The Gospels Rejection of Individual Ethics
It’s impossible to talk about Christian ethics without talking about Holy Scripture. But the Christian faith is also something that’s true even before anything is written about it. For Christos Yannaras, the order of precedence is fundamental, and in the third chapter of his book The Freedom of Morality , he says that: 'We cannot think of the bible as the ‘founding charter’ of the church.’ The Bible isn’t something that contains ‘theoretical ‘statutes’ for the Christian faith.’ It’s not ‘a code of ‘commandments’ for Christian ethics.’ ‘The morality of the Gospel’ is ontological, it relates to mans existence, the transfiguration of his nature.
The word ethics is never found in the New Testament, the words we usually hear are ‘piety’ or ‘godliness’. And what these words point to in reality, is the regeneration of man. This regeneration is something that happens ‘in Christ’, and it requires the cooperation of mans freedom. It involves the emptying out, or shedding of individual autonomy, something which is known by the Greek term ‘Kenosis’. This is the practice of asceticism, obedience or faithfulness to the image of God, not just submission to law.
Morality in the Gospel has nothing to do with individual ethics. In the Old Testament the law concerns Gods covenant with the people of Israel. Being faithful to the law is being faithful to God. In the book of Leviticus we are told, ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’ (Lev 19:2). Being faithful is not about individual justification. The meaning of ‘law’ in the Old Testament is much richer than this. It’s more than just a set of obligations or conventions. Yannaras compares it to something like artistic creation or composition. The artist, in order to express something beautiful, has to transcend his own subjective preference for colour. And in the same way, we have to forego our individual inclinations in order to align ourselves with what is true and righteous.
All the laws and commandments in the Gospel point toward love. In the book of Romans, St. Paul says that ‘love is the fulfilment of the law’ (Rom 13:10). And Christ Himself says that love is the ‘first and great commandment’ (Matthew 22:38). Love should be seen as something that is never fully completed, moving toward perfection however, is the goal of mans moral progress. This progress has to begin with repentance, but it also requires faith and the need to escape from our own ego.
The message of the Gospel is radically opposed to utilitarian ethics. In fact the attempt to secularize the Christian message has done great harm in recent years. The Gospel message often reverses the standard classification of virtues. We see that first becomes last, and last becomes first, as when Jesus says ‘I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’ (Matt 9:13). Jesus is not looking for the individually virtuous members of society, but for the tax collectors and prostitutes, those who have need of repentance.
Yannaras says that it’s characteristic of mans fall that he has managed to ‘reconcile the Gospel with a juridical understanding of the relationship between God and man’. It’s often seen as a kind of business deal where certain achievements are given divine rewards. But the ethics of the Gospel are centred around the transfiguration of life, not reward and punishment. In the Gospel you must be born again through repentance and baptism. If sin is just seen as individual guilt, and virtue is seen as individual achievement, then the existential impact is lost. Sin and virtue just become ends in themselves without any connection to true life. And this problem isn’t confined to the secular viewpoint, it’s often Christianity that creates the problem for itself, as Yannaras says:
“The structures of morality and religion are more successful than any other aspect of life in camouflaging and concealing the reality of the fall, the real corruption of man. Taking social utility as their frame of reference, they define sin merely as an objective transgression and virtue merely as a necessary and useful individual quality, thus definitely closing the way to repentance.”
“Fools for Christ”
An example of the rejection of individual morality is provided for us when we look to the holy “fools for Christ”. Throughout history these Saints of the Church have helped to reveal the hidden meaning behind the practices of the world. They remind us that the Gospel’s message is ‘foolishness’ in the eyes of the world. By refusing praise and honour among men they often take on the guilt of another in order to demonstrate how sin is common to all. They expose conventional decorum and moral uprightness as a fraud, and show us that the ‘end of the law’ is the freedom of the Saints. Famous examples include St. Basil fool for Christ and St. Gabriel of Georgia, More information on this topic can be found here.
The Liturgical Ethos of the Church
Christian morality looks to the personal identity of man. It’s not about virtue as such, but truth. Virtue has a way of singling man out as an autonomous and self-sufficient being, whereas truth concerns his life ‘in totality’. The Church doesn’t deny objective moral obligations and duties, but it doesn’t limit its understanding to them either. The truth of morality goes beyond merely social conventions and behaviours.
There’s debate within Christianity over whether man is saved by faith or works. But for the Orthodox it’s really no debate at all. ‘Good works’ reveal the truth of morality through action. There is no contradiction between faith and works only the emphasis of different priorities. Without faith, works cannot be considered righteous, but without good works faith is just an ideology.
The transformation of man doesn’t happen by individual effort alone. God became man so that mans nature could be transformed. And this happens through participation. Man is grafted into the body of Christ, by eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. This is the holy supper of the Eucharist, which restores the image of God’s ethos. It’s not an individual act of virtue but a participation in something greater.
“The Church’s ethic is diametrically opposed to any philosophical, social or religious ethic: because it rejects individual virtue, private attainment and individual evaluation. The morality of the Church is a liturgical morality, a liturgical ethos of unity and communion, a personal participation in the body of God the Word.”
It’s also Important to note that the Church is prefigured in the Old Testament. Here it is found in Israel, God’s chosen people. In the New covenant, the ‘New Israel’ is the Church. The liturgy of the church is not just about religious worship but the whole ethos. It restores man and makes him whole. Christian ethics has a cosmological dimension too, the material and spiritual are brought together ‘all in all’. The practical manifestation of this is the Eucharist, as a ‘cosmic liturgy’. And without this transfigured view of the material world, the Christian ethos becomes devoid of life. The eucharistic mode of existence can never be organized into an economic system or political ideology. When this is attempted morality becomes idealized, and separated from being. But the ethos of the Church operates through ‘persons’ not objective systems. It’s the freedom of the ‘person’, which reveals the truth and authenticity of life in communion.
The Kingly, Priestly and Prophetic Ethos
When we look at our existence we see the fall of man at one end, and the Eucharist at the other. Our salvation may be described as the passage from one to the other, through repentance and transfiguration. Ethics and religion arise as a direct result of the fall. They describe mans attempt to replace the Eucharist, or thanksgiving, with something based on individual merit. Instead of seeing creation as something to be celebrated as a gift from God, it becomes a resource which man can use for his own benefit. Freedom is replaced with individuality, and life is replaced with survival.
Christ’s assumption of flesh and the changing of bread and wine, into body and blood, also changes our relationship with creation. For salvation to be real it must liberate man from his flesh, from his subjection to space, time, corruption and death. The Eucharist is a union of the created and the uncreated. It’s a synthesis of sense and mind, which transfigures the individual into the personal. It’s a real cosmic event that goes beyond individuality.
“In the Orthodox Eucharist nothing is theory, autonomous doctrine or abstract reference: All is action, tangible experience and total bodily participation.”
Through the Eucharist we become kings and prophets of the holy mysteries. The Kingly Ethos reveals our sovereignty over our own nature. This is the image of man as king. The nobility of our descent is seen through our capacity to give life and immortality to creation through our relationship with God. The Eucharist makes this real, and marks mankind as a ‘kingly race’.
If the kingly ethos represents the priority of person over nature, the Priestly Ethos bridges the gap between the created and the uncreated. The world is formed through the energies of God, and this is reflected in the matter and spirit of man. Through our personal distinctiveness we may encounter the personal principle or ‘word’ of divine creative energy.
“The image of the priest in the language of the church expresses the human person’s capacity for giving life and immortality to the whole of creation in his own body, by uniting it and ‘grafting’ it into the divine life.”
The Prophetic Ethos is how the church interprets time and history. It’s the experience of time within the dimension of God’s love. This mode of existence works itself out through history as the ‘economy’ of God. The prophetic ethos is the ‘end’ of history as summed up in the cross of Christ. It is the complete opposite of moralizing, it doesn’t denounce human weakness but tries to provide clarity to those in confusion. The church’s prophetic intervention in history is realized through the progress of the saints.
In the church every day is a feast in the memory of a particular saint. This is something that points toward the Festive Ethos of the church.
“One concrete way of approaching the transfigured life of the church is through personal participation in the liturgical experience of time, in the daily, weekly and yearly festive cycles of the calendar.”
This personal participation involves a renouncing of individuality. In order to imitate the obedience of Christ and the Saints we come together in a daily ascetic effort. This eucharistic ethos is at the heart of Christianity and the heart of Christian ethics.
And that’s where I’m going to leave this discussion for now. In the next post or two I will be diving deeper into asceticism, pietism, and the holy mysteries. I will also try my best to outline Yannaras’ chapters on the historical and social aspects of Christian ethics, as well as canon law and liturgical art.
If you like this content please share, subscribe and join me soon as I continue to explore Christos Yannaras treatise on the Freedom of Morality.