstorff’s aesthetics is that he focuses on social practice rather than fine art, disinterested contemplation, or proportion. Traditional aesthetics, including what often goes by the name ‘theological aesthetics’—with its emphasis on proportion, disinterestedness, and analogies between transcendental and creaturely beauty—risks setting up a hierarchy of beauty and goodness wherein the value of humans with disabilities must be affirmed despite their disabilities. 40 Rather than starting from a theory of beauty that must be applied, Wolterstorff focuses on social practices and what judgments of beauty and justice emerge from these practices.
Liturgy and Aesthetic Judgment
Where Wolterstorff’s coordination of beauty and justice points is to the church’s foundational social practice: liturgy. By liturgy, I am not just referring to what happens in the Sunday service of word and sacrament, or just to the liturgical arts (i.e., vestments, architecture, music etc.) but to how the various liturgical practices that Christians engage in shape their communal life together. Wolterstorff has turned to liturgy in recent years, seeing it as a topic neglected by analytic philosophers of religion. 41 Key to his treatment of liturgy is its connection with justice. This should not come as a surprise since, as discussed above, Wolterstorff’s social practical view of artistic practices is connected to judgments of justice. If liturgy can be described as an ‘art’ in Wolterstorff’s terms—which it can be given liturgy is a social practice involving an enacted script, music, and other artistic forms—then it entails the possibility for the pursuit of justice. 42
When it comes to Christian liturgy, justice is not just a possibility but a necessity according to Wolterstorff. He notes that scripture often makes the claim that ‘liturgical actions lose their authenticity when those who participate in the liturgy do not practice and struggle for justice’. 43 Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah alike tell of God’s distaste for sacrifice, feasts and ceremonies apart from concomitant care for widows, orphans, aliens and the poor. 44 The scriptural connection between liturgy and justice is not ‘both/and’, but ‘not/unless’. 45 The presence of injustice in the lives of worshippers vitiates liturgical practice. Wolterstorff makes this move for three reasons: to make sense of scriptural jeremiads against worship without justice such as those mentioned above; to interpret appeals in liturgical scripts that call worshippers to emulate God’s holiness; and to resist temptations within religious communities to privilege a focus on either liturgy or social justice at the expense of each other. 46
But what of justice in liturgy? Wolterstorff does well to note how right worship is complicated by its practitioners’ participation in injustice, but can justice and injustice be rendered within liturgical practice? Certainly, as Nancy Eiesland notes, public worship is frequently a site where injustices such as exclusion, inaccessibility, and false connections between sin and disability occur. 47 In addition to these sorts of injustices, Wolterstorff highlights how enactments of justice and injustice are present within liturgy. His main example is the remembrance of the crucifixion in Christian liturgies. 48 Christ’s crucifixion is present as an injustice in scripture, an example of an innocent man being sent to a humiliating death by an unjust empire. This injustice is recounted regularly in eucharistic liturgy and annually during Holy Week, where the entirety of the passion is recounted in many Christian traditions. Injustice is performatively enacted in these liturgies.
In dialogue with James Cone, Wolterstorff goes on to explore how the centrality of the crucifixion in African-American preaching and hymnody leads to an identification with Christ’s suffering on the cross. 49 The crucifixion is so prominent in African-American liturgies, Cone shows, because the daily experience of African-Americans led them to see Christ as a victim of injustices similar to the injustices of the African-American experience. Christ’s crucified body must be seen as identified with the ‘“recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree’. 50
Note how the focus on the crucifixion leads to a new way of seeing. In light of the experience of injustice against African-Americans, the liturgical focus on Christ’s crucified body leads to an identification with his plight. What Wolterstorff suggests is that there is a kind of justice rendered here. Identifying the injustice of lynching with the injustice of the cross rightly affirms that the experiences of African-Americans are real injustices and presents Christ as a liberator from said injustices. 51 This is not to say that African-American suffering is valorized and redeemed as a way of imitating Christ, but that anti-black violence is rightly seen as an injustice. Note that this is an aesthetic judgment, a way of seeing one injustice as identified with another, and that this judgment occurs through the aesthetic social practices constitutive of Christian liturgy. Justice is rendered to African-Americans in that their suffering is rightly seen for what it is, and this judgment proceeds from singing hymns, engaging with sermons, and participating in other liturgical practices. The social practice of liturgy becomes a site where justice is rendered and injustice perceived. The good that is rendered is a kind of aesthetic judgment—i.e., seeing a lynched black body as the crucified body—and this good is mediated through aesthetic social practices.
A similar movement can occur concerning disability. Consider the Eucharist. As Reinders notes, this practice in particular is a site where we learn to see differently.
52
Through receiving Christ’s body and blood, communicants recognize themselves as a people dependent on God who have incorporated together into the crucified and risen body of Christ. The Eucharist thus enacts a different aesthetic judgment, a different way of seeing humans with disabilities than the one society inculcates communicants into, a way that is justly owed because of the sorts of creatures they are: humans with inherent worth and dignity. Hauerwas sounds a similar note, claiming that the presence of humans with disabilities in the church’s life and liturgy positively challenges the church’s perspective of humans with disabilities. As he puts it,
We thus learn that we can take the time for someone who does not talk well to read Scriptures. We can take the time to walk slowly together to the communion table when one of our own does not walk well or not at all. We can take the time to design our places of gathering so that they are open to many who would otherwise not be there.
53
The presence of the disabled within the church’s life teaches the church a different way of seeing, drawing the lives of the abled and disabled together into a pattern of life which circumvents the assumption that humans with disabilities lead ugly lives that we would rather not have comingled with ours.
What Reinders and Hauerwas both want is an account of liturgy that teaches a new way of seeing the disabled, which renders an aesthetic judgment. What Wolterstorff offers is an account of how this occurs. Through liturgy, a social practice is engaged in. Like other social practices that involve aesthetics, justice can be rendered through liturgy. In fact justice must be rendered for a liturgy to count as Christian on Wolterstorff’s view. In addition to the worship due to God, this justice may involve seeing humans with disabilities in a new light. The aesthetic judgment that humans with disabilities are not inherently ugly, and that they are due certain goods because of this judgment (e.g., friendship, certain rights and privileges), is one worshippers may come to see through liturgical practice. Liturgy is a social practice that can tend toward justice in this sense.
Mary McClintock Fulkerson offers concrete examples of liturgies that tend toward rendering justice to the disabled. She writes of Good Samaritan United Methodist, a church whose worship seeks to honor the skills and needs of people with disabilities. 54 McClintock Fulkerson writes of this in terms of ‘noticing’. Noises and movements generally considered ‘disruptive’, for instance, are noticed as participation in the liturgy; others count them as signs of faith. The parish is able to see the disabled in their midst anew: as rightful members of the congregation, each participating in the life of faith in their own way. McClintock Fulkerson goes on to claim the presence of those with disabilities in worship allows theologians to see ‘wounds’ in certain understandings of Christian faith which rest on intellectual ability. In Wolterstorff’s idiom, the liturgical practice of Good Samaritan UMC renders justice to the disabled by counting them as full members of the community with active faith of their own, and by questioning theological conceptions that fail to render what is due to the disabled. McClintock Fulkerson’s ethnographic work shows that more determinate applications of Wolterstorff’s insistence that humans with disabilities are owed justice and that this is rendered in the church’s social practices must come from ecclesial communities where humans with and without disabilities share their lives together. Since—as Wolterstorff tells us—liturgy is a social practice, then it must emerge from communities of practice.
Conclusion
What I have shown is the relevance of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s coordination of beauty and justice for disability ethics. Miguel Romero has introduced beauty as a category for disability ethics. What he has done from a Catholic and classical perspective in conversation with Aquinas, I have tried to do from a Reformed and social practical perspective in conversation with Wolterstorff.
What Wolterstorff offers is an account of justice and rights which is insistent that humans with cognitive disabilities have rights and are owed justice because of their inherent bestowed worth, and an account of aesthetics that stresses the connection of aesthetics to pursuits of justice. This enables an account of the social practices of the liturgy as a site where the church is called to render what is justly due to the disabled, namely the rejection of the judgment that their lives are inherently ugly and the call to the goods of communion and fellowship with them in Christ’s body. Put another way, what is justly owed are the goods of friendship which follow from the theological insignificance of the category ‘disabled’, goods rendered and deepened in the church’s communal and liturgical life. 55