Complicaciones obstétricas

Having articulated the character of the moral order in terms of eschatological transformation, objective reality, and teleological order, O’Donovan turns next to the

question of epistemology—how is it that we come by this knowledge of the moral order? He deliberately postpones this epistemological question, in order to take it up as a calculated “pause for reflection”,64which follows articulation of the ontology of the moral order. He explains why discussion of epistemology must necessarily be held in abeyance until the objective reality of the moral order has been apprehended—the epistemological questions

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R&MO, 64. Similarly, O’Donovan insists that “there must be order which is not subject to historical change… otherwise history could only be uninterpretable movement”, 45.

62

O’Donovan elsewhere reiterates this point, and refers to the objective reality of the “whole moral vision” provided within the Christian faith, and describes the practice of ethics as the speech and acts of “interpreting the worldinto which we must act in the light of that moral vision”; O’Donovan,Liturgy and Ethics, vol. 89, ed. Michael Vasey (Grove Ethical Studies; Bramcote: Grove, 1993) 5.

63

R&MO, 67. 64

cannot be addresseda priorifor the simple reason that it is impossible to define any epistemological premise without introducing a belief system, whether tacitly or explicitly, into the development of dogmatic content. As O’Donovan explains, “there is noneutral account” of moral thought which could provide astartingpoint for discussion of the moral order.65 Any attempt to begin the discussion by sorting out the purely epistemological questions fails, because truth claims regarding epistemology will necessarily bring with them presumptions of belief. These presumptions are ‘smuggled goods’ in the sense that they have not been examined, judged and found worthy according to an absolutely objective

epistemological standard. No such standard exists, of course, which is why O’Donovan insists upon a clean separation of ontology and epistemology, in order to avoid this hazard. He thus prescribes a lexical ordering in which awareness and cognizance of the objective reality of the moral order must come first, before the questions of epistemology may be considered. Thus, the method of O’Donovan’s realism requires that discussion of the

ontological reality of the moral order must precede and take priority over reflection upon the means by which we acquire epistemic access to the moral order:

Our epistemological pause… quite properlyfollowson what we have learnt about the created order and its fulfillment, for epistemology is a reflexive, not an absolute, intellectual operation.66

It would seem that by relegating the questions of epistemology to the status of afterthoughts which mustfollowthe ontological doctrine of the moral order, O’Donovan intends to avoid any charge of fideism that might accuse him of having imported tacit dogmatic beliefs into his ethics. But does this stratagem avoid fideism, or does it merely cloak its fideism in the disguise of the objective reality which it ascribes presumptively to the moral order?67

O’Donovan defends his position with respect to the objective reality of the moral order by asserting that the reality of the moral order is simplythere; it is there for all to apprehend, and whatever errors or deficiencies might impede or cloud our knowledge of the moral order

65

R&MO, 77. 66

R&MO, 76. Italics in the original. Cf. O’Donovan’s discussion of Christological doctrine: “We may approach this question in two stages, epistemological and ontological” (149).

67

By way of example, we can see how ontological priority sets the stage for O’Donovan’s discussion of “just war theory”, as he sets out the foundational principles of the topic: “First, God’s peace is the original

ontologicaltruth of creation”; O’Donovan,The Just War Revisited(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 2. Whether such statements of ontologically prior principles are reasonable or unreasonable, and whether they are objective or fideistic, depends on the context of faith in which they are presented.

Chapter 2: The Concept of Moral Order 40

are attributable to our limitations as human observers, and do not in any way detract from the assurance that the order isthere. Thus, by subordinating the epistemological questions to the ontological, O’Donovan is able to posit the generic, universal reality of moral right and wrong in any and all circumstances, regardless of the conditions pertaining to the individual’s epistemic access to moral knowledge.

This is not to suggest that O’Donovan neglects the epistemological questions pertaining to the fallen condition of human reason. To the contrary, he recognizes the need for Christian doctrine to address these questions, and he makes four claims with respect to the nature and limitations of moral knowledge:

1) Moral knowledge pertains to thetotality of things in their relationsto one another;68

2) Moral knowledge is existential; i.e., it occurs “from within” the moral order as “the subject participates in what he knows”;69

3) Moral knowledge arises “from man’s positionin the universe”, and is therefore “inescapably compromised by the problem of fallenness”;70and,

4) We remain always “ignorant of the end of history”;71

In these limitations we can see the inescapable consequences of the fall. Human

knowledge is existential; that is to say, formed within and limited by our imperfect vantage as observers and participants in the moral order. There is no Archimedean point from which we might observe the creation in order to discern its structure with perfectly objective clarity.72 Until the day of the eschaton, it seems our moral knowledge must remain incomplete,

provisional and shrouded in mystery.73 Given the mystery of it all, and heeding the advice of Qoheleth regarding the vanity of seeking to understand human existence, what hope may we

68

R&MO, 77. 69

R&MO, 79. 70

R&MO, 81-82. Cf. “But given the fact that the world is fallen and is perceived only by fallen minds…”; O’Donovan goes on to point to the necessity of eschatological fulfillment of Christ to bring about full knowledge, 55-56.

71

R&MO, 82. 72

As O’Donovan notes, “the skeptical Koheleth” ofEcclesiastessearched in vain for such a vantage point, and so shall we all aspire in vain to “comprehend it all”,R&MO, 79f.

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“Such knowledge must always have an incomplete character… The whole can be known only as a mystery which envelops us, into which our minds can reach only with an awareness that there are distances and dimensions which elude us.”R&MO, 79. Cf. 49, and 81: “It is, by its very nature and not by accident,

provisionalknowledge.” O’Donovan acknowledges that natural epistemic access is incapable of arriving at anything more than a flawed and “fragmentary knowledge of the way things are”, 89.

attach to our striving after moral deliberation and learning? O’Donovan has a ready answer to that question—our hope is secured because the ordered structure of being and good isthere, as an objective reality, no matter how fragmented and provisional our discernment might be.

Ontological priority thus provides the corrective O’Donovan needs to shore up our confidence that moral knowledge does not become mired in ambiguity as a result of our necessarily existential “position in the universe”, which is “inescapably compromised” by our status as imperfect participants.74 The purpose of this corrective is to sustain the realism by which O’Donovan aims to determine “good or bad, right or wrong, by virtue of a reality ‘out there’”, and thus to avoid the degeneration of theological ethics into “voluntarism, relativism, emotivism, subjectivism, etc.”75

This has implications for deliberation and moral learning. Relying upon the assertion that right and wrong exist as part of a reality that is ‘out there’, we may conclude that there will exist in every circumstance the challenge as well as the possibility to perceive rightly the structure of the moral order which informs moral deliberation and action. As moral persons therefore, we should aspire to learn and apply moral knowledge with better skill. This leads to the paraenetic conclusion: “mental striving is essential if knowledge is to be knowledge.”76 O’Donovan rightly notes that such striving will forever reach for, but never attain, the

horizon of completeness; nonetheless, we must continue to strive on toward the goal, for this is the essence of what it means to be human.77 By putting the epistemological questions in second place, behind the objective reality of the moral order, O’Donovan is thus able to conclude:

74

O’Donovan protests against any such ambiguity or “ethical underdetermination” in his critique of Hans Ulrich’s theological ethics (Wie Geschöpfe leben, 2006), which are based in the “theologico-ethical…

experience of the theological self, acting consciously as God’s creature before God”. Ulrich’s view suggests that theological ethics must be grounded in “man’s conversion” as a participant who discovers and experiences the moral order through relationship with God. This union of ontological and epistemic realities is incompatible with O’Donovan’s ontological priority, and so he asks and answers rhetorically: “how is the theologian himself to become part of what he describes? Surely we need a discipline that will help us gird up our loins!”

O’Donovan, ‘The Object of Theological Ethics’,Studies in Christian Ethics(2007): 203-14, 205, 211. Given that O’Donovan has stated the core of evangelical ethics in terms remarkably similar to Ulrich— “Morality is man’s participation in the created order”, and “moral illumination does, in its fundamental form, involve conversion”,R&MO, 76, 92—we should expect the exhortation to gird up our loins to apply with equal serious to both Ulrich and O’Donovan.

75

O’Donovan, ‘The Object of Theological Ethics’, 210. 76

R&MO, 49. 77

“We remain beings for whom knowledge is the mode of their participation in the universe”;R&MO, 87. “Moral ‘learning’ is all the time ‘thinking’. It is the intellectual penetration and exploration of a reality which we can grasp from the beginning in a schematic and abstract way, but which contains depths of meaning and experience into which we must reach”, 92.

Chapter 2: The Concept of Moral Order 42

Knowledge which admits discontinuity as anything other than a challenge to be overcome has in principle abandoned the task of being knowledge…”78

This means that our striving after moral knowledge is not in vain. This is the thrust of O’Donovan’s realism—it protects against the cloud of suspicion that accompanies critiques based upon the subjectivity of human experience. For this reason O’Donovan is able to say metaphorically that moral truths stand “as bricks to a building”, and therefore “wisdom must involve some comprehension of how the bricks are meant to be put together.”79 Such a concept of ontological priority suggests that humans must possess, in some sense, the capacity to acquire moral knowledge in spite of the epistemological challenges described above with respect to existential knowledge. This construes the moral order as being in some sense accessible to human nature, without being contingent upon any endowment of faith, doctrine or scripture to facilitate epistemic access to its structure.80 O’Donovan describes this aspect of the moral order as a “natural ethic”81 and goes on to observe that “Secular man can observe the same indications of order as anyone else.”82 Of course the “secular” observer of moral order will necessarily fail to discern thetruecontext of the moral order, and will completely miss its evangelical content; nonetheless, the moral order remains in some sense immediately accessible to the secular observer via human nature. This follows logically from the concept of ontological priority, because O’Donovan’s methodical realism affirms

objective knowledge of the ordered structures of the creation. The logic behind this argument rests on the premise that the ontological and epistemological issues can be neatly separated and addressed sequentially. On O’Donovan’s view, confusion results if the lines between

78

R&MO, 49f. 79

R&MO, 200. 80

John McIntyre offers a helpful insight as to why we should not rush to conclude from the idea of ontological priority that humans have a natural capacity to discern moral truth, or any other revealed truth: “[I]f God is to communicate with us, then his communication must eventually be convertible into verbal, conceptual,

propositional form. But we are not thereby affirming that the source of the communication is verbal, or even that God’s response can be atomized into discrete thoughts. On such matters we have to remain agnostic.” This agnosticism rightly serves to undermine the presumption of epistemological arrogance which seems implicit in the idea that the ontological priority of the moral order means that moral truths can be “atomized into discrete thoughts”, as O’Donovan suggests metaphorically by his reference to “moral bricks”. McIntyre,Theology after the Storm: Reflections on the Upheavals in Modern Theology and Culture, ed. Gary D. Badcock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977) 209.

81

R&MO, 16f. O’Donovan argues that the ontological reality of moral order provides grounds for an “ethic of nature”, i.e., an “objective order to which the moral life can respond”, 19.

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ontology and epistemology are blurred.83 He cites this as a primary failing in the Barth- Brunner debate with respect to natural theology, and suggests that his own form of realism can sort out the confusion.84

But how can we best differentiate the ontological and epistemological issues cleanly? How is ontological priority to be maintained in the face of the peril it invites with respect to naturalism? We see now that O’Donovan’s claim to pursueevangelicalrealism85apparently hinges upon the requirement of ontological priority. At root, O’Donovan’s realism may be expressed as the requirement to conjoin and hold in tension two essential, yet opposing, polar commitments: (1) on the one hand, the ontological priority of the moral order ensures access to “moral knowledge as a natural function of man’s existence”86; and yet on the other hand, (2) “the order of reality is not truly known at all”, because “there is no self-contained cosmic intelligibility” of the creation as creation.87 What kind of knowledge is this then, which arises as a natural function of human existence, and yet remains ‘not truly known at all’? How can moral knowledge be both known and yet unknown at the same time? There is necessarily a bit of mystery remaining in this type of realism (as O’Donovan duly noted at the outset in the four parameters named above), yet he is not content to let the matter of

evangelical ethics end here, shrouded in a mystery that prevents further articulation; rather, he intends to peer into this mystery at least far enough to outline the path forward to the goal of outlining the structure of an evangelical ethic. We now see that success in this goal requires anepistemologicalrealism robust enough to maintain the polarity “between revelation in the particular and created order in the universal”88without collapsing. The question remains however: what form must such knowledge take?

83

Bretherton,Hospitality as Holiness, 64-65, sees correctly that “This clarification of the ontological and epistemological issues in ethics underpins one of the central thrusts of O’Donovan’s work; its attempt to restore the concept of ‘the natural’ and the doctrine of creation within Christian ethics.”

84

O’Donovan diagnoses the Barth-Brunner debate in these terms: “[T]he ontological and epistemological issues were never properly differentiated”;R&MO, 86.

85

R&MO, xviii. 86

R&MO, 88. Cf. 20, where O’Donovan also states the nub of the epistemological problem: “This nature involves all men, and indeed, as we shall see later, does not exclude a certain ‘natural knowledge’ which is also a part of man’s created endowment. And yet only in Christ do we apprehend that order in which we stand and that knowledge of it with which we have been endowed.”

87

R&MO, 88. In supporting this latter commitment O’Donovan says: “If one term of that relation [i.e. knowledge of the Creator] is obscured, the universe cannot be understood”, 88. In this context he sounds sympathetic to Barth’s language about “the image of God in man [being] not merely ‘defaced’ but ‘lost’” (89). 88

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