Space Enough, and Time

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.

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Four

One of the first “5-minute finds” that we do in our senior-level class involves the ancient concept of eudaemonia, the term the ancient Greeks used for a good or flourishing life.  Every culture has an example of what constitutes a “good life,” and any given culture might have a picture of it with some variation.  It’s interesting watching Ephraim Radner make sense of the idea from a particularly Christian perspective while weaving in a major thread from the Old Testament.  It’s a move that he almost has to make, since once of his goals is to focus on the here-and-now and let the supernatural seep through.  And so the journey of the people of Israel is vital to what he wants to communicate in Mortal Goods.

Early in the book, Radner picks up own the language of sojourning, of being “on the way” in some sense or another.  The earliest positive example of this would be rooted in the Exodus narrative.  The book of Numbers is important for Radner here, as

. . . the Hebrew name midbar (wilderness), taken from Number 1:1, is more telling.  A midbar is an open tract of land, not always a desert in a modern sense, but land without roads or settlements. And the book of Numbers is properly read as a vision of sojourning, of life in the trackless world, where Adam— that is, all the people— in his joys and frustrated needs receives life and death from God . . .  In this sense, the service that Moses lays out for Israel is itself a service of survival.

Here Radner adds service to the idea of sojourning.  And that service, at least as it is articulated in the book of Numbers, appears as a kind of offering.  Numbers tells of the peoples way through the wilderness as a way of preparation to enter the Promised Land, including both narrative and laws.

Like that of a sojourner, the “way” through the wilderness, which is less a clear path than a wandering, is bound to the “way” of God’s commandments— a “walking” that both takes us through trackless desert and brings us closer to God.  Once they are no longer slaves to the world, Israel’s embededness in this world becomes the stuff of praise and faithfulness.  One cannot be a slave to what one offers up.

The last two sentences there are quite striking: a reminder of the reality of Israel’s calling as well as something deeply, devotionally true.

It is in the context of this sojourning as service, and ultimately as offering (“what one offers up”) that Radner lands on the image of the holy peasant.  It’s not a phrase that rings well in 21st century American ears, but there’s also something in it that resonates better on reflection.  Radner argues that much of human history is the story of the peasant.  The peasant-life will be key to understanding a Christian “politics” moving forward. Invoking the “Christian peasant” of days-gone-by, Radners defines mortal goods:

With each of the Christian peasants day’s came a prayer, and the prayers were wrapped around the content of the days— children, animals, gardens, feast days, marriages, bedsides, burials. All this was good, however hard and however brief. All this was good, not on its own, but because this is what God gives.

As Radner understands it, this is the heart of eudaemonia: what is good because it is what God gives.