God, keeping the commandments, and loving the neighbor.
Matters become even more complex with the young man’s declaration that he has kept all the commandments Jesus enumerates, but he still thinks he must lack something. Jesus tells him to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and then come and follow him. Is this a condition for being good applicable only to this young man? Or is Jesus suggesting anyone who wants to be good must be dispossessed? Moreover what finally does following Jesus have to do with the one alone who is good? Jesus’ declaration to the disciples concerning the status of the wealthy seems to suggest that goodness depends in some way on God, that is, “for God all things are possible.” Is Jesus suggesting that he is the “who” that alone is good?
Christians are sure there is a relationship between God and goodness, but we have never been sure how to spell out that relation. Platonism has often seemed like an attractive way to display the relation between God and goodness. Christians have read Plato’s account of the impossibility of “picturing” the good to be an anticipation of the Christian insistence that only God is good. Plato’s account of the good, moreover, suggests that there is a mystery about how someone may actually be good that suggests something like the Christian understanding of grace.
One cannot help but hear, for example, the Platonic resonances in Augustine when he says in The City of God:
Thus we say that there is only one unchanging Good; and that is the one, true, and blessed God. The things he made are good because they were made by him; but they are subject to change, because they were made not out of his being but out of nothing. Therefore although they are not supreme goods, since God is a greater good than they, still those mutable goods are of great value, because they can adhere to the immutable Good, and so attain happiness; and this is so truly their Good, that without it the creatures cannot but be wretched.4
Such a view can and has led some to think that Christians, and in particular Augustine, subordinate all earthly loves, including love of neighbor, to the love of God. However, as Eric Gregory has recently argued, Augustine’s distinction between that which is to be enjoyed and that which is to be used is finally not determined by Augustine’s Platonism, because Augustine’s Platonism is christologically determined.5 There can be no love of God, according to Augustine, apart from love of neighbor, but that is not to say, as Gregory observes, “that explicit love of God involves nothing more than love of neighbor.”6
But what does it mean for goodness, even understood as love of the neighbor, to be christologically determined? How is the love of God, the love that determines how goodness is understood, inseparable from what it means to “follow me”? To follow Christ, moreover, has meant that Christians have at times found it necessary to sacrifice life itself, all worldly goods including life itself, rather than betray what they took to be necessary to follow Christ. Whatever it may mean to be good from a Christian perspective cannot avoid the possibility of martyrdom.7
That there is some essential connection between death and goodness is not a thought peculiar to Christians. Raimond Gaita, a philosopher, who does not share my theological commitments, has argued that there is a necessary connection between how good people regard their deaths and how they understand how they should care for the neighbor. By directing attention to Socrates’ contention that nothing can harm a good man, Gaita develops an account of goodness that challenges modern accounts of altruism that conflate harm and suffering. When harm and suffering are not properly distinguished, Gaita suggests, this leads to a condescending stance toward those whose suffering cannot be eliminated.
Before turning to Gaita, I need to make clear that I am not trying to argue that any satisfactory account of goodness requires belief in God. Such a project I take to be a theological mistake. It is a mistake often made by Christians faced by the loss of the status and intelligibility of Christian convictions in recent times: thus the attempt to show that, if you do not believe in God, the world will go to hell in a hand basket. I think we are long past the point that, as Troeltsch thought, the truth of what Christians believe should depend on Christianity being necessary to sustain the ethos of our “civilization.”
By engaging Gaita, however, I hope it may be the case that the analysis of goodness I develop will be of interest to those who do not share my theological convictions. That I write for myself and Christians, however, is an attempt to respond to a problem identified by Charles Taylor. Taylor observes that Platonism and Christianity, in spite of their considerable differences, shared the view that the good was known through the self-mastery made possible by, in the case of Platonism, reason and, in Christianity, the transformation of the will by grace. Yet each tradition, according to Taylor, has been secularized primarily by being identified with the ideal of altruism.8
According to Taylor, most modern people assume that the highest form of ethical idealism is altruism. Because altruism is assumed to be the ideal, selfishness is then assumed to be the lowest form of morality. Such a high view of altruism means that those identified with dedication to others or the universal good are regarded with admiration and even awe. Such dedication has obvious roots, Taylor suggests, in “Christian spirituality,” and no doubt is compatible with Christianity, but “the secular ethic of altruism has discarded something essential to the Christian outlook, once the love of God no longer plays a role.”9 Though Taylor does not explicitly draw the conclusion, I think his account of our lives makes clear that the current identification of Christianity with altruism hides from most Christians that they have learned to live as if God does not exist.10
That is a position I hope to render problematic. My strategy is not to argue that what it means to be good depends on belief in God, but rather to show how goodness and God cannot be distinguished in the life of Jean Vanier. “Showing” is the heart of the matter. Gaita argues that if we are to see what goodness looks like it will depend on the unanticipated ability of some to be present to the afflicted without regret. Without a people who have so learned to be with the afflicted, we are unable to see the humanity that their affliction threatens to hide. I hope to show how such a “seeing” is made possible by the work of Jean Vanier.
Raimond Gaita on Goodness
I am attracted to Raimond Gaita’s account of goodness because his analysis betrays the influence of thinkers from whom I have also learned much, that is, Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, and Iris Murdoch. As might be expected by one so influenced, Gaita develops his case slowly and with attention to what we say. He attends to what we say because there cannot be, according to Gaita, an independent metaphysical inquiry into the reality of good and evil that could underwrite or undermine our most serious ways of speaking.11 So he begins his investigation of what we might mean by good by directing attention to Socrates’ address to the jury in the Apology: “You too gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence and fix your minds on this one truth—that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.”
Gaita observes this passage is seldom discussed by Plato scholars because they assume that Socrates’ claim about harm and what it means to be good is not relevant for understanding Plato’s more developed metaphysics of the good. But Gaita lingers on Socrates’ charge to the jury, arguing that Socrates did not mean that people who live virtuously could not suffer, but that Socrates thought, even in their suffering, people who see their life in the light of a certain kind of love, a love of philosophy, could not be harmed.
Socrates’ understanding of goodness, Gaita suggests, astonished Aristotle, who thought Socrates’ claim to be irresponsible. For Aristotle, who certainly thought a person of virtue could endure great suffering, recognized that there may come a time in the life of a person when their suffering is so great they could not help but think it would have been better never to have been born. Gaita characterizes Aristotle’s reaction to Socrates as the “most serious in the history of philosophy.”12 Yet Aristotle understood that he could only react to Socrates because no argument in and of itself could count against Socrates’ claim.
Aristotle objected to Socrates’ view because he assumed that at stake was a certain kind of humanism. It is a humanism Gaita characterizes as a “non-reductive naturalism,” which is committed to the view that what a person counts as harm depends on their