The Moral Life and the 23rd Psalm: "He Makes Me To Lie Down In Green Pastures"
The Paradox of Agency, Progress, and Rest
The moral agency we have is one which funds our common life, but only within limits of rest, the bodies of others, and the natural world.
The Psalm begins with an invocation of the one before whom and through whom we can conceive of a moral life: God, the Shepherd among us, the Uncreated dwelling among the Created. It is there that our desiring comes into view: that without desire, no one does what they do, and no one can be moved toward that which is good.1 In the next verse, we are faced with the question of desire’s limit: what is the frame for our desire, even for that which is good?
Is our desire for the good endless? Should it be a bottomless pit? Should our lives then be endless work and shaping of the world? To this, we take the professor’s cop-out: “Yes and No.”
Yes: insofar as we seek God, our desire for goodness, for our lives to be shaped into the image of goodness, to receive endlessly the gifts of the world and the presence of others, there is no end. God is the Uncreated Giver, and to the depths of God, there is no end; likewise, with the gifts of God and the opportunities of mending the world, there is no end. I say this not burden us with endless duties2, but just an acknowledgment that God is God, and to the plumbing of that mystery, there is no end. Gregory of Nyssa once wrote that even in eternity, we do not exhaust the mystery of God, but endlessly search out those depths.3
The world is wounded in innumerable ways, and to refuse the summons of God, the theologian Karl Barth writes, is the heart of sloth. There is no prize for not responding to the beaten man on the road or to not attending to the ones in prison, in sickness, without clothes, because in that, we meet God’s endlessly wounded side.
No: We are creatures with real agency, but agency which is limited, in two ways. In one way, our limits of agency are those of being a creature. The desire that we have for the good is bounded by age, time, resources, and competitive goods. For me to spend time writing is to not spend time with my children; for me to spend time with my children is to not spend time feeding the hungry.
But in another way, our limits of agency are those which guard us against forming the world into our own image. To follow the metaphor of the Psalm, we are sheep, part of a flock, and the sheep does not rest unless the irritants which exist within the flock are calmed: the sheep will not lie down if other sheep are biting it or if there is something within the “common life” of the flock creating disturbance. A sheep who seeks to shape the flock will, paradoxically, only lead to a flock which is more unruly than it was before. Our agency, as it were, is the agency of a flock-member, and not of the shepherd.
The Christ who leads us is the Christ who leads us to attend to each other in ways appropriate to the flourishing of the flock. In that, each sheep will find their limits to Promethean desire, a check to having their plans written large on the wall, and in that, each sheep will find that they do not have what they need except, paradoxically, by not seeking it out, but by waiting for what is already present through the flock.
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And in that limit—not of endless shaping the world, but of receiving the gifts of God through the bleatings of other sheep—we are led to rest. Augustine, in Confessions, has this surprising statement, written after his time spent with the Manicheeans, an ancient sect which Augustine initially thought had offered the wisdom he yearned for:
Master, God of truth, is it really possible that whoever knows [the depths of philosophy] ipso facto pleases you? No, because even anyone knowing all of that, but no knowing you, is an unfortunate person. It’s a happy one, on the other hand, who knows you, even if he doesn’t know any natural philosophy. In fact, the one who knows you and science isn’t any happier on account of the science: he’s happy because of you alone, if in recognizing you he glorifies you as God and gives you thanks…4
To be sure, Augustine isn’t always this low on the happiness which temporal goods give us, but the point here is important: pursuit of what is good within any created activity—whether sciences or the moral life—find a limit which is internal to the good itself, which is a mismatch for our endless desire for excellence. The key here is not to tire of doing good, as Paul puts it, but that we trust that the goodness we are summoned to give ourselves to is that which allows the flock to ultimately find rest in the world we are given to love.
The laying down of the sheep begs one final question: who lays them down? How are they directed? The pious answer here is “God!”, and while not a wrong answer, can lead us to the practical outworking of “everyone doing what seemed right in their own eyes”: God is not visible to us, orchestrating our movements. But if Christ has a body, Scripture tells us, then we look to that body as a condition of our voicing the pious answer well. The Holy Spirit, who attests that Christ has come in the flesh, is the one who animates the body: the flock, and the sheep within it, attend to the Spirit who creates the flock, God among us. We listen to the gifts of one another, receive those gifts, and find ourselves coordinated by those gifts.
Apart from one another, we become the lost sheep, who may very well be rescued by the shepherd, who leaves the 99 to rescue the one, we are told. But life in the wild for a lone sheep is not only a hungry one, but a life which turns the gifts and agency of the lost sheep into food for whatever new system wants to maximize that sheep’s profitability. It’s much harder for a flock, who knows that what it needs comes from the gifts of God within, to be convinced that selling its gifts to the meatpacking plant is a better deal.
There is much to say here about the role of compulsion in the moral life, and of addiction, which I did not say before. There is a great body of literature on this question of whether or not someone who is addicted or experiencing compulsion can be said to be a free person, and whether their desires are captive and thus not productive desires. The importance for the moral life is profound: ones suffering from addictions and compulsions, are, in a real sense, not free and thus, limited in moral agency.
This is the way that John Calvin tends to go: the gifts of God open up an endless life of gratitude and discipleship, which is to say that the obligations of the moral life are without end. The flipside of having God repair an incalculable debt is that we are incalculably indebted, in the sense that our gratitude opens up endlessly, not that we are saddled with endless obligation. But if gratitude does not compel us as a traffic cop, it surely propels us like the West Texas wind, without beginning or end.
Citation lost to the mists of memory.
Confessions, Book 5.7, Sarah Ruden translation.