Gaita describes as an urbane humanism. From Aristotle’s perspective, a Socratic point of view is but “highminded indecency” if it fails to acknowledge that there are some lives so steeped in appalling and ineradicable affliction that they are irredeemably ruined.
In order to explain why he thinks Aristotle represents such a view, Gaita raises the question of “whether we can see those who have no share in what gives our lives sense as our moral equals.”13 We would like to think we do so, but, drawing on Simone Weil, Gaita suggests that our reaction to those who we do not believe share our moral lives is one of condescension. Weil observes:
We have the same carnal natures as animals. If a hen is hurt the others rush up to peck it. Our senses attach to affliction all the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime. Except for those whose soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no-one is conscious of it.14
Gaita is not questioning the fact that most of us do not believe that the afflicted should be despised or condescended to, but the question is whether we understand ourselves in believing it. He suspects we share with Aristotle the rejection of Socrates claim that a good man cannot be harmed because we do believe it is possible for misfortune irredeemably to ruin a person’s life even if they are virtuous. Such a view, according to Gaita, is based on the “sense of necessity which is internal to the judgment that there are lives such that it would have been better for those who suffer them if they had not been born.”15
Gaita, however, argues that it is just at this point we see the profound difference between Socrates and Aristotle. For Aristotle did not see, as at least Plato seemed to gesture, that “there was goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice.”16 Such goodness Socrates not only possessed, but saw in others. In contrast to Aristotle, Socrates thought no amount of suffering could negate the good. Thus Socrates’ claim that a good man cannot be harmed. Such a view of the good, Gaita observes, is essentially mysterious given our limited epistemic and logical powers. The task of philosophy is to provide conceptual space for the acknowledgement of such a mystery.
There are three requirements philosophy must meet, according to Gaita, if a space is to be left for an account of the good that respects this mystery. First, the concept of what is essentially mysterious must be connected to a certain conception of experience; secondly, the concept of experience must be connected with that of being bound in testimony; and, thirdly, “we must give a serious place to the concept of love, Goodness and purity.”17
All Gaita can do, therefore, is to provide examples that display the pressure to claim as Socrates did that a good person cannot be harmed.18 The example he provides is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He does so because it is said of her that she showed to those who were appallingly afflicted “a compassion that was without a trace of condescension.” That her compassion was without condescension means Mother Teresa was able to care for the afflicted “without a trace of the thought that it had been better if the person for who she felt compassion had never been born, even if they suffered affliction of the most protracted, severe and ineradicable sort.”19
Her compassion was a denial that the affliction could, or even at a certain limit must, make a person’s life worthless. Mother Teresa’s love had a purity that can only be characterized as a gift. So it is not an achievement that on Aristotelian grounds might be found in a virtue such as courage, but rather her love is born of a humility that makes it a different order. We stand in awe of such a love, but our wonder is not determined by her achievements but by the light her love throws on the afflicted. “The wonder which is in response to her is not a wonder at her, but a wonder that human life could be as her love reveals it.”20
Gaita argues that it is a mistake, however, to try to retain the sense of what is revealed by the love Mother Teresa exhibits by constructing a metaphysics that would secure it.21 He argues his account of her compassion requires no metaphysical underpinning and in particular the “metaphysical underpinning that is often associated with Christianity.”22 He does not deny that Mother Teresa says she would not be able to do what she does were it not for the love of Jesus, but Gaita says he does not even have to ask what that means much less believe it. Rather we can retain a sense of what is revealed by her compassion by attention to like things which are absolutely good. “We know them only as they are revealed in the light of pure love.”23
That is not, however, Gaita’s last word on the matter. He returns to the question of goodness in his book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice, first published in Australia in 1998.24 He begins a chapter entitled “Goodness beyond Virtue” with a story of his work as a seventeen-year-old as a ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital.25 It was in the early 1960s and the ward was more like a prison than a hospital. The patients were judged incurable so they were often subject to inhumane treatments such a being washed down with mops after they had soiled themselves. Friends and relatives had long ceased to visit them and they were often treated brutishly by those charged with their care.
There were some psychiatrists who worked to improve their condition in the name of the inalienable dignity of even patients. Gaita admired the psychiatrist’s commitment to their patients, but, he observes, it probably did not help to appeal to the inalienable dignity of the patients because such an appeal depends too much on appearances. The appeal to someone’s “dignity” is too easily undermined by the complete loss of any “humanity.”
However, Gaita reports, one day a nun came to the ward whose demeanor toward the patients—the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body—was in marked contrast to even the psychiatrists Gaita admired. For like Mother Teresa she was without condescension.26 She was able to interact with the people suffering from mental illness without any thought that it might be better that they had never been born.
Gaita says he does not know how important it might have been that she was a nun. Her behavior might have been a function of her religious belief but, because he argues beliefs can explain behavior independently of their truth or falsity, nothing follows from how her behavior was connected to her beliefs. More important is how her behavior was shaped by the reality which it revealed, that is, the full humanity of those whose afflictions had made their humanity invisible. Therefore no justification of her behavior is required because “the purity of her love proved the reality of what it revealed.”27
Such love, according to Gaita, depends on the conviction that there exists goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice. True love requires that every human being, as Hannah Arendt argues, be regarded as “infinitely precious.” To learn to love and regard others as infinitely precious, Gaita suggests, requires training exemplified in the lives of the saints.28
Gaita acknowledges that religious traditions have spoken most simply and deeply about such a view by declaring all human beings sacred. But he contends that the language of love nourished by the love of saints can stand independently of speculation about supernatural entities. What grew in one place can flourish elsewhere. He reports, however, that there is one question put to him by a theologian whose answer he is not sure of.29 The theologian asked him whether the kind of love shown by the nun could exist in the prolonged absence of the kind of practices that were part of her religious vocation. In response Gaita says:
Iris Murdoch said that attention to something absolutely pure is the essence of prayer and is a form of love. If she is right, then the answer to Hauerwas’ question will depend on whether with the demise of religion, we can find objects of attention that can sustain that love, or whether they will always fail us. I don’t know the answer.30
Nor do I know the answer. I certainly have no reason to suggest that Gaita’s account of goodness as non-condescending love is unintelligible if God does not exist. But then the question has never been about God’s existence—but ours. Gaita is quite right to think that if Mother Teresa and the nun he encountered at seventeen did not exist we quite literally would be less human. They did exist, however, and it at least makes sense to ask if and how they and the goodness they reveal makes sense if the God they worship does not exist.