PART I
EVALUATING BANNERâS PROPOSAL
INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON MEANING AND METHOD
1
TOWARD AN ETHICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
MOLLY FARNETH
MICHAEL BANNERâs The Ethics of Everyday Life proposes that moral theology attend to ordinary social practices, explain how these practices create and maintain the norms that constitute a shared ethical life, and then offer a theological understanding of and response to them. It is a worthy proposal that resonates with work already under way in religious studies. Religious ethicists, in particular, should welcome its attempt to bring ethnographic and normative inquiry together.
The importance of rituals and other social practices in religious and ethical formation is a common theme in contemporary religious studies, but it also echoes through a tradition of theologians and philosophers stretching back to antiquity. When moral theologians and religious ethicists recover this theme, they enter debates that have been going on for a long time: debates about how character is formed, deformed, and transformed; debates over the social functions and effects of rituals; and perhaps most importantly, debates over what sorts of people and communities we should aspire to become through them.
These debates assume what Banner rightly assertsânamely, that social practices shape people of one kind or another. The contestation is largely about what kind of people, and thus what kind of communities, we have reason to want. The cultivation of compassionate subjectivities, which Banner commends, is important. It also prompts us to consider what other virtues well-formed people should have. We need to grapple with such questions if we are going to take Bannerâs proposal seriously as scholars of our traditions and as critics of our societies.
In what follows, I illustrate how these questions arise for religious ethics when, in the spirit of Bannerâs proposal, we look closely at one of his examples, the following of the Stations of the Cross.1 Banner argues that the Stations of the Cross and other forms of meditation on the Passion are ethically and politically significant because of how they imagine the suffering of Christ and the cultivation of compassion in the face of such suffering. But, we must ask, compassion for whom? Accompanied by what other affective and behavioral habits and dispositions? With what social structure, roles, and powers as their context? If ethics is to take the social practical turn, we will need to be clear about how these questions should be answered in light of the diversity of contemporary practices modeled on the Stations of the Crossâand the diversity of effects that these and similar practices might produce in people and societies.
Bannerâs Social Practical Turn
Before turning to the Stations of the Cross, let me first outline Bannerâs methodological proposal and say a few words about its concern with rituals and other social practices that inculcate habits, dispositions, and virtues. Banner argues that moral theology is overly preoccupied with âhard cases.â âSo practiced,â he writes, âmoral theology is insufficiently interested in the social; specifically, it lacks a concern for the plausible narration of moral lives, and this lack of concern has doleful consequences for its apologetic, or . . . its therapeutic or evangelical responsibilities and potential.â2 In this, Banner echoes moral theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, whose work turns to the character and conditions of moral lives, understood within a Christian narrative.3 The so-called narrative turn has been one of the most important developments in recent Christian ethics.
Banner combines this narrative turn with what we might call the social practical turnâan ethics that considers the relationships, social practices, and organizational structures in which moral lives are shaped and lived. Banner proposes that moral theology and ethics, in conversation with social anthropology, ought to make those relationships, practices, and structures visible. âAnthropologyâs concern with the reproduction of the social,â he writes, âis a concern with the everyday, the routine, and the normalâand thus may serve to remind moral theology of where its work might, at the very least, begin.â4 Banner directs his readersâ attention toward âeveryday life,â and he draws on the work of social anthropologists first to show how the categories that shape our livesâcategories such as kinship, childhood, compassion, aging, and mourningâare constructed and maintained and then to offer theological guidance for an ethics of everyday life.
The turn from an ethics of hard cases, or what the philosopher Edmund Pincoffs called âquandary ethics,â toward an ethics of everyday life involves a significant shift in what ethicists analyze.5 Quandary ethics, as Pincoffs characterized it, focuses on âa quandary which arises because I fall into a certain situation. The situation is such that it can be described in perfectly general terms, without any reference to me as an individual.â6 Quandary ethics abstracts from the characteristics of the moral agent and his or her social and historical context. It also tends to focus on extraordinary cases that most people will never confront, such as the famous trolley problem and the ticking time bomb scenario. An ethics of everyday life, by contrast, must be concerned with character, its formation, and its transformation, on the one hand, and with the social roles, relationships, and institutions in which moral agents are embedded, on the other.7 It must attend to the social matrices in which moral agents are formed and live their lives. Banner aims to show how social anthropologyâand, in particular, ethnographyâcan contribute to and inform normative inquiry in these matters.
The social practices that constitute our everyday lives are sites of continual innovation and change. One often implicit challenge for an ethics of everyday life is to make clear which forms of relationship and practice ought to be cultivated and why. This normative question adds the distinctly ethical dimension to anthropological accounts that focus on ethnographic observation and thick description of everyday communities and practices.
On the second page of the book, Banner notes the vast diversity of Christian reflections on the life of Christ. I will quote him at some length here to give a sense of the diversity he describes:
Christâs life has been imagined, represented, enacted, expounded, and interrogated, not only through the drama of the liturgy and the liturgical year, but also through sermons, prayers, through biblical commentary, exegesis, and contemplation, in doctrinal, moral and philosophical theology, in art of all kinds . . . , in devotional writings, mystery plays, poems, and other forms of literature, in hymns, oratorios, cantatas, spirituals, and every other type of musical workâand so on. Through these highly diverse and virtually countless engagements with the life of Christ, that life has been brought to an imaginative realization and in that realization a particular architecture of the human and of human subjectivity (with certain emotions, attitudes, and perceptions), has been explored, staged, elaborated, and commended.8
The diversity of forms that these Christian imaginations of the life of Christ have taken and, presumably, the diversity of effects that those imaginations have on those who have âexplored, staged, elaborated, and commendedâ them is striking. But by the end of the introduction, Banner has begun to refer to the Christian imagination in the singular. The bookâs main question, he writes, is this: âHow does the Christian imagination of conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial bear on the human life course, and envisage and sustain a Christian form of human being?â9 Surely the answer to Bannerâs question must be multiform. But his use of the singular hereââthe Christian imaginationâ and âa Christian form of human beingââleaves me wondering about which imagination is normative in Bannerâs account of the ethics of everyday life and what principled grounds he employs in making that determination.10
What Kinds of Selves and Societies?
To see the implications of this diversity for the ethics of everyday life, we might turn to one of Bannerâs own examples, meditation on the Passion, which was not an important focus of Christian thought or practice until the late medieval period. Banner argues that the emergence of practices that focused on Christâs suffering enabled new ways of experiencing and responding to that sufferingâempathically, in sorrow, compassion, and love.
Among these practices is the following of the Stations of the Cross, a form of devotion that developed as a way of bearing witness to Jesusâs suffering and death. In the traditional form of the practice, the worshipper proceeds along fourteen stations, each of which depicts a moment in Jesusâs procession from his condemnation in Jerusalem to his crucifixion to the placement of his body in the tomb. Worshippers stop at each station for prayer, contemplation, and visualization. On Good Friday, this practice often takes the form of a public processional. One person will carry a cross, recalling Jesusâs own bearing of the cross. Banner quotes historian of Christianity Rachel Fulton, arguing that the Stations of the Cross âschooled religiously sensitive women and men in the potentialities of emotion, specifically love, for transcending the physical, experiential distance between individual bodiesâabove all, bodies in pain.â11 Banner suggests that through the enactment of the Stations of the Cross, medieval Christians cultivated compassion for the suffering Christ.
The Stations of the Cross, Banner argues, is what Foucault calls a âtechnology of the self.â12 It is a bodily practice through which worshippers train their thoughts and actions in order to cultivate an empathic response to the suffering of anotherâto feel Christâs suffering, to share in it, and to respond in sorrow, compassion, and love. Reenacting the Stations of the Cross is not only a symbolic remembrance; it is also a bodily practice that enables particular ways of being in the world.
This is one situation in which the diversity of Christian imaginations and enactments of the life of Christ complicates matters. Banner asks, âHow do we take up or take on Christâs suffering and those in whom he suffers?â13 Contemporary forms of meditation on and reenactment of the Passion, some inspired by the Stations of the Cross, respond to this question in different ways. Some focus on the cultivation of compassion for the suffering Christ, while others also intend to cultivate compassion for sufferers other than Christ. This is not an insignificant distinction. It is worth keeping in mind that meditation on Christâs suffering in Good Friday liturgies and Passion plays was long associated with outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.14 It is often unclear whether or how the cultivation of compassion for the suffering Christ might translat...