Keywords of the Moral Life: Indifference, Part Two

Being Indifferent About Your Life and Other Malleable Objects

To say that all things in life are indifferent is a double-edged sword. All things are able to be used for the moral life, should we have the same posture toward our own lives?

Indifference: The Redeemer of Creation

In the previous edition¹, we introduced the concept of “indifference”, not in an “indifferent to the suffering of others” kind of way, but in the sense that creation bears within it a kind of neutrality: that the monks recorded by John Cassian spoke of the need to be indifferent to all things in the world, as a way of being able to be moved toward God by all things in creation. Christians confess that all things are made by God, and as such, are given as gifts. But those gifts do not come with an intrinsic force toward being used well.

This goes then for malevolent things as well: it’s common to think of certain elements of creation being Totally Good and others being Totally Bad, but break anything down far enough, just at a molecular level and it’s something found elsewhere.² A tree which rots in the woods is the same tree which provided shade and shelter³; carbon makes up much of human life and in another form pollutes the air human life needs.

The kind-of-technical name for this temptation is Manicheeanism:⁴ that goodness or evil resides in particular material forms, and as such, goodness is a matter of avoiding the Wrong Material Things. For the actual Manicheeans, this took the form of foods of a certain kind, but for the 21st century, any variety of goods are on the table, given your political persuasion: petroleum products, animals, democracy. The problem, as Augustine identified a long time ago, is that evil isn’t a material good: it’s located within the will which turns things to purposes disproportionate to their nature—to use petroleum products for ease in mechanical objects is arguably fine, but to eat them is less than ideal, for example.

As such, the things themselves don’t do the work, but the will which puts the things to evil ends. “Indifference” follows up on this, by reminding us that creation is a good thing, a gift of God, and that all within it can be turned toward good, even if that turning means changing the form of it. A tree which is rotting provides good for mushrooms and maggots, but not so much for humans, at least until the rotted tree has passed through some other food source.

NOW: some objects, in their present form, have but one purpose. Guns are designed for penetrating flesh at high speeds with bullets. Bleach is meant for destroying bacteria and other organic elements. You can use a gun to shoot pool or bleach to do your dishes, but it’s less than ideal. Once dismantled, a gun can be melted down into a gardening tool, and bleach diluted enough can help stains on fabric. But it requires a will to turn the malicious form into a benevolent one.

It’s one thing to recognize the indifference of objects, and to celebrate the way in which all things can work together for good.

But what about something more complex, like your life?

Indifference: The Redeemer of Your Life

A friend emailed this picture to me which I hadn’t seen in….a long time. The provenance is my friend Gretchen, and this is her mother’s birthday party. Gretchen is a friend from college that I had reconnected with after seminary, who asked if I wanted to give her and our mutual friend Kim a ride up to Hot Springs from Dallas for said party. The party coincided with the Fourth of July, and being as this was years before I was reasonably busy with family, work, or children, and that I had heard legends of Gretchen’s mom, it was an opportunity to be grasped.

Reader, it was a fun party as I remember it. Imagine Hot Springs, Arkansas, if you can, and then imagine being in your mid-20s going to a party populated by people from Hot Spring, Arkansas. Imagine further that there is alcohol and people dancing, and that everyone will go home safely. When you’re in your 20s, if you are able, this is the kind of trip you take and then are grateful for later. It was a great chance to reconnect with some college friends, return to beloved Arkansas, and to be spontaneous without it being an emergency situation.

Indifference here takes a different shape: that the celebrated memories are both true, and that in time, they will reveal other things as well. Conversely, memories which we would rather forget will themselves be put to other uses. Augustine, in his Confessions, offers a master class of this, recounting how even his mothers’ tears, his relationship with his concubine, his intellectual wanderings and wasted time of his youth—these too could be redeemed in light of his baptism.

If life itself is one of the things toward which we are to be indifferent, then it means that our own lives—including good memories—are among those things which we have to hold loosely, that within these aspects of our lives which have given us joy are also mitigated joys, opportunities to turn over and be changed by.

In this weekend of Gretchen’s Mother’s Birthday, I had the chance to not just reconnect with old friends, but to stretch out and receive this gift of the unknown: a birthday party with strangers many miles away from Waco. In the years to come, I would hear less and less from Gretchen, and so now this memory provides a different lesson: the challenge to keep up with good people, and to value friendships as ongoing living creatures.

Both exist in the same picture, and this is the gift of indifference: that our lives are—in the same moment, neither fully redeemed, nor fully forsaken, but containing the seeds of both, which will grow up as they are needed. In the moment of this picture, I see a young man happy to be alive, hamming for the camera, and a man who would still need to learn a great many things about being alive, about being a friend. Indifference allows us to learn from the joyful, and to, in other times, know the terrible to have other seeds than the tragic that will grow as well.

Your life, your past, your memories—these things are never done with us. They are not fixed objects with trajectories of evil or virtue only, but objects of play, aspects of ourselves which are brimming with encouragement or appropriate regret, with joy or appropriate sadness. That they can do both, as they are needed, is part of the gift of living in a world in which even the saddest of memories can be reknit into a tapestry of redemption, and the most joyful of memories can provoke us toward repentance.

1. Go read it already!

2. This is where the First Law of Thermodynamics has radical implications for theological existence: nothing is ever lost or gained—it simply gets moved around. Nothing is ever lost in the love of God: it just gets repurposed; there is already enough, by God’s hand.

3. This begs big philosophical questions about whether things have continuity apart from their particular shape, but let’s leave that alone for now.

4. I hear you, classicists and patristic scholars, and I don’t have time for you today. If you want to read up on Christian engagements with real live Manicheeans, consider this book as a starting point.