Explainer

Belief

Creed

16 March 2023

4 min read

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

14 March 2023

5 min read

How to encourage a second nature of virtue

Cultivating virtue could make you cheerful. Andrew Davison explore the benefits. The first in a five part series for Lent.

Andrew Davison

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

Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.

Lent is upon us: the season to cultivate virtue. In that old-fashioned word, ‘virtue’ – so unpromising, even dismal in tone – lies so much of what Christianity wants to commend in its vision of a moral life. Even if Christian ethics enjoys a dour impression in the popular imagination, the tradition known as ‘virtue ethics’ places its emphasis on happiness, not being miserable, and on having a good disposition, not primarily on following laws. It’s all about having a good disposition – on being the sort of person to whom goodness comes naturally, even under taxing circumstances – and that as the basis for happiness. For the virtuous person, a virtuous response has become second nature: spontaneous, easy, and cheerful.

The idea of virtue as ‘second nature’ draws on Aristotle’s idea of habit. Over time, he thought, we settle into certain ways of being and reacting: into certain ways of behaving, responding, and relating to others. That can be for good, in which case we call that habit a virtue, but also for ill, in which case we call that a habit a vice.

'We are cultural, linguistic, and moral, and we have to learn and practice those things that make us human.'

We are creatures of habit, which makes us a strange sort of creature. We are born very much still a work in progress. All sorts of other organisms can perform their most characteristic actions more or less from birth. Contrast us. We are cultural, linguistic, and moral, and we have to learn and practice those things that make us human. In many important respects, what or who an infant will become remains an open question.

Aristotle put this pithily:

‘The virtues arise in us neither against nature, nor simply by nature. Rather, our very nature is to acquire them, and it is in that way that our nature reaches completion.’

Our nature is to be open, those works in progress. Inevitably, we acquire habits, one way or another, for better or worse. Habits are like a sediment that is laid down over time. Or – perhaps better – habits are like the course that river cuts through sediment or soil. The river cuts the course, but eventually the course directs the river. Acts lay down habits, then habits shape acts.

'We don’t become better or worse primarily by thinking hard about it; we become better or worse according to the way we act.'

That offers a bracing and distinctive view of what it means to be moral. For one thing, it shifts the emphasis away from motives, psychology, and an inner realm of the mind. We don’t become better or worse primarily by thinking hard about it; we become better or worse according to the way we act. Good deeds beget good habits, which beget further good deeds; bad deeds beget bad habits, which beget further bad deeds. That’s a good reason to make Lent a time for doing things (and maybe also not doing things, although virtue ethics will tend to think that action is important, and that we best drive out bad habits with good ones).

Virtue ethics has a lively place for reason, and we will come to that in the next article in this series (on the all-important rational virtue of prudence), but it’s also a remarkably bodily tradition. Virtue is almost as much laid down in one’s bones and sinews as in one’s brain. There is a ‘muscle memory’ to virtue, as also to vice. Imagine rescuing a child from an oncoming bus. It belongs to virtue in that situation for the body to move before the mind can catch up, or at least the conscious, deliberating mind. The child is snatched from danger in a pre-conscious whirl. The first well-formed thought to cross the mind of our virtuous protagonist might well be ‘Goodness, look what just happened?’

Virtue is at both home with dramatic responses in dramatic circumstances, but also disinclined to dramatize itself. The same person who reacted so bravely, and on instinct, faced with the child and the oncoming bus, is also likely to say ‘What else was I going to do? No big deal.’

The strength in virtue

The word virtue relates to the Latin with the word for strength. Virtue is strength of character. Virtue fills out what humanity can be. We might be born a work in progress, but that progress can go better or worse, depending on whether that human life is fulfilled in virtue, or hampered by vice. To fall into vices is to live an attenuated life, the glory of our humanity tarnished. To rise to virtue is to live a life of the kind of splendour of which a human being is capable.

Christianity has things to say about the crookedness of our tendency towards doing wrong, but rarely has it denied that we are still capable of making choices that are either better or worse, of performing better or worse actions, and of being formed, as a consequence, into better or worse people. Virtue isn’t the whole Christian story. It might not even be half the story, but it’s an indispensable part.

Offering common ground

Virtue perfects nature, as far as nature goes, but that isn’t the main part of that Christian story. It goes on to say that grace elevates humanity to a state beyond its wildest natural imaginings: to ‘participation in the divine nature’ and being a son or daughter of God. (There will be much more on all of that in other posts on this site). But, while that comment puts virtue in its place, it’s still an elevated place. If you are sympathetic to Christianity, but standing somewhat outside the door of the church, the traditions of thought and practice around virtue might offer common ground: common, both because they are about making the best of a humanity that we share, and common because so much of the thinking about them has been carried out across and beyond confessional lines, the great example being the place of Aristotle – an ancient Greek pagan – in all of this.

The virtues

Aristotle singled out four primary virtues. They are prudence (or practical wisdom), justice, courage, and moderation. To these, the church added three from St Paul: faith, hope, and love. We will think more about each of these in the weeks ahead, as we journey through Lent, and onto Easter.

Who is the honest man?
He that doth still and strongly good pursue;
To God, his neighbour, and himself, most true.
Whom neither force nor fawning can
Unpin, or wrench from giving all their due.

Whose honesty is not
So loose or easy, that a ruffling wind
Can blow away, or glittering look it blind.
Who rides his sure and even trot,
While the world now rides by, now lags behind.

Who, when great trials come,
Nor seeks, nor shuns them, but doth calmly stay,
Till he the thing and the example weigh.
All being brought into a sum,
What place or person calls for, he doth pay.

Who never melts or thaws
At close temptations. When the day is done,
His goodness sets not, but in dark can run.
The sun to others writeth laws,
And is their virtue: virtue is his sun.

George Herbert

'Constancy '(selected stanzas)