The God of Orthodoxy Meets the Juridical Deity of the West

“For the Church,” avers Christos Yannaras, “sin is not a legal but an existential fact. It is not simply a transgression, but an active refusal on man’s part to be what he truly is: the image and ‘glory,’ or manifestation, of God.”¹ Sin cannot be properly understood through the conceptual lens of the violation of a legal code, for the Father of Jesus Christ is not a moral despot. He is interested neither in rewarding the virtuous nor punishing the wicked, as demonstrated by the atoning sacrifice of the incarnate Son on the cross. “For I did not come to judge the world,” declares the Savior, “but to save the world” (John 12:47). The Triune LORD’s concern is the redemption of sinners and the deification of creation:

The God of the Church as known and proclaimed by Orthodox experience and tradition has never had anything to do with the God of the Roman juridical tradition, the God of Anselm and Abelard; He has never been thought of as a vengeful God who rules by fear, meting out punishments and torment for men. God is not the ‘judge’ of men in the sense of a magistrate who passes sentence and imposes a punishment, testifying to the transgression. He is judge because of what He is: the possibility of life and true existence. When man voluntarily cuts himself off from this possibility of existence, he is automatically “judged.” It is not God’s sentence but His existence that judges him. God is nothing but an ontological fact of love and an outpouring of love: a fulness of good, an ecstasy of loving goodness.

God is not the “judge” of men in the sense of a magistrate who passes sentence and imposes a punishment, testifying to the transgression. He is judge because of what He is: the possibility of life and true existence. When man voluntarily cuts himself off from this possibility of existence, he is automatically “judged.” It is not God’s sentence but His éxistence that judges him. God is nothing but an ontological fact of love and an outpouring of love: a fulness of good, an ecstasy of loving goodness.²

In Yannaras’s view, therefore, the ethics of the Church cannot be properly interpreted in terms of law and justice. Rather, ethics is an expression of God’s love for human beings and his desire to bring them into the fullness of life:

The concept of ethics, then, which stems from the interpretation of sin as failure and “missing the mark” does not depend on the conventional social idea of “good” and “evil,” of merit or transgression; it involves the dilemma between life and death,” between existential truth and authenticity on the one side, and existential deprivation and corruption on the other. The Church’s ethics are “beyond good and evil”: they relate to ontological realities and not to evaluative categories. “You should know,” says St Maximus, “that what is simply called evil is not altogether evil, but evil in one way and not in another. In the same way, what is simply called good is not altogether good, but is good in one way and not in another.”

The ethics of the Church have nothing to do with this essential indeter­mi­nacy of good and evil, whose conclusions and development cannot be other than conventional. They preclude relativity in values, and do not have reference to any convention, whether customary or consciously accepted, which would permit objective valuations and juridical calculations. The Church’s ethics “judge” man by revealing the image of God in the human person, distinguishing existence and life from ephemeral survival and the illusion of self-existence.³

Catholic and Protestant Christians will object to Yannaras’s caricature of Western Christianity, even while acknowledging its validity when addressing specific theologians, preachers, and penitential practices. Does the caricature, for instance, accurately describe the three formative doctors of the Latin tradition—St Augustine, St Bonaventure, and St Thomas Aquinas? Yet by the 16th century the juridical paradigm had become widely and firmly established, prompting Martin Luther‘s bold, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to correct and transcend the paradigm. Yet as astringent as Yannaras’s anti-Western polemic may be, it cannot be simply dismissed. Whenever we date its beginning, some­thing went tragically awry in the Catholic and Protestant Churches, affecting both the apprehension of the Holy Trinity and the vision of the moral life.

In his important book The Sources of Christian Ethics, Catholic theologian Servais Pinckaers discusses the important changes in the moral theology of the Latin Church introduced by the rise of nominalism and voluntarism. For our purposes, the most important change was the replacement of the morality of happiness, grounded in the supernatural and natural virtues, with a morality of obligation, grounded in an innovative construal of libertarian freedom. Pinckaers calls this construal the “freedom of indiffer­ence,” i.e., the power to choose between contraries. This change goes hand in with a change in the Latin presentation of the Deity, who becomes “the absolute realization of freedom,” transcending all moral norms and laws. The divine will is “the sole cause and origin of the moral law.”⁴ That which God commands is good; that which he prohibits is evil. Pinckaers elaborates:

When we consider freedom of indifference, we discover that we are in a new moral universe. It is lodged between two freedoms that confront each other: the freedom of the human person and the freedom of God. No natural bond connects them, for nature is now subordinated to freedom. Nature only establishes an exterior relationship shaped by their differences: The omnipotence of the Creator gives him absolute power over the human person, which he especially exercises by means of the moral law. The moral law expresses the divine will, which is perfectly free and sovereign, while it limits human freedom by commanding or forbidding certain actions with the force of obligation. Law is the source of morality. In fact, human acts, since they are born of a choice between contraries, are by nature indifferent; they become morally good or bad insofar as they conform to a legal obligation. Law itself depends entirely on God. God could, in principle, at the whim of his will, modify any one of the law’s precepts. Ockham pushed this view to its logical extreme. Without hesitation he affirmed that if God ordered someone to hate him, in this case hate itself would become good, being an act of obedience to the Creator’s will. It would be impossible to express more clearly the view that obedience to law has priority over love.⁵

The God who wills our good and happiness in loving communion with him is replaced by the holy, just, and wrathful Judge who delivers the Law and summons humanity to obedience and submission, with heaven and hell in the balance. Morality becomes the meeting place between the transcendent agent of retributive justice and the human agent possessed of libertarian freedom.

Particularly illuminating here is the way the morality of obligation, developed in the post-Reformation manuals of moral theology, impacted the Sacrament of Penance:

Observing the makeup of the moral textbooks, we are struck by their similarity to the sacrament that has been called the tribunal of penance, at least at this period. For both, everything breathed the atmosphere of a courtroom, with some adaptations. Both moral theology and the sacrament were dominated by law, which expressed the will of God and determined the morality of actions. Conscience, in moral theology, exercised the role of the judge who applied the law by determining what one could or could not, might or might not, do. In the sacrament of penance, the role of conscience was filled by the confessor in regard to the judgment to be made, while conscience itself played the role of prosecutor in regard to freedom, through the confession of sins. Human acts were the subject matter of moral theology insofar as they came under the law, with special attention to sins, which formed the subject matter of penance. In his role as judge, the confessor concluded his judgment by assigning a penance or satisfaction suited to the gravity of the sin, and this corresponded to the remorse of conscience which punished faults. Morality and the sacrament of penance were thus set in a juridical and legal context. We should add that ethicists and confessors often had a great concern for mercy, taking care not to overburden consciences and seeking to favor freedom wherever possible. Confessors were mindful that penance was above all the sacrament of divine mercy. Nevertheless, the attitudes inculcated by the theology of manuals were too juridical to give free scope to mercy, which is so preeminent in the Gospel.⁶

A conversation between Christos Yannaras and Servais Pinckaers, I suggest, should prove very fruitful.

Footnotes

[1] Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, p. 46.

[2] Ibid., pp. 35-36.

[3] Ibid., p. 37.

[4] Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 3rd ed., p.  252.

[5] Servais Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View, p. 72.

[6] Pinckaers, Sources, p. 273.

(15 January 2015, rev.)

(Go to “Taking Up the Cross”)