In defense of moral agency and the necessary pursuit of holiness

The biblical narrative of redemption is rendered pointless and ultimately incomprehensible in a culture that has been bleached of a real sense of the importance of moral agency—the ability to choose freely right and wrong, and be responsible for those choices. The biblical story of Fall-Redemption-Glory makes little sense if human moral choice loses its purchase as the central defining aspect of what it means to be a person at all.

In fact, and as we now see in many “academic” treatises, once the importance of moral agency as the gravitational center that coalesces dust into rocky density is removed, the very notion of a real “self” evaporates as the core around which a spiritual destiny is forged.

This is what is at stake today: the true “humanism” of the Gospel versus the destruction of the human in modern “humanitarianism”.

The loss of the moral self

The former understands that we are either moving upwards towards our final fulfillment in God or we are moving downwards towards an ultimately deadly apotheosis of the visceral and the genital. By contrast, modern humanitarianism views such moral and spiritual construals of the human as potentially fascistic and thereby, in Gramscian fashion, creates a new reductionistic ideology for the bourgeois masses that celebrates the destruction of moral agency as the only true liberation.

The Church, in this view, is the enemy of real freedom. Christians are a dangerous social contagion, successful for a long while, but against whom society is now happily inoculated with the MNRA vaccine of modern enlightenment. Thus, the central message of Christianity concerning moral agency and regeneration is used by secularists against it. The very terms of the debate—that is, “freedom”—are stolen from Christianity and transformed into synthetic secular spike proteins that invade the social genome, creating an immunity against any renewed assaults from the Christian virus.

This loss of a sense of the moral self as constitutive of my dignity as a spiritual person made in the image and likeness of God makes the Theo-dramatic interplay of divine and human freedoms in the biblical narrative seem like a fanciful and quaint mythology from an ancient era of prescientific naivete. In this view, there is no spiritual person, no gravitational center of consciousness that we label a “self”. There is only a mélange of neuronal experiences that excrete consciousness like the liver excretes bile. Therefore, this epiphenomenal thing we call “consciousness” is the product of a series of competing subterranean biological forces that were forged over the eons of evolutionary time.

In other words, it goes, we are little more than trousered apes with brains big enough to make space rockets and hot pockets, but nothing of deeper moral significance. And the only vestigial remnant of our sense of morality is a vague sentimentalism about cute things like puppies, and the virtues of sex. The former at least elicits from us a gooey warmth, while the latter seems to generate little more than outrage at anyone who would dare place limits upon its expression. Once the self is evacuated of its moral significance, of what C.S. Lewis called its “Weight of Glory”, it becomes a clearinghouse for organizing the only “real” thing left to us, which is all things sensual.

Modern humanitarianism and the Inquisitor

Thus, the humanitarianism of modernity is both sensual and sentimental. This is why our “public morality” is purely stipulative and grounded in little more than the shifting moods of the social contract. And real moral argument–of the kind that serious adults make–is replaced with sloganeering and intimidation. The latter being the telltale sign of a latent totalitarian impulse, a latency that comes out in the currently fashionable attempt to recast “free speech” as “speech that has been curated of its ‘disinformation’” or, in lieu of such curation, simply put into the index of forbidden ideas.

Dostoevsky foresaw this long ago. Most emblematically, we see his critique of such denigrations of moral agency and the essentially spiritual nature of the human person in his character Ivan Karamazov’s tale of “The Grand Inquisitor”. In the tale, Jesus returns to 16th-century Spain and starts performing miracles only to be arrested and dragged before an aged Inquisitor who accuses Christ of undermining the modus vivendi the Church has reached with human moral weakness and intellectual ignorance. He further accuses Christ of freighting human freedom with too much responsibility and importance, which imposes upon hapless and fragile human beings untold sufferings as they struggle to live up to such high moral demands.

Instead of foregrounding such freedom, the Inquisitor states that the Church has had to clean up the mess Christ made by giving people instead a kind of religion based on bread and circuses, mixed in with some whiz-bang supernatural spectacles. Christ remains silent, and his only response is a tactile one. He kisses the Inquisitor on his “aged bloodless lips” which unnerves the old man, whereupon he opens the door to the dank cell and tells Jesus to leave and never return.

Central to the story is the Inquisitor’s claim that Jesus should have accepted the temptations of Satan in the desert. This is Dostoevsky’s way of accusing modernity of being engaged in an essentially Satanic project. We can overlook Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholic overtones in the narrative insofar as he would view any form of Christianity that is complicit in this Satanic denigration of human freedom as a vile form of apostasy. We can look past this because it is clear that Dostoevsky’s primary point is an affirmation of Augustine’s vision of history as comprised of a struggle between the two cities.

The journey and its true destination

And that brings us to our current ecclesial moment. We hear often these days from some of the supporters of pastoral “accompaniment” that the Church is now engaged in a great “paradigm shift” in moral theology. This means that deductive and deontological, mostly academic, “armchair theology” is being replaced with a new vision of the moral law that valorizes “concrete lived experience” and the subjective consciences of individuals above such dogmatic abstractions. The implication being, of course, that “real” pastoral accompaniment will now go beyond the already well-accepted practice of pastoral gradualism and move toward an acknowledgement of the great plasticity and pluralism that moral discernment must now take.

Gone are “moral certitudes” grounded in inviolable moral norms. In their place will be a robust embracing of human fragility and the need to view the moral agency the Church has heretofore promoted as a blunt instrument that crushes such fragile souls under the weight of moral norms. Why? Because those norms supposedly demand more of common people than they feel “they can give to God at this time”.

Am I reading too much into all of this talk of “paradigm shifts”? Not at all. Never mind the fact that the notion of intellectual paradigm shifts, first promoted by Thomas Kuhn with regard to the evolution of scientific theories, is no longer taken seriously by most philosophers of science. Used in the current context of moral theology, it is a clear attempt to undermine the Church’s traditional reliance on natural law moral reasoning and to replace it with something far more affective and, frankly, sentimentalist.

Of course, like its precursor “aggiornamento”, there are many ways in which accompaniment as a pastoral approach is both good and even necessary. No good pastor of souls would deny this. It is also most certainly true that the Church’s moral teaching can authentically develop in light of new concrete historical and cultural circumstances. But this is not what is in dispute in the linking of accompaniment with the idea of a “paradigm shift”.

What is at stake is the central theo-dramatic core of the Gospel. What is at stake is the entire narrative of salvation history as the dramatic interplay between divine and human freedom. The theandric nature of the Incarnation demands that no curtailment of its essentially regenerative and restorative meaning take place. We are called to holiness, we are called to theosis, and we are called to glory.

To be sure, central to the Gospel as well is the message of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. These are indeed God’s first and last words to us. But these critically important virtues are also not an end in themselves but a means to the end of divinization. They are the first steps toward helping both ourselves and others to rise above mere finger-wagging moralizing and into the brighter light of Trinitarian love.

As we extend mercy, we image God’s mercy; in so doing, we open the doors to glory. Endless mercy and endless forgiveness lead to glory. But like someone sojourning on pilgrimage over very rough and rocky terrain, and therefore in need of many helps along the way and maybe even some first aid, the journey must never lose sight of its destination.

Proclaiming the path of challenge

Wherever the Gospel message of theosis and glory is elided in a mad rush to affirm the sinner, then the truth of the Gospel has not just been undermined, but reversed and negated. The sinner is not understood as one in need of the moral light of the Church but as the actual barometer and metric in their subjective circumstances of what is a sin and what is not in this singular and inherently idiosyncratic case.

The Gospel then ceases to be the Gospel and is replaced by the sentimentalism of the false humanitarianism of modernity.

Christ did not offer the Sermon on the Mount as an amelioration of the draconian harshness of the Ten Commandments. Rather, the sermon doubles down on those commandments and actually intensifies them by moving from a purely forensic living out of their demands into the inner world of spiritual motives and, thereby, true spiritual transformation. The sermon was the Magna Carta of how to reach theosis, not a manual for how to hide a melanoma under a Band-Aid.

Yes, Christ preached nonjudgementalness. Yes, he went to the peripheries. But he did so to call sinners to repentance. He called himself the physician whose mission was to heal the sick. But that means he viewed sin as a sickness and not as a “paradigm for that moment which can change someday”. He viewed sin as a sickness and, as I have said many times before, the image of the Church as a field hospital is indeed a good one, but it is still a hospital meant to heal the sick, not a hospice.

Finally, we are called to “read the signs of the times”. And as far as my reading of those signs goes, the great threat of our time isn’t moral rigidity and a Church larded with parsimonious killjoys ever-ready to pronounce judgment on sinners. Rather, it seems the opposite. As Pope Benedict famously pointed out, we live today under the increasing shadow of the “dictatorship of relativism” and its corollary in the denigration of the absolutely central importance of human moral agency. Now is not the time for the Church to embrace an essentially reductive therapeutic reading of that agency, no matter how important psychological evaluations are as a propaedeutic for sound pastoral guidance.

The Church in the West is hemorrhaging followers. And the causes of this are, of course, many and complex. But one key factor has to be that if the Church has nothing to offer beyond an anodyne “fellowship” and a “come here and be affirmed just as you are with no further demands” message, then many people will, and have, concluded that they can get such things elsewhere and better. If Church is just therapy with some Jesus-sprinkles tossed in, people soon see that the sprinkles are superfluous baggage.

This is especially true, I think, for young people today who have lived their entire lives in the digital fog and who swim in the cultural waters of anomic pointlessness. Which is why, rather than chastise endlessly those young Catholics who are seeking a spiritual grounding and call to holiness via the path of traditional liturgy and ascetical living, we should instead ask, “Why it is that they seek such things? Why is it that they, apparently, have not found such things in the broader Church?”

All controversies concerning this thing we call “traditionalism” aside, where we generally see young people attracted to the Church today is precisely in those parishes and Newman Centers and movements that offer them the challenging path of theosis via the kenosis of submitting to the “light” yoke of Christ. The path of challenge. The path of the heroic ideal larger than oneself. The path that gives meaning to life as a theo-dramatic encounter with the living Lord who calls us to “come up higher”.

In short, this should be our pastoral path, and not that of the Inquisitor’s paradigm shift.