Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Six

Much of the first chunk of Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods is an attempt to “get the lay of the land.”  God gives us life to live, but the days in which we live them are evil days- goodness in the context of both love and loss, joy and pain.  And we have the Biblical Story as revelation and resources for what that can look like us.

I mentioned previously some connection to the Ancient Greek concept of eudaemonia, which is something we cover in class at the beginning of our discussion of ethics.  Along with eudaemonia, of course, must come a discussion of the virtues.  For Aristotle,  the virtuous life is the good life.  We don’t hear much of virtue unless we engage with pictures of chivalrous knights, which is really to our loss.  Our day-to-day living could be greatly enriched by terms like prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance (the four classical virtues).  Christian Scripture and tradition would add three other virtues into the mix: faith, hope, and love.  And so into his discussion of the good life, particularly with the “beauty of limits,” Radner draws out the idea of virtue.  He writes:

Virtue emerges not in the perfection of our following but in the struggle to do it at all. Virtue comes to be, then, usually only in the midst of a difficult and often unrealized attempt to navigate that which subverts our obedience— testing, suffering, frustration, anger, and despair. But just here the scriptural center of the good life— the beautiful life— comes into view. For the navigation of evil days, in its details, is itself “beautiful” insofar as these details follow the divine design of the world that the Scriptures themselves embody. The Bible is, in its historical format (which includes the lived realities that form the content of legal and prophetic scriptural texts), the presentation of this navigation, better and worse in its skill and outcome.  Cain and Abel, Noah’s children, the patriarchs and their families, Israel, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, the kings and queens of the people, and the prophets in their midst— all these display the shape of engaging the “testing” that comes to all (1 Cor. 10:13). The recognition of these accounts as our own, just in this identification, stamps our lives with the beauty that God would grant them.

And so we come closer to “playing our roles fittingly” in the Biblical Story since

. . . lives of obedience or habituated attitude are truly virtuous only insofar as they press our recognitions and naming of this as that, my life as Scripture’s life.

One thing I like about Radner’s view here is the reminder that virtue does not come easy.  How great it would be if we made every decision right at the first attempt!  But life is often, if ever, like that.  And so we live and learn and live some more and nudge our way closer the a conformity with Scripture.

After many beautiful words about the form of the virtuous life (and also the vicious one), Radner returns to his “political” concern, since politics should be concerned with what is right in front of us, in the things given by God during fleeting and evil days:

If politics cannot make us better human beings or give us a better world, then politics will have to be reframed so as to give us what is already here: our selves, in their true form, their form that is God-given and thus God-taken.

I have argued that a beautiful life is indeed possible in any day, for our days are beautiful insofar as we receive them from God as God’s own offering.And in this reception we offer them to God in thanks. Such offering is a process by which we come to see our days as ones of God-given miracle (hence as humanly untethered and impermanent), recognizing their gifted form, whatever their mortal burdens, in their simple divine enunciation— that is, in the Scriptures. That is good, that is beautiful, and that is the truth of our lives.

And, once again, such skills of “seeing our lives as God’s gift and recognizing their gifted form as God’s scriptural word about them” must be taught and learned.