Abstract
Every Good Path, which originated in the author's PhD thesis at the University of Aberdeen, is a rich and probing analysis of the nature of practical reason in Christian ethics. In contrast to the philosophical and theological traditions shaped by Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Errington argues that wisdom is not a perfection of speculative knowledge. Rather, according to the book of Proverbs, wisdom is practical knowledge of how to act well. It is therefore less about being a particular kind of person, and more focused on acting in ways enabled by ‘the way creation extends hospitality to good action’ (p. 89; on this theme of creation's hospitality to good action, see also pp. 2, 118, 122, 175, 194, 208, 210, 219, 221, 226). Errington pursues his argument by staging a discussion between Thomas Aquinas, the book of Proverbs, and Oliver O’Donovan. These conversation partners, with Proverbs playing an appropriate governing role, are well chosen, allowing Errington to focus on a coherent set of questions across his argument.
Chapter 1 introduces Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and practical reason, which stands behind Aquinas's own use of this distinction. This serves to prepare for Errington's treatment of Aquinas, and also to introduce the main concepts that are analysed in this volume: first, the contrast between wisdom (sophia), which for Aristotle concerns necessary things, and prudence (phronēsis), which concerns contingent things. Relatedly, there is the relationship between theoretical reason, which for Aristotle considers necessary and eternal principles, and practical reason, which involves deliberation about how to act from a given desired end.
Chapter 2 turns to Aquinas's account of moral reasoning. He also maintains the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and the necessity of practical reason moving from the general to the particular, and from ends to means. However, in contrast to Aristotle, for Aquinas practical reason is located not in the unstable context of the polis, but in relation to the doctrines of creation and providence. Human practical reason is anchored in divine reason and the eternal law (p. 39), which is ‘the determinate divine conception of creation's ordained movement to its end’, and so ‘the divine pattern for creaturely goodness’ (p. 71). Significantly for Errington's argument, Thomas derives his understanding of the relationship of wisdom to the eternal law from his understanding of the claim of Proverbs 8 that God created the world through his wisdom.
In chapter 3, Errington challenges this understanding of wisdom and the eternal law by means of a close theological reading of Proverbs 8 as Christian scripture. In contrast to Aquinas's speculative account of divine wisdom, Errington argues that, in Proverbs, wisdom and action belong together; wisdom is practical knowledge arising from creation's hospitality to good action. Strikingly, God's wisdom, rather than being God's speculative self-knowledge, an attribute of the divine life in se, is understood here as intrinsically connected to his action. God ‘got’ wisdom in the beginning of his works (Errington makes a strong case for this reading of Prov. 8:22) in acting in a particular way; God's wisdom is thus manifest in his work of creation. This enables Errington to connect God's wisdom not only to creation, but also to the historical person and work of Jesus Christ (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:23-24), in that Christ crucified is the determinate form of God's redemptive action in history. God's wisdom is therefore construed as the twofold form of his action in creation and redemption. This understanding of God's wisdom as his action provides the analogy with human wisdom, understood likewise as determinate action. Importantly, Errington does not deny God's eternal self-knowledge. However, he recognizes (p. 15) that as it stands, this consideration of divine wisdom needs further dogmatic development and clarification, work that he has himself begun in a recent journal article (Andrew Errington, ‘On God's Practical Knowledge of Creation’, IJST 23.2 (2021): 215–34).
Chapter 4 turns to a consideration of O’Donovan's account of the relationship between the moral order of the world and Christian moral thinking. This chapter, less crowded with secondary voices than the others, provides an admirably clear and focused sense of the grandes lignes of O’Donovan's thinking in Resurrection and Moral Order and the Ethics as Theology trilogy. It is a sympathetic, but not uncritical treatment. Errington's central concern is O’Donovan's understanding of wisdom as fundamentally theoretical. For O’Donovan, human wisdom is holistic knowledge of the shape of created reality. Errington questions whether O’Donovan's articulation of a comprehensive moral teaching enables life and action that is responsive to creation's hospitable invitation to act, or simply offers an understanding of the shape of reality. He also doubts whether, in his concern for God's reaffirmation and vindication of creation in the resurrection of Christ, O’Donovan does justice to the transformative aspect of the ‘new’ thing God has done in Christ, arguing that, in fact, it is ‘fundamentally static’ (p. 152; italics original). In contrast, Errington wishes to press for a more historically specific and Christologically focused account of what wisdom is. Rather than a speculative, intellectual and somewhat static sense of the whole, what is required is an attention to particulars, a sense of what action is required at this very moment. To this, Errington turns in his fifth and final chapter.
Chapter 5 engages with several new interlocutors: David VanDrunnen, David Kelsey, Karl Barth, and more briefly, John Webster, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Immanuel Kant. If this at times risks imparting a slightly journalistic flavour to the argument, it also demonstrates something of the range of Errington's ambition as he ties the various threads of the first four chapters together. The heart of his argument—building now not just from Proverbs, but also from the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and the exhortation to maturity in Heb. 5:12-14—is a crystallizing of three claims. First, that there is indeed an important distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and that practical knowledge is important for Christian ethics. Secondly, that the relevant distinction is not between ‘types of objects’ (pace Aristotle), but rather ‘between thinking to a conclusion in knowledge, on the one hand, and thinking to action, on the other’ (p. 223). And, thirdly, that ‘The moral order is not a timeless, unchangeable whole’ (p. 221); rather, it depends on the twofold work of the wisdom of God in Christ, both creation and redemption. Therefore, the moral order that wisdom senses is ‘creation's hospitality to good action, and the obligations laid upon us by the gospel’ (p. 221). It is those who hear and do Christ's words who are ‘like a wise man who built his house on the rock’ (Matt. 7:24).
Throughout this work, Errington shows himself to be a generous, probing and judicious reader, aware that he is engaged in a discussion, never dominating, taking care to allow his interlocutors to speak on their own terms, equally skilled in expounding the architecture of a text or drawing out the intricacies of a particular detail. Nevertheless, his generous attention also includes rigorous exploration of tensions and fissures between authors and also within the work of an individual thinker.
However, even as he gives space for a range of voices to speak, Errington does not allow his own voice to be muffled. The unfolding of this discussion is at times dense and complex, but it is always in the service of advancing a distinctive analysis of Christian moral reasoning that is, in itself, a valuable contribution to understanding what it means to think and to act well.
This does not mean that Errington has achieved a resolution. After careful listening, I am left wondering if there are various distinctions that are real enough, but are being pressed too hard or pulled a little out of shape: between God's (wise) being and God's wise acts; between wise creaturely character and wise creaturely action; between contemplation and action; above all between the original creation order in Christ, its vindication in his resurrection, and its transformation at his cross. At one point, Errington concedes that ‘Perhaps there can be great value in speculative conceptions of world order’ (p. 174). Perhaps that ‘perhaps’ is telling. Perhaps his relentless focus on wisdom as action risks undervaluing the ethical contribution of contemplative reason. Certainly, this is a question ripe for further reflection, not least as it intersects with Errington's concern for good action in response to created reality in Christ.
Nevertheless, with those questions registered (and doubtless other readers will have other questions of their own), following Errington as he unfolds his argument is richly rewarding. This is a volume to which other thinkers would do well to attend with the same kind of patience and critical generosity that Errington has modelled for us.