Day: February 20, 2022

“The seed is the word of God”

The ‘Gesima Sundays’ mark the transition from learning to living, a turn to the practice of the virtues as transformed by divine love to become the means of our participation in Christ’s work of human redemption. That will be the project of Lent, the pilgrimage of love that brings us to the book of love opened out for us to read on the cross of Good Friday. Already we are being turned towards Easter.

Today the virtues of courage and prudence are set before us in the Epistle and Gospel respectively. This focus on the classical virtues as transformed by divine love to become forms of love themselves locates the ‘Gesima Sundays’ within a larger tradition of ethical thinking. They connect to the great ethical turn in philosophy by Socrates and Plato, for instance, along with others in what has been styled the “axial age” (Karl Jaspers) and thus to the idea of philosophy as something lived, the idea of the good life.

Such ancient interests speak to our modern concerns. What is the good life? It is a pressing question in our current circumstances economically, politically, socially, environmentally, and religiously. The Christian Faith speaks to our current distresses even if nothing more than to raise the necessary ethical questions, the questions that are rooted in an understanding of the dynamic between God and Man in Jesus Christ. “I am come”, Jesus says, “that they may have life and have it more abundantly.” He doesn’t mean more and more of everything materially but spiritually and intellectually.

It means a kind of thoughtfulness in the face of the fearful thoughtlessness of our world and day. The question about the good life is the question we all face. The contemporary preoccupation with ‘wellness’ suggests  one way in which this is pursued largely through the various techniques of physical exercise and diet. At best, this might relate to the virtue of temperance, of the self-control of our appetites, in a culture of excess and addiction. Endorphin high or cannabis high? There is a difference, I suppose, which lies in the question of intention at the very least.

But in another way this points to the unlivable character of contemporary life in a global world that confronts us with enormous iniquities and inequalities on a scale of magnitude that is scarcely imaginable. It signals the loss of a way of understanding that belongs to the mediating institutions, such as schools and churches, between the leviathan of modern governments and the behemoth of multinational corporations. As governed by technocratic reason, they are profoundly anti-life and effectively reduce us to passive little technobots, mere cogs in a machine ruled by technocrats. The levelling nature of this form of thinking has no respect for the organisations and institutions that once contributed to the social and spiritual well-being of our communal lives, let alone the ethical and spiritual principles which animate such institutions.

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