Every Good Path

Wisdom and Practical Reason in Christian Ethics and the Book of Proverbs

Andrew Errington

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567687722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Andrew Errington brings the book of Proverbs into discussion with two significant accounts of the nature and foundation of practical reason in Christian ethics: those of Thomas Aquinas and Oliver O'Donovan. Aiming to move towards a framework for understanding Christian moral reasoning, this book develops a significant critique of aspects of Aquinas's thought and provides a major engagement with O'Donovan's moral theology. Errington argues that the way the Book of Proverbs conceives of wisdom presents an important challenge to the Western theological and philosophical tradition. Instead of a perfection of theoretical knowledge, wisdom in Proverbs is a practical knowledge of how to act well, grounded in the reality of the world God has made. Discussing the complexities of practical reason, moral reasoning in Aquinas, world order and deliberation in the work of O'Donovan, and the place of created order in Christian Ethics, this volume is invaluable for scholars and general readers in reconfiguring moral theology.

1

THE COMPLEXITIES OF PRACTICAL REASON IN THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS OF ARISTOTLE

Happy the person who finds wisdom

—Prov. 3:13

Introduction

This chapter has two aims. First, to prepare the way for our discussion of Thomas Aquinas in Chapter 2. “Aquinas’s (unacknowledged) aim,” in John Rist’s words, “was coherently to appropriate Aristotle for the Augustinian tradition.”¹ Although as we will see, Aquinas disagrees with and develops Aristotle’s ideas in important ways, the central aspects of his understanding of practical reasoning are best viewed in the light of Aristotle’s discussions. We will therefore prepare the way for our discussion of Aquinas with an orienting sketch of some of the core ideas of the Nicomachean Ethics.² Beginning from Aristotle’s thinking about the relationship of happiness and reason (Section 1), we will move to his account of the virtues that correspond to theoretical and practical reason—sophia and phronēsis (Section 2). This will lead us to a more detailed discussion of Aristotle’s thinking about deliberation (Section 3) and the practical syllogism (Section 4).

Providing this sketch also allows us to introduce the conceptual issues that are the focus of this study. This is the second aim of this chapter. Aristotle introduces us to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and the ideas of wisdom and prudence. His conception of wisdom as a perfection of speculative knowledge will have a profound influence on Thomas Aquinas, as will his notion of deliberation. Yet these ideas are also beset with ambiguities and tensions in Aristotle’s thought. In particular, the distinctive character of practical thinking is partially obscured by the prominence given to a certain conception of productive skill. This will be a key point when we come to consider both Aquinas and the book of Proverbs. Therefore, just as Aristotle’s thought was the chief stimulus for Aquinas’s understanding of practical reasoning, it can provide a productive starting point for this discussion. It should hastily be added, though, that the sketch of Aristotle’s position that follows will be roughly as satisfactory as having major monuments frantically pointed out as you pass through a city on a fast train; we must settle for a sense of the lie of the land. It is impossible to survey this material without making choices about various contentious questions, and some kind of argument. Nevertheless, many complex issues are barely touched on.

1 Happiness and Reason

The Nicomachean Ethics begins with an observation: that every human action “is thought to aim at some good.”³ From this starting point, Aristotle moves quickly to the idea of a highest good, which leads him to the notion of happiness (eudaimonia), and thence to a formal conception of practical reason as reasoning from ends to actions.⁴ Before we delve further into these arguments, however, it is important to notice the form of the starting point. Aristotle begins his discussion from what “is thought” (dokei) to be the case, and, as John Cooper points out, throughout the discussion of happiness Aristotle “returns periodically to this dialectical home-base.”⁵ Thinking about ethics, Aristotle is at pains to point out, is a rough business, in which success is mostly a matter of offering “sufficient proof” for “received opinions.”⁶ “The truth in practical issues,” as Aristotle later puts it, “is judged from the facts of our life, these being what really matter.”⁷ The initial premises of practical thinking are not known through formal logic, but are grasped through dialectical argument.⁸

It is important to recognize this aspect of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, because it highlights the fact that Aristotle’s thinking is embedded in, and draws upon, a particular social context.⁹ As Richard Kraut notes, Aristotle’s insistence, “that his audience have experience in ethical matters and must have been brought up in good habits suggests that he is not building his arguments on a value free foundation.”¹⁰ The polis, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, is for Aristotle “the locus of rationality,” because it supplies “those systematic forms of activity within which goods are unambiguously ordered.” In a real sense, there is “no practical rationality outside the polis.”¹¹

However, it is also true that Aristotle’s arguments rely on categories and principles that transcend his context. Aristotle appeals at several junctures to human nature, and to reason, in ways that produce a critical standpoint upon the culture and life of the polis. This is particularly clear in the “function argument,” in which Aristotle attempts to discern “the characteristic activity of a human being” (to ergon tou anthrōpou),¹² and in which he concludes that this ergon must have to do in some way with reason.¹³ A similar kind of appeal manifests itself in the discussion of wish (boulēsis),¹⁴ where Aristotle regards as deeply unsatisfying the notion that “nothing is an object of wish by nature.”¹⁵ Aristotle’s argument, as Irwin puts it, “relies indispensably on … premises about the human essence and the human good.”¹⁶ This point is also very apparent in book ten, in which Aristotle makes a case for contemplation as the greatest activity to pursue:

And what we said above will apply here as well: what is proper to each thing is by nature best and pleasantest for it; for a human being, therefore, the life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.¹⁷ So this life will be the happiest.¹⁸

This quotation raises a contentious aspect of Aristotle’s practical philosophy: his views about the nature of happiness. The difficulty lies in determining how this claim in book ten, that happiness lies in contemplation, relates to what seem to be clear and careful articulations elsewhere of how happiness is found in the practical life of moral virtue. In book ten, Aristotle appears to resolve this by distinguishing between “perfect happiness” and happiness in a “secondary” sense.¹⁹ This is not satisfying, however, because it still leaves hanging the question of how the two relate.²⁰ One possibility is to say that this is in fact consistent with the view Aristotle appears to develop more clearly elsewhere, namely what Irwin calls, “a comprehensive and composite view of happiness.”²¹ This is a conception in which a range of goods are sought not only in and for themselves, but also as parts of a whole; these goods are good as such, but better insofar as they contribute to a whole.

Although there are undoubtedly things to be said for this position,²² it is difficult to sustain in relation to the Nicomachean Ethics as a whole.²³ Parts of the text strongly suggest that happiness is most fully realized in one, “dominant”²⁴ activity of contemplation: “The god’s activity, which is superior in blessedness, will be contemplative; and therefore the human activity most akin to this is the most conducive to happiness.”²⁵ It is possible that this implies that the moral virtues and practical wisdom are ordered to the service of contemplation, so that Aristotle is saying both that “one will need the ethical virtues in order to live the life of a philosopher, even though exercising those virtues is not the philosopher’s ultimate end,”²⁶ and that the polis requires both political activity and contemplation for its health.²⁷ It may be, however, that things are not so neat as that. Many interpreters feel a significant disjunction between the two conceptions of happiness. Cooper, for instance, concludes that book ten affirms the intellectualist account of happiness only with “significant reservations,” and to an extent leaves the “mixed” life of moral virtue standing as a real alternative.²⁸ Similarly, Thomas Nagel sees a real “indecision between two accounts of eudaimonia” in the Nicomachean Ethics.²⁹

How one resolves this issue will depend partly on how certain passages are read and partly on one’s assumptions about the coherence of the different parts of the Aristot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Complexities of Practical Reason In The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle
• Chapter 2 The Nature and Foundation of Moral Reasoning In Thomas Aquinas
• Chapter 3 Practical Reason and The Ways of Swisdom
• Chapter 4 World Order and Deliberation In The Work of Oliver O’Donovan
• Chapter 5 Wisdom, Creation, and Christian Ethics
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Scripture References