not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea

Thus Pope Benedict began his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, speaking of the fundamental nature of Christianity.

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

Rocco Palmo posted an address the Pope gave to the Bishops of Switzerland a couple years ago. In it he speaks of how too often being Christian is reduced to "being a good person," an ethical model, or the promulgation of moral laws. These subsidiary matters must never be mistaken for the central reaity:

what matters above all is... one's personal relationship with God, with that God who revealed himself to us in Christ. Augustine repeatedly emphasized the two sides of the Christian concept of God: God is Logos and God is Love - to the point that he completely humbled himself, assuming a human body and finally, giving himself into our hands as bread.

He later continues:

I think that this is the great task we have before us: on the one hand, not to make Christianity seem merely morality, but rather a gift in which we are given the love that sustains us and provides us with the strength we need to be able to "lose our own life". On the other hand, in this context of freely given love, we need to move forward towards ways of putting it into practice, whose foundation is always offered to us by the Decalogue, which we must interpret today with Christ and with the Church in a progressive and new way.

I often reflect on this in my job of trying to teach Ethics to high school Juniors. I often hear the response from students when I ask about the meaning of being Christian: it's about being a good person, doing the right thing, having a good intention. That reflexive response betrays the influence of a banal Kantianism (and perhaps, Protestant legalsim) in American culture (or maybe even a nominalist voluntarism if you want to go back even farther). Sometimes I hear: Christianity helps us become virtuous people, and if we are virtuous, we will be happy. Perhaps the influence of trickle-down virtue ethics, there. But not really the Christian life, as it in fact is.

An emphasis on the Decalogue has certainly become gauche in light of all the emphasis and ra-ra on virtue ethics in recent years. (Full disclosure: I have often been an advocate for such an emphasis.) Aristotle has been revitalized, and it is becoming more and more common to see teleological and virtue ethics emphasized in high school (and college) curricula.

But the Pope has an important point here. It is important to appreciate the discontinuity with Aristotle as well. The Pope did this himself in his encyclical on love:

The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love —and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love.

Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue and Dependent Rational Animals emphasized this from several other angles as well, particularly in regards to Aristotle's deficient appreciation of humility and the value of dependence on others in itself. Interestingly, an overemphasis on virtue ethics can sometimes have the same effect that liberal protestantism had: rendering sterile the Christian scandal, expunging it of the personal, of destiny and the cosmic, leaving it merely ethical in the end. (Certainly those such as Pinckaers seek to avoid this, and explictly locate a virtue ethics within a theological morality--but nonetheless, I feel the tendency remains, and metastisizes under less capable teachers.)

Fundamentally the problem amounts to this: even after I have understood Aristotle's Ethics, even if I am living and practicing the virtues as he explains, I find that the deepest questions in my heart, the most haunting problems in my life, remain unanswered. This is the same for my students. If we are simply teaching ethics, or rather, teaching Christianity as an ethical philosophy, the questions that really matter remain untouched. Questions like:

- do I have a personal destiny and call?
- is there a meaning and purpose in time, in the universe?
- can I find and possess real beauty?
- is there an end and solution to all this suffering in the world? a meaning to what seems senseless?
- what will happen when I die?
- will I find love? will I always be lonely in the end?
- will I always be condemned by the past? is real healing possible?
- why am I here at all, rather than not?
- what is this thing I call my self?

These are questions that transcend ethics; and they are questions that will remain unanswered if Christianity is left on the level of morals or social justice.

Christianity is fundamentally an encounter with an event, with a love that creates me and draws me and defines me, an enounter that truly takes life as you know it and radically alters it by virtue of a new horizon, a persepctive that comes in the radical surprise and gift of love, a love that the world has never before known.

Within the acceptance of Christianity, which is a surrender of love to a Person, and a new view of reality as now utterly charged and rendered through the speech of this Person, the set of moral commandments is transformed from the deontological to the interpersonal. These commands, previously seen as cold impositions or contstraints, are now revealed as invitations to love; in light of the Son, we know that obedience is the foundation for love of the Father. Not obedience in the sense of moral duty, but obedience in the sense of abandonment to an Other. Rather, it is the duty of vocation, to listen and discern and follow the will of God, a will that is manifested in very concrete, particular, and non-ethical commands. Not, when in this situation, do or don't do this; but, go here and do this thing now (i.e. marry this man; be a priest; prophesy to these people). The Decalogue thus becomes a reality of love and invitation for us in all those particular moments when we can respond to the invitation to love (i.e. the Good Samaritan, who otherwise broke many of the Jewish ceremonial laws as Samaritan).

The question of, what exactly are we doing when we teach high school religion, is a whole other problem, and a rather difficult one--but at the least, in the encounter with persons who have not yet known Christ, nomatter whom, the methodology and presentation must be: reflect on yourself; what are the deepest desires of your heart; what are the questions you burn to have answered, but never are; what are you seeking? And in the dialogue the interlocuter (teacher, missionary) has the same role: to help clue the person onto what this answer must look like, what it must be in order to be the kind of answer that really satisfies, and then, either to wait for an apostle to present that news that an answer has been given, or in fact to be sent as an apostle and communicate that good news of an answer to this person, waiting. (That distinction contains within it the whole difference between the religion teacher, and the actual apostle sent by the Church, by the way.)

And in the end, it must always be, the introduction or awakening to a Person who loves me more than I could have ever anticipated or expected, who spared nothing, even to the point of giving everything, for me.