J Value Inquiry (2017) 51:123–140 DOI 10.1007/s10790-016-9561-x

The Essential Connection Between Human Value and Saintly Behavior Simon Coghlan1,2

Published online: 27 May 2016  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

1 Introduction In this paper I will explore the idea that saintly goodness is essential to an understanding of the value, specifically the preciousness, to use Raimond Gaita’s term, of all human beings. Key parts of this idea can be traced to Simone Weil.1 Gaita has recently revived her thought.2 Yet the idea of a vital connection between saintly goodness and universal human value remains philosophically marginal and misunderstood. Indeed, Gaita’s influential personal illustration of this idea – his story about a saintly nun’s behavior towards profoundly intellectually disabled patients – continues to strike some philosophers as obscure and underdeveloped.3 Even Gaita himself has recently criticized parts of his earlier formulation of that key example.4 Moreover, his philosophical style, as with Weil’s, can elicit both misdirected criticism and misdirected support. In what follows I address this question: How should we best characterize saintly behavior, and our responses to it, so as to display the preciousness of all human 1

See Simone Weil, Simone Weil, ed. Eric O. Springsted (New York: Orbis Books, 2006).

2

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge 2000).

3

See, e.g. Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2008): 181–195.

4

Raimond Gaita, After Romulus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010), p. 58.

& Simon Coghlan [email protected] 1

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

2

114 Queensville St, Kingsville, Melbourne 3012, Australia

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beings? I explore the cases of the severely intellectually disabled, the irredeemably evil, and the perfectly ordinary (vast majority). In relation to these groups, I examine three interconnected aspects of saintliness: recognition of full humanity; pure and rare compassion; and impartial love. My overall aim is both to defend and expand upon Gaita’s revival of Weil’s thought.

2 Weil and Gaita Gaita’s example of saintliness is central to his revival of Simone Weil’s work. As a young man, Gaita worked in a psychiatric hospital housing patients so mentally afflicted that they had ‘‘irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives.’’ Some of the staff cleaned them ‘‘as zoo-keepers wash down elephants,’’ at a distance with long mops.5 Unlike these brutish staff members, a few brave psychiatrists spoke of the patients’ ‘‘inalienable dignity.’’6 Even so, Gaita contrasts those heroic and noble psychiatrists with a nun he encountered one day in the ward: In her middle years only her vivacity made an impression on me until she talked to the patients. Then everything in her demeanor towards them – the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and showed up the behavior of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.7 Gaita stresses that it was the form and quality of her love and compassion – its purity, beauty, and wondrousness – which proved to him that even those severely intellectually disabled patients ‘‘are rightly the objects of our non-condescending treatment’’ and are ‘‘fully our equals.’’8 He claims that the nun’s goodness – its lack of all traces of condescension as expressed in aspects of her behavior like her bodily demeanor – had the ‘‘power to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible.’’9 Gaita argues that saintly goodness is both revelatory and constitutive of human preciousness. The connection is, therefore, epistemic and conceptual.10 This does not mean that human beings could not have great value in the absence of such goodness. But it does mean that there would not be, and that we could not recognize, human preciousness of a certain deep kind had there never been instances and

5

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge 2000), p. 17.

6

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 18.

7

Ibid., pp. 18–19.

8

Ibid., pp. 20, 21.

9

Ibid., p. 20.

10

See Mark Wynn, ‘‘Saintliness and the Moral Life,’’ Journal of Religious Ethics 31(3) (2003): 478.

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stories of saintly love. Expanding on Rush Rhees’ remark that there would be no love without the language of love, Gaita writes: Because of the place the impartial love of saints has occupied in our culture, there has developed a language of love whose grammar has transformed our understanding of what it is for a human being to be a unique kind of limit to our will. We express our sense of that limit when we say that human beings are owed unconditional respect…11 There would not be, Gaita argues, perfect goodness ‘‘without certain ways and tones of speaking of what we love’’ and without the accompanying recognition of standards that distinguish deep from defective ways of loving and showing compassion.12 For Gaita, these standards are connected to the fact that we can recognize some forms of love as, say, sentimental, banal, or self-indulgent, or as free of these defects.13 In Gaita’s thought, it is the purity of the nun’s compassionate love – the fact that her demeanor shows no trace of sentimentality, banality or self-indulgence – which gives it its power to reveal the preciousness of the lives of those severely disabled patients. At the same time, that preciousness is itself constituted by the nun’s loving demeanor. On Gaita’s view, then, value comes into existence partly through human acts of valuing. But this does not render values purely subjective and arbitrary. Acts of evaluation, like the nun’s compassionate love for those afflicted patients, are subject to objective critical standards – was her behavior merely sentimental or merely self-indulgent? – that are enshrined in our language, social practices, and traditions. It is these standards which determine whether such acts of evaluation are justified or not. Thus Gaita’s ethic is groundless in the sense that it requires no metaphysical, ontological, or teleological support. Or as Gaita simply puts it, ‘‘I allow for no independent justification of her [the nun’s] attitude’’ beyond our critical responses to it.14 Like Weil, Gaita distinguishes saintly behavior from, say, extraordinary empathy, heroism, beneficence, self-sacrifice, and supererogation. Important as they are, these virtues and features are at the center of a very different philosophical debate on the nature and value of supererogatory action.15 But saintly love – which Weil calls a supernatural virtue – goes in a sense beyond virtue, and not merely because it is supererogatory or self-sacrificing. Saintly goodness is stamped with a distinctive quality – it typically involves a compassionate love of others that is pure, rare and impartial – which helps constitute, and enables the recognition of, human preciousness. That quality arises partly from our responses, like wonder and astonishment, toward saintly behavior. The concept of human preciousness, at least 11

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 24.

12

Ibid., p. 26.

13

Ibid., p. 250.

14

Ibid., p. 22.

15

See J.O. Urmson, ‘‘Saints and Heroes,’’ Reprinted in A.I. Melden (ed.), Essays in Moral Philosophy (Washington: Washington University Press: 1958) and Susan Wolf, ‘‘Moral Saints,’’ Journal of Philosophy LXXIX (1982), pp. 419–439.

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for Gaita, is generated by the conceptual interdependence of response (e.g. sense of beauty) and the response’s object (human subjects and saintly behavior). I return to this point in the next section. Some people will feel that terms such as saintliness – like sacredness – carry too much religious baggage and are best replaced with, say, perfect goodness. However, not only is the word saint part of the philosophical territory I am exploring, it also continues to have moral resonance even for non-religious people. Conversely, others feel that the language of saintly goodness should be retained precisely because religion, specifically Christianity, is required to make sense of the goodness.16 Gaita’s reply is that although that idea of goodness was originally conditioned by religious language, what ‘‘grows in one place can take root in another’’, and that religious language is itself conditioned by familiar kinds of love, like unconditional parental love.17 The historically formative language of, for example, Christ’s love for perfect strangers might have evolved over time into the pure compassion that nonChristians too can display. Perhaps, also, the idea that we are God’s Children has given birth to the still evocative but now often secular ideas that other human beings are our brothers and sisters, or that we are All in it together, or simply that every human is worthy of the deepest forms of love and compassion. But even if, unlike Gaita, we admit that the concept of saintly behavior still depends on some religious language – because we find that we need such poetically moving language to fully sustain our sense of such goodness – this need not imply necessary religious commitment. Arguably, it no more requires religious commitment than (say) a person’s belief in absolute value, sustained (for them) indispensably by Plato’s rich poetic myths of the Form of the Good, requires Platonic metaphysical commitment.18 Some religious people will feel that the ‘‘evolution’’ of certain religious ideas into secular ones constitutes a conceptual loss.19 But even granting that such ethical losses do sometimes occur (at least in the eyes of the religious), this need not mean that the ideas we are left with lack the features and resonances which enable us to have a deep and distinctive sense of, say, ideal goodness or perfect love. Equally, we 16

For example, Mark Wynn, ‘‘Saintliness and the Moral Life,’’ Journal of Religious Ethics 31(3) (2003): 484, argues that Gaita’s argument is unstable without religious language and commitment and, indeed, without Christian metaphysics.

17

Raimond Gaita, After Romulus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010), p. 64.

18

See Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 91. I should also note that Wynn thinks my general response here is unstable. If we need religious language to fully express the resonances of saintly goodness, he suggests, ‘‘should we not consider the language of religion as having authority on other matters too?’’ Mark Wynn, ‘‘Saintliness and the Moral Life,’’ op. cit., p. 474. Wynn means having authority, for instance, about the reality of God. But, must those for whom some of Plato’s poetic myths are irreplaceable resonant metaphors subscribe to other things Plato says or to his metaphysics? Suppose we do take religious language to have real authority on other matters than perfect goodness. Doing so need not depend on either religious or metaphysical commitment. It need only depend, as it would with other aspects of Plato’s work, on us finding that additional religious language poetically and/or conceptually indispensable on its own merits.

19 Such as Stephen Mulhall, ‘‘The work of saintly love: the religious impulse in Gaita’s writing.’’ In C. Cordner (ed.) Philosophy, Ethics and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honor of Raimond Gaita (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 21–37.

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might be cautious about assuming that very strongly religious-sounding language – sacredness, for example – can have no deep and distinctive secular equivalent.20 Gaita confesses the word preciousness can sound soft-headed.21 Perhaps its derogatory sense also intrudes. Why not, then, speak of unconditional value, or, like Lloyd Reinhardt, of equality of respect, which, in Reinhardt’s view, conveys with greater clarity the meanings of equal preciousness?22 But again, talk of preciousness still resonates with many of us. We may want to say that our loved ones are precious, and we may wish others to feel they are unconditionally precious too. The word precious signifies what we find most deeply valuable, what is dearest to us, and what we could never give up or abandon. Phrases like equality of respect, or unconditional value, cannot convey precisely that. As we shall see, these connotations are deepened in the light of the love of saints. We need certain words to evoke the right resonances. Perhaps some will wonder why sacredness is not equally preferred, given the earlier suggestion that a person who is not traditionally religious may yet find power in it. Yet it is also true that many will balk at the word sacred, and not just some bioethicists. Of course, many will also balk at saintly goodness and preciousness, though probably less violently. I shall, then, place my present hopes of showing why the interlinked terminology of saintly goodness and human preciousness is worth retaining in the subsequent exploration of these ways of speaking.

3 Recent Criticism and Praise of Gaita’s Nun Example Gaita’s position is easily misunderstood. It will be useful to explain how not to interpret it, and to indicate where further exploration might be fruitful. In a paper defending Gaita’s example, Elizabeth Drummond Young says: Gaita’s emotional response has two main elements, wonder at the nun’s goodness and the recognition that the belief he holds about the humanity, equality and preciousness of the patients has come alive and is now ‘‘in his heart;’’ a felt belief, rather than something to which he assents merely intellectually…By a sort of moral contagion, and especially through causing Gaita to ‘‘wonder,’’ the nun has transmitted the feelings that accompany partial love to Gaita, and I suggest that this transformation of his belief into one activated by such feelings is what he considers to be saintly and what prompts his feeling of admiration.23

20

Cf. Raimond Gaita, Good and evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2004), p. xxvi.

21

See Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 5.

22

Lloyd Reinhardt, ‘‘Is Love What we Need?: Raimond Gaita’s A Common Humanity,’’ Arena Journal 15 (2000), p. 145. 23 Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2012), pp. 200–201.

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Gaita’s encounter, Young claims, ‘‘brings alive an already existing belief about the patients’ equal preciousness.’’24 Like the noble psychiatrists, Gaita apparently believed it, but he did not really believe it. Gaita says he came to believe something about the patients in his heart. His phrasing might seem to describe the replacement of a merely verbal belief with a genuine belief. But Young misses the way in which the change in belief is a significant alteration in the content of what is believed. Before the encounter, Gaita did of course believe that, in some sense, the psychiatric patients had inherent dignity. But he was unprepared for what it could mean for such people to be equally precious. The content of his (our) new understanding concerns how saintly action conditions the concept their preciousness. It is true that, on Gaita’s view, the change in understanding must involve a change in the heart and not just the head, because real ethical understanding necessarily depends upon, for example, being moved rightly in wonder at the nun’s beautiful behavior. It is true, then, that the change is not merely a shift in disengaged intellectual understanding. However, what Young misses is that both the responses (wonder etc.) and the details of the nun’s behavior are revelatory because they are at the same time constitutive of the acquired understanding. In fact, they are not only constitutive of the new understanding, they are also constitutive of the very idea of preciousness. Or put differently, the new understanding involves grasping a new sense of human preciousness conditioned in just that way. On Gaita’s very unorthodox view, then, the beauty of the nun’s love and compassion, and the fact that all human beings are worthy of it, are internal to human preciousness itself. This altered understanding of the patients’ preciousness has a new conceptual content that is in part filled out by certain responses to the nun’s behavior. Given this substantive conceptual change, along with the magnitude of the ethical reorientation, it seems fair to speak here of a moral conversion. The opportunity for such a conversion passed the noble psychiatrists by, because, unlike Gaita, they were not moved in a way that was connected with the relevant substantive change in understanding that involved a new sense of human preciousness. Related to this misunderstanding on Young’s part is the failure to grasp precisely what it is to recognize certain human beings as our equals in preciousness and thus to believe that in our hearts. This depends upon grasping the right connection between the relevant details of saintly behavior and the human objects of it. And this is where the trouble that interests me begins. What is it about saintly goodness and our responses to it that reveals and constitutes human preciousness? How should we characterize this allegedly essential behavior? Unlike Young, Christopher Hamilton believes Gaita’s nun example (and in fact, most of his discussion of saintliness) signally fails to justify unqualified human preciousness: We are told nothing about what she actually did while visiting the patients in the psychiatric hospital or thereafter. Did she remonstrate with the doctors in an attempt to get them to treat the patients better? Did she seek to get the

24

Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ op. cit. p. 194.

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institutional structures and organization changed that the patients might be better cared for? Did she herself wash or feed or clothe them?25 Because the nun apparently did not achieve anything for the patients’ wellbeing, it is unclear ‘‘what this [her] love is and what its worth is.’’26 Importantly, Hamilton is skeptical of goodness that seems to consist in simply doing something in a particular manner – with certain facial expressions, ways of talking, bodily inflexions, etc. According to Mark Wynn, Gaita learns that ‘‘it is possible for the patients to figure in an embodied, enacted relationship of genuine equality, and at the same time he comes to a new understanding of what is required, in terms of bodily demeanor, for such a relationship.’’27 But Hamilton’s point is that such behavior is far too minimally characterized to be convincing – mere talk of bodily demeanor (etc.) is too vague to illuminate human preciousness. In the following three sections, I hope to mitigate such skepticism by discussing in more detail than Gaita does the apparently insignificant yet crucial (though of course not exhaustive) details of saintly goodness. The fact that attentive commentators either misunderstand or remain unconvinced by an essential connection between human preciousness and saintly behavior, is an indication that further argument for the Gaita/Weil position is required.

4 Revealing and Recognizing Full Humanity More than ten years after he reinvigorated Simone Weil’s seminal work on love and affliction, Gaita confessed that his explanation of what the nun revealed to him about afflicted human beings contained ‘‘revealing errors.’’28 Earlier, he had said that the nun’s behavior ‘‘was striking not for the virtues it expressed, or even for the good it achieved, but for its power to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible.’’29 Gaita has come to think this muddled for two reasons. First, the apparently illuminating expression of the revelation of full humanity, he now thinks, is in fact redundant – it says no more than that the nun rightly behaved toward the patients without condescension. Furthermore, that expression ‘‘does nothing towards diminishing the mystery that we should ever have incorporated, into our sense of our ‘full humanity’, the idea that we should behave as the nun did towards people like the patients in that hospital.’’30 Second, the expression full humanity, like the expression fully our equals, ‘‘looks to be saying that she revealed a fact about them (perhaps a metaphysical fact) that would explain and perhaps even justify it’’ – whereas all she reveals, once again, is 25

Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2008), p. 183. 26

Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ op. cit. p. 185.

27

Mark Wynn, ‘‘The Moral Philosophy of Raimond Gaita and Some Questions of Method in the Philosophy of Religion,’’ New Blackfriars 90 (1030) (2009), p. 642. 28

Raimond Gaita, After Romulus, op. cit. p. 56.

29

Ibid., p. 58.

30

Ibid., p. 59.

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that the patients are rightly the objects of her perfectly non-condescending behavior.31 I think Gaita is correct to stress, against a widespread and strong philosophical instinct, that the saintly nun does not reveal any new or justificatory fact or feature, metaphysical or otherwise, about the patients which could stand independently of her perfectly non-condescending treatment of them and which shows they are precious. This does not mean we cannot argue about the ethical value of the nun’s behavior, as in fact Gaita and some of his critics do. But Gaita does want our focus to be on the wondrousness and beauty of the nun’s revelatory behavior. More controversially, he insists that there is ‘‘no independent justification of her attitude.’’32 Although we need to be careful about how we interpret this difficult claim, we might now simply mark Gaita’s (I think correct) point that the nun’s behavior does not reveal to us an unnoticed or specific fact or feature about the patients that justifies her behavior. And no new fact or feature about the patients is uncovered that would diminish the wonderful strangeness of the fact that we have incorporated into our understanding of full humanity the nun’s beautiful sort of behavior. While in different historical circumstances we might have found her behavior intelligible, we may nevertheless have found it to be the misguided indulgence of a bleeding-heart. Thus it may seem incredible that some of us do in fact find her behavior wonderful. So Gaita is right to that extent. Nevertheless, I am rather less inclined to agree unreservedly with him that talk of the nun revealing full humanity and equality ‘‘obscure[s] what was most wonderful about the nun’s behavior.’’33 At least, I think that is the case so long as, first, we remember that the wondrousness of her behavior itself creates for us a new understanding of human preciousness, and second, we can infer, construct, or flesh out some additional details about how she behaved, as I will shortly do. But first I want to ask what humanity might mean in this context? It does not, for Gaita, simply mean biologically human. Humanity, like preciousness, is in significant part a moralized or ethical concept. Nevertheless, it has connections with important ways in which human beings can behave. Simone Weil speaks sometimes of human souls. The truly afflicted can lose their souls, she thinks. Soul can have a non-metaphysical sense, meaning something like a person’s humanity. Consider Gandhi’s address to the untouchable caste: Not to yield your soul to the conqueror means that you will refuse to do that which your conscience forbids you to do. Suppose the ‘‘enemy’’ were to ask you to rub your nose on the ground or to pull your ears or to go through such humiliating performances, you will not submit to any of these humiliations. But if he robs you of your possessions, you will yield them because as a votary of ahisma you have from the beginning decided that earthly possessions have nothing to do with your soul.34 31

Ibid., p. 59.

32

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 22.

33

Ibid., p. 59.

34

Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-violence, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 2007), p. 84.

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So Gandhi bids the despised caste remember and exercise their humanity rather than submit to social condescension. It is the state of their humanity or souls – their own sense of, for instance, what is humiliating or truly good for them – that matters most. Attention to the souls of individuals, I think, is characteristic of saintliness. It comes out in the story where Jesus, looking lovingly at the rich young man, tells him to give up his worldly possessions if he wants to be perfect. But the problem we face with the nun example is this. The rich man, and even the untouchables (ground down by social contempt), seem clearly to have souls/humanity. Their humanity is what Jesus and Gandhi sought to engage. But can we make sense of the idea that those suffering severe intellectual disability, like Gaita’s psychiatric patients, have souls or humanity? On the one hand, we may wonder what the difficulty is. Does not anyone who knows and loves a severely intellectually disabled person find it easy to recognise his or her humanity? And cannot someone who feels this towards loved ones, or who is simply moved by compassion for the disabled, readily recognize the humanity of all such unfortunate people? Perhaps they can. Simone Weil, however, thought otherwise. She thought genuine compassion for the afflicted was both impossible and miraculous: Our senses attach to affliction all the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime. Except for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everyone despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it.35 Besides the presence of social degradation, there is another, perhaps related, way to construe the seeming impossibility of genuine compassion for the afflicted. In philosophy, it is evident in the so-called Argument from Marginal Cases, which claims that some nonhuman animals are not essentially ethically different from the severely intellectually disabled. For those who genuinely (not merely verbally) accept that argument, talk of the equal humanity of the severely intellectually disabled can be baffling. For them, the idea that such humans have full humanity appears not only contrary to our natural and common-sense reactions, but also contrary to sound or valid moral reasoning. As Gaita says, we may be naturally appalled by the humiliating mopping-down of the patients, but, really, how can we respect their dignity? For it ‘‘seems there is nothing much to humiliate.’’36 We can explain this problem by distinguishing between humanity which is manifest or capable of expression – as it is for even the socially degraded untouchables – and humanity which is neither manifest nor expressible. In the former case, we might speak of humanity as it can be lost and gained, or humanity as an achievement in which we become, as people say, more fully human – an outcome Gandhi intended to promote through his exhortations to the repressed Indian underclass. In the latter case, we are speaking of humanity that is not a matter of achievement and indeed cannot be lost, even when all forms of enacted or manifest humanity are missing. Soon, however, I will suggest that these two senses 35

Simone Weil, Simone Weil (New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 45.

36

Raimond Gaita, After Romulus, op. cit. p. 55.

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of humanity are conceptually related, and indeed that humanity which cannot be lost is, in a sense I will explain, continuous with the fully manifest and expressed humanity that we may easily discern in normal human individuals. Understanding how that is possible requires, I shall suggest, looking at the ways saints might respond to those individuals whose humanity cannot be expressed. But for now, we can further sharpen our problem by comparing Gaita’s psychiatric patients to, say, the victim in the Good Samaritan story who – we will imagine – suffered affliction. Affliction, in Weil’s sense of the word, not only causes severe suffering and destroys flourishing, it ‘‘deprives its victims of their personality and turns them into things.’’37 Affliction is the eclipse of a person’s soul or humanity. Now while it may be true that the victim in the story of the Good Samaritan suffered affliction, he was, unlike Gaita’s psychiatric patients, a normal human being prior to his misfortune. Furthermore, affliction for Weil appears to allow for a victim, like the beaten man the Good Samaritan comes across, to regain his humanity: ‘‘He quivers like a butterfly pinned alive to a tray. But throughout the horror he can go on wanting to love,’’ she says.38 But for the psychiatric patients, Gandhi-like appeals to their sense of dignity have been and will remain unthinkable. This distinguishes them from people with other terrible illnesses, people suffering immobilizing depression, and even from people with some serious cognitive disabilities. In these cases, we might imagine the victim acting in some small way that affords a glimpse, however minuscule, of their humanity – a fleeting smile or a brief response to music, for example, might do it. But the psychiatric patients, we may suppose, lack any hint of humanity. They may have no conception whatsoever of their condition and its degradations. No wonder the hospital staff had no hesitation mopping them like zoo-keepers wash elephants. And although we rightly regard this as deplorable, the philosophical difficulty is in meaningfully locating the patients’ humanity. Young thinks that the nun’s ‘‘capacity to ignore difference in fortune’’ partly constitutes her saintly goodness.39 That seems on the right track. But surely the difference in fortune cannot be entirely ignored, since the patients’ misfortune itself sometimes warrants non-condescending compassion. For a saint to ignore such misfortune would be very odd. Weil says the Christ-like person ‘‘does not feel any distance between himself’’ and the one who has been ‘‘stripped of their humanity by misfortune.’’40 Christ-like people do for these people something very different from feeding, clothing, or taking care of them. By projecting their own being into those they help they give them for a moment – what affliction has deprived them of – an existence of their own.41 How does one project one’s own being into the severely intellectually disabled? Is that effort possible? Or is it pure fantasy? 37

Simone Weil, Simone Weil, op. cit. p. 47.

38

Ibid., pp. 54–55.

39

Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ op. cit. p. 200.

40

Simone Weil, Simone Weil, op. cit. pp. 62, 63.

41

Ibid., p. 62.

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Weil’s phrase about being stripped of humanity might appear to leave little room for affirming the equal preciousness of such people. Perhaps her words also seem to invoke the need for some sort of philosophically problematic projection of humanity onto those victims of severe misfortune. However, there is a different way to take these remarks. I will explain it by recalling the idea of behaving without a hint of condescension. For Gaita, this appears to mean the perfect enactment of the refusal to believe (or the complete absence of the belief) that it would have been better had such patients as those he saw in the psychiatric ward never been born.42 Although that is important, I shall develop the idea in a different direction. A total lack of condescension, we were told, showed in the nun’s bodily expressions and demeanor. Now, we might snobbishly patronize a person by treating her as a fool but never doubt her equal humanity. In a more moral vein, people do often condescend to those of lower caste or social standing – again, without doubting their equal humanity. By contrast, we might feel that condescension to severely intellectually disabled humans means failing to fully recognize their equal humanity, a failure that was manifested glaringly in the zoo-keeper-like act of mopping down the patients. But recognition of humanity and its failure is also manifested in much subtler ways. Hamilton wonders whether the nun washed and fed the patients. I think we can say that if she did, she would wash and feed them without artificiality, as she would any non-disabled hospital patient. She would, I imagine, talk to them as naturally as she would talk to a nondisabled adult patient – some of Gaita’s psychiatric patients were adults – knowing they cannot understand. So, our nun would not speak to the adult psychiatric patients as babies, fools, or even as children, even though children and fools can understand something. True, non-saints might object to long-handled mops. Yet talking to such patients with the kind of intonation and demeanor we use so unthinkingly for normal adult human beings does not come naturally to most of us, especially in dehumanizing circumstances like those Gaita encountered. There are indefinitely many ways the nun might recognize and reveal their humanity. The point here, of course, is not that she would expect a reply. One might say with justice that she would speak differently to someone from whom she could expect a reply. But in that case, the difference in the way she speaks is to be understood in terms of her expectation, however faint, of a reply. My point is she would, with perfect naturalness, speak to those patients, who as Gaita tells us had been institutionalized for over thirty years, in the same spontaneous and meaningful manner with which she can speak to normal adult patients – that is, patients whose full humanity is manifest or capable of expression. What is at stake for our understanding here is not, as Young thinks, a change in emotional intensity, but a moral conversion involving both the recognition and revelation of the equal humanity of the patients. Yet, as we saw, Gaita now rejects such wording. That is because he wants us to see that our responses to the nun are internal to a certain conception of humanity that has, mysteriously and contingently, been extended to incorporate severely intellectually disabled humans. Stressing this 42

See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 202.

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is indeed vital. But I think it equally important to stress that our sense of those patients’ humanity is – albeit in a strange way – continuous with our sense of an enacted or expressible humanity in ordinary people whom we address or encounter; a humanity which we all recognize, and which is sometimes detectable, even if barely so, in (less profoundly) mentally disabled people and in some of those suffering affliction (but not, we imagined, Gaita’s psychiatric patients). My suggestion is that this strange continuity of behavior is revealed in the spontaneous and effortless manner of relating – manifested in often subtle bodily and verbal expressiveness – that some rare people display towards others who, in another (but related) sense, have been stripped entirely of humanity. But is not this precisely what Gaita (still) says? Well, he says that we have incorporated certain forms of (wondrous, miraculous, mysterious) expressiveness towards others into our understanding and conception of full humanity. But again, what expressiveness? Compare the behaviour of the mother in the following examples: 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

The mother who essentially abandons the care of her adult severely intellectually disabled daughter to the staff of a nursing home because she is a ‘‘hopeless case.’’ The mother who occasionally washes and feeds her adult daughter from a sense of duty. The mother who washes and feeds her adult daughter tenderly but cannot speak to her normally – who might speak to her like a baby or a child or not at all – because ‘‘she can’t understand what anyone is saying.’’ The mother who attends to all her daughter’s needs tenderly and speaks to her as she would to any other adult. The mother who treats all the residents at her daughter’s nursing home with exactly the same kind of subtle and expressive attention she gives to her own adult daughter.

The mother in example 1 has no sense of the preciousness of her daughter. The mothers in examples 2 and 3 have some sense of that preciousness but only in an attenuated way. The mother in case 4 both recognizes and reveals that value in her demeanor – in her tenderness and her natural mode of speech. But it is only the mother in case 5 who is truly like Gaita’s nun. For it is only she who treats all the intellectually disabled patients in the home with the same kind of spontaneous tender attention – an attention without any hint of condescension – that she treats her own daughter. In this section, I have wanted to stress how a certain expressiveness, composed of various natural, subtle, and often effortless ways of behaving, and which is of a kind that is familiarly expressed towards people whose humanity is not in doubt, is involved constitutively in the bodily and verbal recognition of the full humanity of even those (perhaps quite rare and particularly unfortunate) people for whom such expressiveness is wholly missing. It is, we might say, partly because of this strange continuity of behaviour that we have incorporated into our sense of full humanity such behaviour as the nun displayed. I shall return to the idea of recognizing and

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revealing humanity when I ask whether hopelessly evil people are precious. In the next section, I will discuss another (interconnected) element of bodily and verbal expressiveness that contributes to the distinctive quality of saintly behaviour.

5 Pure and Rare Compassion and Love For Simone Weil, goodness is connected to love and compassion. Acting from a sense of duty is not saintly. But not all forms of love or compassion will take us to the heart of saintliness. For one thing, saintly behavior is characteristically expressed in physical and verbal gentleness, attentiveness, and tenderness. Other responses, like displays of indignation at injustice – which will bear their own vital details of bodily and verbal expression – may also strike us as important to saintly goodness. But the sustained tenderness, warmth, and patient gentleness, often effortless, natural, and unhesitating, which is present in the behavior of those we recognize as saintly and which is usually, in human behavior generally, confined to relationships with family members or close friends, suggests that a certain kind of loving compassion, at least when it is expressed not only sincerely but also in the right way, is a central condition of ideal goodness. The Good Samaritan, for example, unhesitatingly renders aid by tending gently to the afflicted man: bandaging his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, bearing him to the inn, and caring for him there. If the Samaritan’s heroic, supererogatory behavior had been described only in terms of him courageously saving the other man’s life, it would not have been the same seminal example of love: some of its novelty and power would have been lost. The expressive details of patient, gentle attention matter greatly to that story and to the tradition of saintly behavior that followed it. For Gaita, purity in love and compassion appears primarily to be associated with the lack of all traces of condescension towards others. (Or at least, the idea of noncondescending treatment here is the context of his mention of purity. Purity for Gaita is also connected to goodness, beauty, and love.) Such purity he calls wondrous, mysterious, and beautiful. As I did when I discussed the idea of behavior without condescension, I will develop the idea of purity and its wondrousness in a somewhat different way than Gaita. We may speak of purity in love when it is free of all traces of self-absorption. Like Weil, Murdoch believed that our compassionate acts are routinely marred by self-regarding motives like pride, consolation, and arrogance.43 But a human self that is, at least relatively speaking, purified of selfishness and insidious ego is essential to saintly characters; and the saintly act of a saintly person is one that lacks all traces of those undesirable yet pervasive forms of self-regard. It is not that the saint in her saintly actions is never aware of her own good. On the contrary, the saint may see her own good as in large part constituted by unselfish service and attention. Furthermore, she may be more keenly aware than most of how often self-absorption taints or spoils her actions and thus her efforts to live a good life.

43

See Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, op. cit. p. 50.

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So, in addition to the recognition of another’s full humanity, a second astonishing thing about saintly love is that it is untainted by common forms of self-regard. It appears that some saintly people are in this way pure without effort. However, our Western understanding of saintliness, from both Christian and Eastern sources, has also been molded by examples of struggles toward self-purification. Yet one reason Gaita says saintly goodness is beyond virtue is that it strikes us more as a gift than as a humanly amazing feat or achievement. Unlike great courage or temperance, Gaita argues, saintly goodness is not importantly characterized with reference to what is achievable or beyond our own human powers and will.44 Hamilton thinks this mischaracterizes saintly behavior, because, historically speaking, saints have often been acutely aware of their shortcomings and have striven after goodness and perfection.45 In that sense, goodness has more in common with virtues that can be practiced and perfected than Gaita seems to think. Although I cannot address this debate in detail here, we can use Gaita’s and Hamilton’s disagreement to further highlight why saintly love is so remarkable.46 In fact, I think Gaita and Hamilton are both half-right. First, it makes no sense to try to achieve something if its successful attainment requires not merely a change in emotional intensity, disposition, strategy, training, or ability, but rather a substantive change in belief. Thus, if one has not understood in one’s heart that the severely intellectually disabled are worthy of certain subtle forms of expressive attention essential to the recognition of their humanity, then it is logically impossible to strive to attain that kind of goodness. Yet, struggling to retain vital understandings of human preciousness does make some sense, even though saints are sometimes (often?) loving and compassionate in a way that seems relatively effortless and more like a gift. In relation to that struggle, Murdoch has spoken of the power of great art, and of our immersion in it, to nourish and deepen moral understanding; and Plato has spoken of our tendency to resemble what (and who) we love.47 Furthermore, it makes sense to strive to purify our dark centers of vanity and self-regard, as some saints historically have done. This brings me to a further aspect of saintly action that contributes to its wonderful quality. Saintly love is both uncommon and, for most of us, too difficult. Young claims that saintliness may be ‘‘achievable by ordinary mortals.’’48 For Weil at least, that is too optimistic. The requirement for having a belief with a particular content (see previous section), and the necessity of retaining that belief, speaks in favor of Weil. The extreme difficulty of self-purification of the profound kind required for saintliness, is a second supporting reason. But whatever the reasons, saintly goodness is rare. Why does that matter? It matters, I think, because the quality of saintly goodness partly derives from its rarity and, if you like, its supreme difficulty. Like a rare 44

See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, op. cit. pp. 202–203.

45

Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ op. cit. p. 186.

46

For more on this debate, which I do not further engage, see Andrew M. Flescher, Heroes, Saints, and Ordinary Morality (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2003). 47

See Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, op. cit. pp. 84–85.

48

Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ op. cit. p. 191.

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living thing, the radical scarcity and near-impossibility of saintliness, above and beyond its other wondrous features, is internal to our sense of the beauty and mystery of saintly love. In this way, speaking of the rarity and the difficulty of saintliness can be a way of registering the wonderful strangeness of facts and truths that to some people seem merely ordinary. And, we should then say, this felt strangeness of saintly behavior moulds and contributes to our sense of the mysterious preciousness of human beings. Selfless love, of course, must be joined with the proper recognition of, and attention to, the full humanity of others, especially the profoundly afflicted, if it is to be saintly. Gaita says that while it is ‘‘deeply unnatural to reason’’ to claim that the irredeemably wicked deserve unconditional respect, it is ‘‘even more deeply unnatural’’ to affirm the full equality of those psychiatric patients.49 That makes sense, because, as we saw, sometimes the latter (we assumed) cannot even faintly express their humanity, and so sound reasons of the kind philosophers often appeal to which might justify their equal preciousness appear to be largely or wholly missing. However, many of us will find it, if not more offensive to reason, then certainly more deeply unnatural to affirm, the preciousness of the hopelessly and unrepentantly evil. Gaita says relatively little about the preciousness of truly wicked people. He argues that Justice Landau’s attitude toward Adolf Eichmann at the Nuremberg trials helps reveal the full equality of evil individuals. Landau insisted that even someone who is universally regarded as filth is due a just trial and unconditional respect.50 But even if we accept that summary execution for an Eichmann would be unjust, it does not follow that we will accept that the incurably evil are worthy of saintly love. As Hamilton complains, there is a conceptual gap between justice or unconditional respect, and saintly love, for individuals like Eichmann.51 Gaita admits that the word precious, applied to Eichmann, sounds ‘‘grotesque.’’52 But he does argue, albeit very briefly, that it requires the impartial love of saints to fully reveal Eichmann’s equal preciousness.53 He acknowledges that a saint’s love for Eichmann would be a ‘‘severe love,’’ fully aware of his evil.54 But for Hamilton, regarding Eichmann as precious simply seems sickly and sentimental.55 He doubts that we non-saints can believe in our hearts that Eichmann was precious. Once again, the sheer strangeness of some instances of saintly love, this time towards the wicked, will help to conceptually fill out and clarify human preciousness. 49

Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 38.

50

See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil, op. cit. p. 7.

51

See Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ op. cit. pp. 190–191. 52

Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil, op. cit. p. xv.

53

See Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 24. Thus, Lloyd Reinhardt – in ‘‘Is Love What we Need?: Raimond Gaita’s A Common Humanity’’, op. cit. p. 154 – is mistaken when he says: ‘‘The idea of respect for wrongdoers is embodied (more or less effectively) in such [fine legal] practices. Would equal preciousness demand something more or something different? Gaita does not tell us.’’ 54

Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil, op. cit. p. xxx.

55

See Christopher Hamilton, ‘‘Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness,’’ op. cit. p. 190.

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First, there may be a real difficulty in recognizing the full humanity of at least some evil people. Some of the damned or the lost, as Christians used to say, may be incapable of reflecting with moral seriousness on what they are doing or on what they have become. They may have no real sense even of their own value and dignity. Consequently, we can and often do feel very deeply that some evil people are different from us. Criminal psychopaths are an obvious case; but some other individuals may simply be abnormally callous and lacking in human sympathy and imagination. The second reason we may feel a gaping difference is that, while the wicked are not to be treated as filth, it is natural to think that a gentle, tender, warm, and patient attention can be properly withheld from them. They are not worthless, on this view; but they are far from precious. Who is right, Hamilton or Gaita? Saints, I said earlier, are characteristically alive to human souls and to what truly matters in human lives. One of the occasions on which the tenderness of a mother may seem fitting rather than sickly sentimental are occasions where the wicked themselves face suffering, death, and/or abandonment. Take the example of Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Prejean is known for her compassion towards the worst criminals, including those who are horribly unrepentant and who are facing execution – so-called dead men walking. One of her aims, of course, is to touch and release their humanity. But even when that is not possible, she does not abandon them. Rather, she continues to talk to them as if they could respond with humanity to her pleas to recognize what they have done. So, perhaps even the lost and damned are not immune from suffering and affliction that is worthy of the tender, patient, and humanity-respecting compassion of the saint. In the next section, I will consider a third (connected) aspect of saintly behavior.

6 Impartial Love Despite her defense of Gaita, Elizabeth Drummond Young has reservations about calling the love of saints impartial. For Young, this term misrepresents the fact that saintly love for all people without exception is imbued with ‘‘all the qualities of partial love’’, such as parental love.56 Young acknowledges that impartial love concerns those with whom we have no special relationship. She also realizes that for Gaita partial and impartial love are interdependent – general love being conditioned by the rich language of unconditional attachment and observed in saintly references to our brothers and sisters, and special loves by unconditional saintly love for the severely disabled, the wicked, and so on. However, Young thinks Gaita misleads us because ‘‘partial love is at the heart of his nun example, rather than impartial love.’’57 It is the nun’s specific bodily responsiveness and attention towards individual patients that must, she thinks, be emphasized. Young believes her correction counters Hamilton’s fear that saints are life-denying and oppressive and so cannot convince us of the reality of human preciousness. 56

Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ op. cit. p. 199.

57

Ibid., p. 200.

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It is certainly important to stress that saints not only can participate in the range of loving human attachments (not all of them are desert ascetics or celibate nuns); but that, in addition, their attention to strangers is permeated with the appropriate verbal and physical details of partial love. Yet, failure to emphasize the dimension of impartiality is itself misleading, and detracts from the sense of goodness we are exploring. That is, it is another miraculous and strange feature of a saint’s love that it can generalize outward from partial attachments involving family members or friends, to complete strangers without exception. But replacing the phrase impartial love with partial love in this context risks under-appreciating the astonishing nature of that love for perfect strangers whom the saint has no special love for. Again, the fact that impartial love is rare, and the love of strangers difficult, is part of the wonderful goodness at issue. Some doubt it makes sense to describe compassion towards perfect strangers as love. For example, Tony Milligan argues that the possibility of love for another depends on at least some ‘‘prior history of care and concern’’ that would conceptually permit real or substantial grief for them as opposed to just sorrow and compassion.58 Love and grief, on this view, are necessary conceptual partners. Thus, because even ‘‘Jesus, the Buddha or Socrates could not grieve for a stranger’’, neither could they love them.59 However, our discussion casts doubt on the idea of a necessary connection between saintly love and grief. Take Milligan’s example of Jesus. Jesus’s sorrowful compassion towards the afflicted and profoundly disabled had a quality of tender and patient attention towards their humanity. And his love for the rich young man was also characterized by a warm gentleness – ‘‘Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him’’ (Mk 10:21) – that, though expressive of sorrow or pity for the young man’s attachment to his wealth, did not require the possibility of grief in the more robust sense that Milligan intends. As I have tried to show, saintly love has a special quality that radically distinguishes it from other forms of love, including forms to which it is closely related.

7 Conclusion When Gaita speaks about the essential role in morality of saintly love, he refers mainly to the afflicted, especially the severely and ineradicably afflicted. To a lesser extent, he refers to the irredeemably wicked.60 I have agreed with him about the essential role of saintly behavior in the constitution and revelation of the preciousness of intellectually disabled human beings. I have also underscored the vital moral function of the rarity and difficulty of saintly love towards the incurably wicked. However, in closing, I want to underline the essential epistemic and conceptual role of saintly goodness in regards to the preciousness of ordinary individuals not damaged by affliction, profound disability, or pervasive evil. 58

Tony Milligan, Love (Durham: Acumen, 2011), p. 128.

59

Tony Milligan, Love, op. cit. p. 128.

60

See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil, op. cit. p. xxx and A Common Humanity, op. cit. p. 24.

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One way this works is that the equal preciousness of the afflicted and the wicked confers upon all people an unconditional value. That is because we can recognize that ordinary people are precious in the sense that no misfortune or descent into depravity could reduce their value. And yet, the way saints treat ordinary people is rare and wonderful too. Unlike most of us, saints routinely manifest such goodness in ordinary situations – in the ‘‘ice-cream parlor’’ as Young, responding to Susan Wolf’s caricature of secular saints, puts it.61 In the West, of course, we were introduced to this kind of goodness in the form of Jesus’s patient and gentle love towards others – not only towards his disciples and the rich stranger whom he met and straightway loved, but also towards nearly everyone he encountered. What seems remarkable in such cases, as I have tried in this paper to say, is the quality of loving attention to the humanity of all others. This quality involves a gentleness, warmth, and tenderness that, in the way I explained, does not condescend to any human being. Although Gaita is right to say that these unusual and rare forms of behavior are themselves formative of the deepest secular concept we have of humanity, it also seems right to say that the saint appears often to direct her love, compassion, and attention towards the souls – towards the humanity – of other human beings. The beauty and rarity of those forms of verbal and bodily expressiveness are epistemically and conceptually essential to the preciousness of all human beings. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Peter Coghlan, Chris Cordner, Rai Gaita, and an anonymous reviewer for invaluable comments and advice.

61

Elizabeth Drummond Young, ‘‘Defending Gaita’s Example of Saintly Behavior,’’ op. cit. p. 197.

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