Of Words Well Wrought and Reality

I am currently teaching a course in Ethics for the diocesan school for vocational deacons. We are using Alasdair McIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics as our textbook. It is a very succinct survey of classical moral philosophy beginning with the Sophists, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; the Stoics and Cynics; Augustine and Aquinas; Hobbes and Spinoza; Locke and Kant; Rousseau; all the way into the twentieth century. It is a formidable task, but a necessary one in order to have the cultural context from which springs theological and moral discourse as well as social, economic and political ideas over western history. For example, one can’t adequately read and interpret scripture without knowing something of Greek philosophical thought. New Testament literature was written in the common Greek, and language brings with it, ethos. Greek thought was the ocean of ideas informing all manner of discourse in the ancient world of the common era. And it is arguable that every subsequent philosopher in the west is rearticulating to some extent the Greeks. Philosophers are the ones who articulate the knowledge of who we are as humans; knowledge that is in the  proverbial air, in our own time and space.

Plato spoke of humankind’s aspiration to the Beautiful and the Good; Machiavelli centuries later spoke of power as a good in and of itself amid the violent competition among the Italian city states; Locke spoke of the divinity of reason in an age that saw a renaissance in science and mathematics; Rousseau spoke of liberty and equality amid the advent of both the American and French revolutions; Marx spoke of the disparity of wealth between the social classes….All vital context to which we must pay attention in order to understand our world and our place in it.

But in this grand sweep of lofty thought and well wrought word, there is another reality: All, every one of these moral philosophers are male and privileged. They live in a world of reasonable wealth, nobility and dignity, at the apex of the socio-economic pyramid. It is a world in which it is easy to speak of pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful, to aspire towards a state of peaceful happiness… salvation in short….but the vast majority of the human species doesn’t have such luxury…theirs is a life of poverty, of illiteracy, of disease; subject to the slings and arrows of injustice and indignity and oppression …these the unsaved…their words a lost piece to reality….among the erudite articulations of learned men, their voices are unheard; their words clatter upon the empty and lost alleys of our world.

At the second Vatican council in 1964 Pope John the twenty-third articulated the doctrine of “God’s preferential option for the poor.” This doctrine spoke of God’s unfailing love for all humankind, but that God’s passion, what gets God up in the morning, as it were, is the plight of the poor….in whatever form poverty is manifest…because wherever poverty exists, in whatever form, there is indignity…and where there is indignity there is despair…And God will not have it, because God knows that we are all incomplete until all are complete…we humans a symbiotic planetary community…one gracious body inspired with God’s gracious breath…so to bear dignity to our world is to claim our own dignity…and that is what salvation means, at least as I read the Gospels…salvation the way we live with dignity in our own day…and until all have dignity then none of us have it…..So may we hear all voices….honor all aspirations towards the good the true and the beautiful…and we’ll see a reality never yet seen…and it  will be marvelous in our eyes…..all words aside.