The tendency is to connect ethics to law and moral striving, but the biblical pattern is to remove the ethical from under the power of the law and to locate it with the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the New Testament ethic, and in Paul’s explanation, cannot be regulated by law, as nothing can be posed against this reality (Gal 5:23). The choice posed between the ethics of the Spirit and law, is not only a choice of life or death, but life as given from an overflowing and original love (the all-encompassing ethic), and ethics as duty assigned to the will. In the former there is no system, measure, or determinate understanding, and in the later all is reduced to the imperative of a particular system or category. This “categorical imperative” demands exercise of the will, while the gift of the Spirit precedes ethics and enables an ethical life, empowering and compelling through empowering ethical gifts.
Overflowing Goodness as the Power of the Spirit
Before any ethical system, there is the impetus and resource driving and providing for ethics; a goodness, which any particular system may shape, stunt, or accentuate according, to its perceived parameters. This goodness is a power, which is felt (it is an affect, or an emotion), which is not to reduce it to this, but it is a power that takes hold and is expressed and produces an atmosphere. Being, creation, humanity, is endowed with a worthiness which is its ground, but before the realization or cognition of this ground, there is participation in this goodness, and the realization of morals and ethics, is simply an attempt to understand and shape this gift. Before the understanding and shaping though, there is the sensation, the feel, the taste, of the good. Its sweetness, joy, peace, and radiance are felt. It may be felt and perceived according to the shaping force of the person, the culture, the place, but prior to everything is the reception, or the endowment. We are gifted with being in the world.
As William Desmond describes, “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[1] It is manifest in and through us, but we are so intimate with it, so familiar and sustained by this reality, that astonishment and joy at this elemental goodness may be obscured. Clarity may fade or be brought back into focus, according to the shaping milieu of life and circumstance, but what is also to be noticed in this flux is the affect which gauges understanding or its absence.
Pleasure as the Power of the Spirit
There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in the recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. Pleasure may fade, but it does not pass away, but conveys a reality. As Desmond describes, “There is passing to this pleasure: it passes into us, it passes through and beyond us, it passes away. There is no absolute fixing of it. But something of the good of the ‘to be’ passes in this ‘being pleased’ of pleasure.”[2] We feel and absorb the potency of being as a recurrent and ever-giving possibility. It is the possibility that transcends us but in which we recognize the transcendent. It points to the One enabling this transcendental realization, which may be the distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness indicates the ephemeral moment of experience, but joy is a spiritual realization. Desmond relates it to the daimon of eudaimonia: “The daimon is a being between the mortal and the divine, at the limit of the mortal and on the threshold of the divine.”[3] The power of the Spirit is at work in this middle domain, divinizing the mortal, which is not a stunting of pleasure, but its fulfillment.
As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic. It is not that the erotic in the Song of Solomon is a metaphor for divine love, but the erotic is directly joined to enjoyment of the divine. The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs, recognized that the depth of love is lit by the flame of Yahweh’s presence (8:6). The one flesh relation between male and female is realized only in the presence of this binding, passionate, presence. Paul, likewise, pictures the act of marriage as completed in the body of Christ (Eph. 5:32). Even Plato describes eros as binding mortals and divinities in the whole. Ecstatic love and pleasure are the power of the ethical and not its diminishment, though focus on the pleasure per se may be distorted in imagining it as an end in itself. Spirituality does not oppose pleasure but traces it to its source and opens the possibility of its continual renewal. According to Rabbi Akiba: “All of time is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.”[4] The pleasure of God mixed with the pleasure of life, and all of life as taking delight in divine pleasure, is the realization of the Spirit.
The Deadly Impotency of the Law
We may be more familiar with life’s affect through the negative emotions, which Paul relates directly to the law. Fear and shame, both describe loss or shrinking engagement with the world, induced by the law (Rom 7:7ff). This affect is a somatic or bodily quality, though not this alone, but the inward turn of shame or the negative affects of jealousy, envy, or fear are written on the body. They are felt viscerally and experienced as a psychological pain. Paul describes his body being taken over by an alien force (Rom 7:9). As he describes in Galatians, the individual is subject to the flesh: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing” (Gal 5:19-21). These deeds of the flesh are caught up in the law, and even inspired by the law (Rom 7:7ff).
Though Immanuel Kant did not intend to, he illustrates how this is the case. He arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality” which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[5] The Kantian maxim does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[6] He pictures the law as regulating such things as sexual love, and presumes adultery would not be committed were gallows awaiting transgressors. He cannot recognize that the threat of death may heighten perverse pleasure (Paul says as much in Rom 1:32).
In the description of Alenka Zupančič, the “Freudian blow” to Kant’s philosophical ethics is to recognize that the moral law or what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” is in fact nothing other than the superego, or what Paul would call the law. Where Kant had sought to set ethics on a foundation of reason and will, Freud has hit upon the intertwining of the will, duty, and law as the deep pathological malady of the human race. As Zupančič concludes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honorable inclinations’ of the subject.”[7] The pleasure found in pain, either masochistic or sadistic, is the perverse pleasure of serving the bounded law of the will.[8] The greater the pain, the more desperate the pursuit of pleasure, such that there is a reciprocal role for death, creating both the peculiar pleasure of sin and its painful end.
The unspiritual is marked by descent rather than the transcendent, and in the Bible, is described as descent into the grave. The grave is personified, using the Hebrew term Sheol, to represent an insatiable, greedy monster with an unyielding desire to consume the living. The human appetite is like Sheol, and like death, never satisfied (Hab 2:5). “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Prov 27:20). Sex and death, or erotic pleasure unto death, describe a kind of transdescedence, finding ultimate pleasure in near death experience. Autoerotic Asphyxiation or erotic choking, points directly to how death, rather than life, poses the only ecstatic possibility for some. Rather than an embrace of life, there is a direct pursuit or shutting off of life, but this illustrates how the wires of life and death can be crossed. As with Paul’s adulteress woman, it may be that pleasure is thought possible only when
“consorting against the law” (Rom 7:3). Unlawful pleasure would exceed the law by breaking it, which is death.
The Pleasures of Life in the Spirit in Excess of the Law
Trust, the generosity of others, or love, are necessary for giving and sustaining life. We are weaned and determined by this good, which is neither within our capacity for measure or control, but we know and feel and experience the beauty as it irradiates and engulfs us. “There is an aesthetic givenness of the ethos of being to our senses and our bodies. . . . The incarnate good of the world is in rapport with our response to goodness and our being as good.”[9] Feelings of pleasure, gratitude, awe, convey the potency of this goodness.
The gifts of the Spirit fuse the power of life with pleasurable emotions such as love, joy, peace, patience, none of which can be reduced to an emotion but none of which are understood apart from the emotional affect. The good can be directly experienced and this shows itself in the pleasurable fruits of the Spirit. The Spirit insinuates herself into the concrete experience of life, drawing together in love (rather than separating by law). The gift of the Spirit is shared life, and all of the gifts of the Spirit are aimed at promoting this communion. We are given life in the community of family, but then pointed to a more expansive communion. “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31–32).
In Desmond’s description, “We are pointed to a community of the good beyond self-determination, a community already at work in the incognito of its surplus generosity, enabling the powers of self and other to be determining of themselves, giving them to be themselves, giving also the ethos of possibility wherein our immanent powers can be more truly realized.”[10] The gifts of the Spirit are the continuing work of the original gift of life. “This is not a moral value reflecting our self-determining powers, but an ontological worth with ethical radiations. It is an intimate goodness to being as given to be, given to be by God as the ultimate origin and end of all finite goods.”[11] The gift continues, working more intimately within than we can perceive, bringing the original gift to its goal of life, to a life more abundantly realized (John 10:10).
The “potencies of the ethical” attached to goodness show themselves in the power of the Spirit. Goodness is the source and the resource prior to or behind ethics; the potency or power, which any particular ethical understanding taps into but which it may also repress. These potencies enter differently into any particular ethical system, but what any system tends to do is lose contact with its originary source. We get stuck on the law or the ethical system and miss the goodness preceding and exceeding the system. We need awakening to “our constant ethical powers and abiding endowments.”[12] The awakening of the Spirit is nothing less than realization of this life giving ethical empowerment.
[1] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”
[2] Ethics and the Between, 67.
[3] Ethics and the Between, 69.
[4] Cited in Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 98.
[5] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392) 38.
[6] Metaphysics of Morals, 38.
[7] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 1.
[8] In the explanation of Maximus, the attachment to the sensory or the finite and passable, results in a masochistic play between pleasure and pain. “Wanting to escape the oppressive sensation of pain, we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment.” Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 61.6, p. 437.
[9] Ethics and the Between, 66.
[10] Ethics and the Between, 71
[11] Ethics and the Between, 73.
[12] Ethics and the Between, 63