I can understand why negations such as obedience, service and humility became popular things to advocate (including in Christianity - but also as part of many other religions and ideologies); as an intended corrective (or, at least, limiter) to motivations that are sinful or lead to evil - such as pride, selfishness and the seeking of personal gratification.
That may be the intent - but if so, it is a misconceptualizations. For example the negation of humility is not the opposite of pride.
The opposite of pride is love of God and fellow-Men. And love is positive, not a negation.
This always applies:
Virtue is never a negation. There are no negative virtues.
So despite that they have (and often) been advocated and promoted by Christians: such negations as obedience, service and humility are not virtues, and they ought not to be pursued as if they were virtues; because this is harmful.
They are, at best, merely temporary (perhaps necessary, or at least expedient) constraints...
As when a delirious or insane person is just about to commit suicide or violence and must be restrained immediately; whether physically or chemically (e.g. by sedation, by putting him to sleep).
Restraint is not a cure of the problem of wrong-motivation, but a way of generating some "breathing space" to consider who (if at all) the problem may be cured.
And, indeed, the problem often resolves with time (for example, post-operative delirium), or may be cured by a period of rest and sleep.
Such negative preventive restraining action to thwart wrong-motivations may be necessary acutely, to avert some bad outcome. But when the constraint becomes chronic, "permanent" then this is a very different business...
It is, at least, much less-straightforwardly justifiable that someone should be tied-up, put into a locked space or drugged to insensibility in the long term.
Even if this is needful for the well being of other people; permanent "restraint" does not solve the problem, nor cure the sin*.
And that is the analogy with promoting supposed negative-virtues such as obedience, service, humility.
Inculcating these negative states to thwart wrong-motivations or intentions; may be needful or expedient in temporary situations, such as young childhood; or may be all-but unavoidable in some persons, a lesser-evil...
But successfully inducing habitual negation of motivations is nonetheless and of-itself harmful: It is intrinsically an evil.
When applied strategically, purposively, doctrinally; negations of motivation become a policy of malign constraint and coercion.
*In this mortal worldly life; it is a tragic reality that what is necessary and unavoidable, may nonetheless be evil.
6 comments:
Great post. This is something I've felt but never articulated properly in the way you just have. The insight that the cure for pride is love of God rather than humility is a profound one.
There is an artificial distinction here which I find meaningless - at the basic level because there is no such thing as pure negativity, it always has connection to positive world or else it would not exist, but also… Destroying evil will liberate what is good. Being humble will open the mind to experience of the good. One of course cannot persue any virtue in an isolated manner, but that is the same with what are positive virtues. It would be difficult to try and practice love as a desired trait, because for the love to be real it must be genuine and ascend from the ground of one’s nature. In order to access this ground, either liberating its true nature or radically changing its nature, it may be more practicable to destroy what inhibits this ground - destroying or resolving evil aspects rather than training positive virtues . Humans aren’t dogs that should be trained, and love is spontaneous and equivalent to existence itself, the essence and sum of nature if totally cleansed of evil
@William. Thanks!
@Jim - I don't get the impression you have really understood and thought about what the post is saying. The point of it was to challenge pre-existing assumptions or habits of thinking.
Intriguing. I’ll have to think about it more. It’s a popular theory with Christians that parenting a young child consists largely of instilling obedience in them by one means or another, usually spanking. The theory is that the temporary obedience towards parents then transfers to permanent obedience towards God - and somehow also love towards both parents and God. There are several questionable claims embedded in that logic, but lately the transference aspect has stood out to me. Certainly a transference usually takes place but I’ve seen it develop in a particular child towards immediate, brutal authority generally rather than toward what’s good/right (my husband calls it the “Are you going to hit me or are you not serious?” calculus). But otoh there is no doubt obedience is a necessary evil in many situations in mortal life, including within the family.
I don’t like any of the prescriptive frameworks, and maybe this temporary need of “negative virtues” in order to reach the real positive ones explains why. When and how much evil is required is always going to be a matter for individual discernment. Engaging with that evil without giving your heart to it is *so* important and that gets completely lost when the necessary evil is misidentified as good.
@Mia - Well, it seems obvious that children need to be kept safe by obedience to (loving) parents until they reach an age of discretion - they need (loving) discipline; but I intended that point to be covered by the post - as analogous to the adult with a temporary psychosis.
The point is that mainstream Christianity has it that this child-like state be permanent *and is the ideal* for our relationships to God (and the church). This has had a terribly distorting effect - but we are inculcated with a superstitious kind of dread at the thought of dissenting from it. I presume that early Christians felt a similar superstitious dread about stopping animal (or human) sacrifice.
The projected sin of Men regarding God as needing and wanting *propitiation* has cast a long shadow.
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