Why Be Moral When You're Going to Die?
Ethics in the Valley of the Shadow
My recent book review of Andrew Root’s book on evangelism and consolation is up now. It’s a needed intervention.
It’s All Going To End Eventually
This summer, my main writing project is to finish a book for Eerdmans which takes up the 23rd Psalm as a guide for how to learn the moral life. In revisiting the original series, I’ve discovered two things: 1) there is far more to say than I can say in 50k words, and 2) the original series is far more philosophical than pedagogical. As I work through the ten chapters, I’m bleeding all over the margins of these 1500 word expositions, both to include more dimensions to them, and to make them less self-indulgent.
This week, I’m working over what will become Chapter Five, on Psalm 23:4:
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,[a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
There’s so much going on here, the most basic bit being that the whole venture of being with God is marked by death from the beginning. The first part of the Psalm begins in sunshine and modest provision, but by verse 4, the spectre of mortality is hanging firmly overhead. In the words of Ecclesiastes 8:
14 There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. 15 So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.
It’s a giant soggy sandwich waiting for us when you’re hungry in the middle of the day: pursue the life of virtue all you want, but you’re going to die.
This basic affirmation of Psalm 23:4—that we’re going to die—quickly affects how we think about bodily life and the ethics therein: Do we idolize youth? Shouldn’t we just hasten death as quickly as possible as a humane alternative to dying? Shouldn’t we just be refusing babies left and right, saving them the despair of finite life?
The ultimate finitude of life is, I think, one of the most primary block for any serious pursuit of the moral life. It drops a big question mark, Wiley-Coyote-sized, right into the paths of our ordinary, distracted lives. This isn’t to say that we can’t rise to the occasion when needed. Perhaps, to get around this block, one can adopt a mode of aspiration in thinking, thinking of how to adopt new lives and mentally trying them on for size, projecting out what it would be like to live a different kind of existence1. In doing so, we can laugh in the face of death. Or perhaps can skip the introspective part and step boldly into the unknown, smiling in the face of the yawning maw of finitude, a Kierkegaardian leap in the face of time’s shortened measure. All of this is admirable.
But these heroic stances do not come from nowhere. They are not the product of rational calculation. While simultaneously recognizing the need to live in the face of death, these heroic stances in fact presume that, when we need to be courageous in the face of death, one already has a small measure of courage already, at least enough to silence the fear.
And to do that, you have been living the moral life already even knowing that it won’t last forever, going on in the face of an uncertain future. Fortitude—the ability to persevere in the face of death, or less dramatically, in the face of serious obstacles—is what we need to be able to go on. But fortitude is grown and cultivated, practiced day over day. The only way these heroes can sneer in the face of death is precisely because they didn’t treat the moral life as meaningless, even if death was around the corner.
Four Ways Into the Shadow: A Brief Typology
In the face of death’s shadow, one of a few ways appears before us as the way through:
1. Despair
If the world is one, in which we cannot get all of what we want, in which everything ends in death, quiet despair is the way forward. Despair is a harbinger of death, for it tempts us to give us our breath before time. There is a real way that emotional anguish overwhelms us, and in many, overwhelms2.
But despair is also a way of undervaluing what goodness there is in the world, even one existing under death’s shadow. Despair has close cousins: irony, which keeps us from embracing the world too seriously, and anger, which keeps us from appreciating the goodness for not being perfection. Despair, in all of its family tree, pulls us away from the earth, bit by bit, until letting go altogether is the only thing which makes sense.
2. Pleasure
It’s possible that goodness has no use but social convention, that we only refrain from pushing children down because society frowns on us. It’s possible that comporting one’s bodily life to the ways of God—if it has a limited time—is of little use, and we should embrace only those things that help us get by in the world. In the face of death, it’s possible that the only service goodness has is to help us be happy, and that if that’s unavailable, to leave it aside.
There is nothing wrong, it must be said, with fun. But it’s also important here that we remember that eating, drinking, and making merry is only enjoined when death is at the door. When built out as an ethos for existence, there is no good reason why commitments should be held on to when difficult, or why people who appear as difficulties to us should be kept around.
If despair’s handmaid is suicide, pleasure’s are not only euthanasia, but eugienics: putting aside those who encumber our pleasure. Pleasure may draw us to one another, but it cannot sustain our connections or our commitments to those whose form give us no pleasure. Pleasure—of another person, of a new skill, of life itself—might be the thing we discover in our commitment to one another, but its light comes and goes like a lightbulb in a loose socket.
3. Making Tiny Changes to Earth
What draws these first two together cleanly is a focus on the self: death is not just a problem, but a problem for me, to be addressed by either giving into the darkness or refusing its shadow. Perhaps through our actions, we leave marks upon the world which, in the words of Dorothy Day, make it easier to be good3. For in this, our actions might endure beyond death in a different way: as testimonies to the LORD’s enduring presence, of the land of the living in the valley of Death’s shadow.
At its best, this too falls short in vanity. For all of the institutions which we live in will forget our names; their effect will go on for a time, and make a difference to a few, but will in time become part of the dust of the earth. And its worst, this too can be just another projection of the self, a hope that after my death, the changes I have made will be remembered, appreciated, if not exalted.
Just Avoiding the Worst.
Or perhaps we just carry on in minor terror? Another possibility is that the courage of the moral life is less important than the persistent reminder that what we do in time matters eschatologically: having recognized the face of Christ in the poor, imprisoned, and sick —irrespective of one’s feelings of the matter—is enough justification. The fact that you’re going to die and face God, on this reading, is enough to overcome any other lack of positive motivation4.
This, however, seems like treating life as nothing but labor, a mountain to climb. And what we know of biblical mountains is that most often, they will be laid low, not deliver on their promise, or become our undoing. The mountains, moral or otherwise, remind us of that which is most important—God’s presence, the giving of the law, the site of the temple—but also become places that most people will die gazing at rather than climbing.
The Shadow of Sabbath
There is another way to approach the dark, though: as another kind of Sabbath, a deep Sabbath of God’s presence: a deep mystery in which God goes with us. And to journey well into that dark, we must practice.
If, as the Psalmist says, it is the Lord who not only leads us beside still waters, but accompanies us in the valley, it’s not too much to presume that the Lord’s presence brings true light into this darkness as well. Our mortality is illuminated at every turn, lit up from the God who journeys alongside us in sickness and in health.
This journey, the Psalmist knows, will end in the house of the Lord: whether seeing that house in the land of the living or after it, we do not know. There was going to be an end to every journey, and this journey of life in particular requires pacing. One cannot work endlessly, but must travel in a way fitting the kind of journey the Psalmist says it is: one which requires still waters, food, protection, and feasting.
Life toward the valley of Death’s Shadow, in other words, is a journey which has Sabbaths built in.
Your time is short, but yes, that is the very reason to enter into God’s rest now, and not only later, as a kind of foretaste of what the valley will offer. The shadow of death is, before it is death, simply shade, a place of rest. Throughout the Old Testament, we are given visions of God providing rest for the people amidst groves of trees, shade in the desert, oasises. It is not an abandonment of the seriousness of being God’s people, or a rejection of finitude, or wishing away the short time we have, but recognizing that the shadow of death is anticipated in all of its terror not by pure dark but by shelter and shade.
To approach the shadow of Death is to remember that, like Sabbath, it speaks of our finitude, our time-boundness, our limits. To live well in the body as we approach the Shadow is because we have learned to live well in the shade, persevering in the sun and welcoming the finitude of time as also the dwelling place of God.
Agnes Callard’s book Aspiration is one that, all weirdness of her personal life aside, is the most potent meditation on this dynamic. We don’t begin to change apart from asking what it would look like for us to be made weird to ourselves.
The most potent literary description here is Dante’s “Suicide Wood” in which those who had killed themselves are trapped as an living forest: having abandoned their bodies in life, they now persist without their bodies, yet living.
The notion of the “encratic” is important here: it’s the notion that, absent desiring the good thing, simply refraining from the bad thing is good enough.