Jennifer A. Herdt

THE RISE OF SYMPATHY AND THE QUESTION OF DIVINE SUFFERING

Seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, writing just at the time when the concept of sympathy was moving from the realm of magic to that of ethics, argued that God must be understood as having a vital sympathy with suffering human beings. Yet while Cudworth invoked sympathy in an attempt to capture Gods intimate relation with creation, in fact, it served as a principle of mediation that tended either to collapse God into the world or to distance God from the world. The broader implications of this problematic conception of divine transcendence can be seen in the secularizing tendencies within sentimentalist ethics and in the work of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Anglican theolo

Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

Recent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvins understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvins careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty , and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvins insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

The Invention of Modern Moral Philosophy A Review of The Invention of Autonomy by J. B. Schneewind

This review essay assesses the significance of J. B. Schneewinds The Invention of Autonomy for the history of moral thought in general and for religious ethics in particular. The essay offers an overview of Schneewinds complex argument before critically discussing his four central themes: the primacy of Immanuel Kant, the fundamentality of conflict, the insufficiency of virtue, and community with God. Whereas Schneewind argues that an impasse between modern natural law and perfectionist ethics revealed irresolvable tensions withing Christian ethics and thus encouraged the emergence of secular moral thought, this author suggests that these tensions were specific to a voluntarist strand of Christian moral thought form which even antivoluntarists of the modern period were unable to break free.

The Pain in the Gift and the Gift in the Pain

If we are searching, over the past half-century or so, for the finest articulation of the Augustinian vision of God as the One who satisfies the deepest desire of our heart by way of uprooting desires that more often than not feel like our deepest desires, we would do well to sit at the feet of Gilbert Meilaender. Meilaender rightly suggests that it is only when we see as God does that we can fully recognize what in our created and/or fallen nature is in need of transformation. That said, even where God is not known as the deepest desire of the heart, happiness can be grasped as coming by way of the painful upending of desires. This is what eudaemonist virtue ethics should lead us to expect, even if it is not Christian—as this article seeks to illustrate by way of reflection on ancient Stoic oikeiosis on the one hand, and modern ecological consciousness on the other.

Virtue, Identity, and Agency

Despite a vibrant revival of virtue ethics, now spanning several decades, the discourse of virtue in early modernity has been insufficiently integrated into narratives of the history of ethics. It was Alasdair MacIntyre’s enormously influential After Virtue that set the precedent: After Virtue wove a spellbinding tale of a fall from coherent traditions and practices sustaining the virtues into ethical incoherence and interminable debate, but it essentially skipped from the medieval scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas to the Enlightenment.1 Of course, if modernity names the time “after virtue,” lack of attention to the discourse of virtue in early modernity seems only natural. Why waste energy looking for something that isn’t there? However, MacIntyre’s thesis was not that the language of virtue dropped entirely out of use, but that it was used in a fragmentary, impotent way. Given the loss of a shared telos in the form of a common conception of the good life, and of the virtues as essential to the realization of this telos, morality was reduced either to rules constraining desire or to rules for the maximization of desire and satisfaction. There have been significant challenges to and complications of MacIntyre’s thesis, coming from a variety of angles. Some have argued that the real challenge to the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues was not the Enlightenment but rather Christianity, seen as essentially deontological or lawcentered.2 Others have suggested that Aristotelian virtue ethics flourished well into the eighteenth century, or that the Dominican school of theology has maintained an unbroken Thomistic theology of virtue up through the present day.3 Still others have worked to give charitable readings of the ways in which Aquinas’s synthesis of the Aristotelian and Augustianian traditions was challenged by later medieval thinkers who nevertheless in their own way sustained a coherent discourse of virtue ethics.4 In addition, a wealth of scholarship has explored virtue in relation to the rhetoric of exemplarity, courtesy literature and conduct books, and the Renaissance aspira-