Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

17 March 2023

4 min read

Where the good, the true, the human, and the real meet

In the second of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison explores the underrated virtue of prudence as the ability to live aligned with the grain of the universe.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A carving tool is pressed into a groove in wood.

Photo: Dominik Scythe on Unsplash.

A full human life is a virtuous one, and vice versa. In the second of these eight discussions of virtue, starting in Lent and moving into Easter, we come to the first of the virtues, namely prudence. It’s not a common word today, but you simply can’t have virtue without it, at least according to such luminaries as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Prudence, Aquinas recalls, is:

‘the mother, custodian, and moderator of the virtues.’

That’s because, for him, prudence is nothing less than the meeting point between the good, the true, the human, and the real.

'That to act well – to be virtuous – is to act rationally.'

Thomas Aquinas

Virtue, as we saw last time, is all about being fully and characterfully human. Human beings are ‘rational animals’, as Aristotle put it, so to be fully and characterfully oneself, someone has to act rationally, to the fullest extent that she is able. (This is also a tradition that has fiercely upheld the humanity and worth of people with disabilities, including mental disabilities.) There is something deeply counter-cultural about placing that sort of emphasis on reason. Isn’t fulfilment about following our desires, with rational interrogation just getting in the way? Moreover, we’ve lived through decades in universities where reason has been treated with suspicion (that’s the technical term), as ultimately an expression of power or some vested interest, such that ‘truth’ more about the speaker than what is spoken about. In contrast to that, Aquinas insists that to act well – to be virtuous – is to act rationally.

‘Reason is an openness to the reality of things’

Thomas Aquinas

That, however, is no cult of abstract or rarefied reason, nor the preserve of some intellectual elite. For one thing, while reason is important, it’s also secondary. Reason matters because of reality. To be virtuous is to live with the grain of how things are: with the grain of being human, of being in a human community, and with the grain of the universe more generally. The place of reason in virtue, according to Aquinas is not so much for its own sake, but because reason is an openness to the reality of things. Second, the rationality of prudence is a matter of keen-sightedness, especially in keeping two things in view, and coordinating between them: moral principles, and the contingencies of the situation to hand. Such clarity of vision is by no means limited to the highly educated, nor is primarily to be learned from books. It is picked up from good examples, and a well-honed common culture. Third, prudence is a virtue – a ‘second nature’, as we saw in the previous article – and that is as much about the honing of instinct, as anything else. It ends up as much a matter of the body as of the soul. It is about being a rational animal, so it shapes us as animals, and not only as minds.

To be virtuous is to be prudent – to be practically wise and rational – because of the need to attend to reality, and work with its grain, not against it. A good life is lived in a way that’s in-keeping with human nature, and with nature more widely, so as to flourish within it. That’s not simply a matter of living sensibly, although that’s also not a bad start, since living sensibly is also harder than we might think. We don’t naturally always make healthy use of the good things of life – food, sleep, sexual intimacy, responsibility, or authority – as good sense would suggest.

On fraught territory

The association of prudence with the reality of things, especially with the shape of human nature, is fraught territory. Human beings are prone to read all sorts of morally charged things into nature, some of them deeply flawed. Even the great Aristotle thought that some human races were ‘obviously’ and ‘naturally’ slaves. He also bequeathed the idea that human nature at its most authentic is male, such that women turn up when a foetus doesn’t develop along those, better, lines. All of that once seemed natural, which is a problem, but it doesn’t invalidate the place of prudence among the virtues, and the place of reason in a well-lived life. It makes careful use of prudence and reason all the more important.

On the good life

Reflecting on what a healthy, flourishing human nature is like, and a healthy, flourishing society, is a tricky business. That’s why it calls for life-long growth in the virtue of prudence: getting better at knowing what that looks like, knowing it more and more instinctually, and in being able to weigh up what it demands in any particular situation, rapidly in some cases. We won’t all agree on what a flourishing life looks like, individually or community, but there may be room for agreement in on the idea that a good life – a virtuous life – involves following that path, which is to say, the path of prudence.