Keywords of the Moral Life: Indifference

So Many Tools, So Little Time to Use Them

Is “indifference” something worth recovering? Are there really that many tools available to us?

The Costs of the Moral Life: A Brief Detour

Following the lead of The Conferences of the Desert Fathers has been refreshing for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it reads as if there are real stakes to the moral life. The moral life is not about ferreting out the best kind of city-state, or about enumerating the virtues: the moral life is about a flesh-and-blood struggle for being made holy. Something matters a great deal here. Case in point: in Book 7, Abbot Serenus gives his take on the various kinds of demons that there are, and how one shouldn’t be afraid of them because they’re riddled with vice: one can’t ultimately be hurt by something that’s shot through with anxiety and doubt.

Last week, while helping with the check-in at our church’s free lunch for neighborhood folks, one of the regular volunteers started talking to me about spiritual warfare. While I’m not sure entirely what he meant by it, I think he and Serenus would have a really great conversation. I have no opinion on how the demonic functions, but increasingly, I have little doubt that the demonic does function. Apart from confessing it to you, faithful reader, this is probably not something I’ll pursue in an academic paper, mostly because it doesn’t fit anywhere, or anywhere at least in regular writings.¹

When I teach Christian ethics, or systematics, I have no section on demonology or angelology, though Christians have long speculated on such things. When I taught methods in Christian ethics last week, I didn’t include a segment on how to avoid demonic attachment, as Serenus does at length. I mention all of this because in The Conferences, things deviate pretty significantly not only from modern accounts of the moral life, which tend to focus on political contexts, personal identity, or quandries. These all have some risks, but there’s the possibility that one will act imprudently, and have to offer some kind of repair in the future…and then there’s the possibility that your soul will be corrupted and subject to demonic possession.²

As I say, there are stakes, and then there are stakes.

Please note how “indifference” here is cast as a vice. I’m more or less inclined to agree: indifference can most frequently be an indicator of one’s apathy toward things which should be loved or rejected. Hence my puzzlement that indifference gets such a positive place in the Conferences, as we’re about to see.

Can Life Itself Be Indifferent?

With this in mind, it is all the more peculiar that not everything is treated as life or death. It is an axiom within most moral philosophies that action, in a particular direction, is intrinsic to whatever ethics is. Whether it’s because ethics isn’t ethics until it is exercised as a matter of prudence, or because ethics isn’t ethics until it is operating in opposition to a form of evil, the active life is prioritized. The Conferences are no exception in their own way: to struggle against temptation, or to struggle for virtue is intrinsic to the moral life—there is no moral life except that striving is involved.

Except.

Altogether there are three things in the world: good, bad and indifferent. And so we ought to know what is properly good, and what is bad, and what is indifferent…But those are indifferent which can be appropriated to either side according to the fancy or wish of their owner, as for instance riches, power, honor, bodily strength, good health, beauty, life itself, and death….

Part of what makes this so interesting is not that it doesn’t play by the on/off switch of modern ethics, in which one is either acting in solidarity or a scab, either for us or against us. That it maintains a mushy muddle under the heading of “indifference” to a whole host of things in life isn’t that new: Augustine of Hippo famously carved up the whole world into those things which are to be used and those which are to be enjoyed, such that all of the things enumerated above can be used for the sake of God under the proper conditions.

What makes this so interesting is that there are some things which are intrinsically good, intrinsically bad, and intrinsically indifferent. Money, no matter how much I want to demand that it corrupts whatever it touches, is treated as inert, waiting to be put to use one way or another. Bodily strength has no intrinsic value apart from the end toward which it is put. Where one starts, in other words, has an enormous set of tools available, in that neither wealth nor poverty are intrinsically evil, but both capable of being used for the sake of something good or evil. They are intrinsically indifferent, just laying there to be used.

Indifference Considered

On the one hand, I’m profoundly uncomfortable with the notion that aspects of our living like wealth are simply indifferent morally, apart from our use: there’s too much in Scripture about the way in which luxury wraps its arms around us until we can’t see our way out. Mammon is treated like an idol precisely because it has a kind of power that it exercises on us.

But on the other hand, treating something like “life itself” as indifferent opens up the possibility that the virtuous really are powerful, that “evil cannot be brought upon a man by another, unless another has admitted by sloth or feebleness of heart.” Much like the aforementioned demons who are weak because they are filled with vice, the virtuous can’t be touched by evil because the things coming at them by the evil ones is itself just indifferent.

All that is to say: the weapons used for wickedness can be turned against their intent without loss. This is different than, say, using something that you know to be intrnisically evil to produce a good end: one doesn’t commit adultery for some greater good. What is meant here is something like befriending hardship because it’s not personal. That same hardship can be repurposed, turned around, put to good use again, because of the indifference.

I’ll leave it here, mostly because I’m unsure of what to do with this yet. But perhaps that’s just further confirmation of the truthfulness of this: the indifference of things is a puzzle to be sorted, that all manner of tools lay before me if only I had the eyes to see how to use them.

Are the tools as endless as the grains of sand on the beach, as the stars in the sea? Are there more gifts available to be put to use for our salvation than we know?

1. Do not expect this to turn into a regular detour here, as beyond this observation, I don’t know where this might go.

2. Ancient ethics routinely affirmed the existence, or at least the social norm, of worshipping the gods. Part of the Stoic ethos is acknowledging that the gods might fling a whole lot of bad things at you, and you were to stand your ground anyway.