Sebastian Moore’s Spiritual Vision and Christological Project

A spiritual vision

Moore was an intuitive man who could see at one glance several components of human life and of the Christian mystery. He confided that in 1959, on the feast of the Sacred Heart, a unifying insight occurred to him in an Italian church as he heard, in the first anthem of Vespers, the familiar words of John 19:34: ‘One of the soldiers opened his side with a spear, and immediately there came out blood and water’. Here is his commentary, so personal and so eloquent:

Quietly I knew that the whole thing was there; that everything I would ever want to say, in the meandering but persistent prosecution of an interest that has been mine for thirty years, would stem from that image. It is extraordinary how one’s psychic life, on the rare occasions that it gets our ear, can programmatize decades of persistent and curious enquiry. For in that image I experienced the vital conjunction, the vital meet-up, of our bitter and desperate aggression with the grace and love that embraces it and reveals itself in, and only in, that embrace … Something got to my heart, in that moment in the musty church, as surely as the soldier’s spear found its mark. ²

Several factors combine here: a liturgical context, a listening to the word of God, an unconscious content emerging from one’s psychic life, and, as a result, an enlightenment. Moore was aware of the psychic-affective source of his vision. Such vision had been prepared and it subsequently unfolded thanks to the daily lectio divina of the Benedictine monk. His books and articles witness to a continual and coherent deepening, and to the re-expressing of a holistic progression.

Besides being contemplative, Moore was discursive. His hypotheses were tested with friends in conversations, with students in the classroom, or with colleagues in conferences. When he read books, he perceptively spotted the often underdeveloped ideas that could play a role in his own approach. He thus borrowed elements from poets, psychologists, mystics, exegetes, theologians. Sometimes his dissatisfaction with fashionable stances – regardless of whether they came from conservative or liberal circles – made him react and rephrase his thought in sharp contrast to alternative views. In such discussions, we then witness the dialectician at work.

In his thinking, we notice two significant shifts. First, from The Crucified Jesus is no Stranger (1977) ³ to The Fire and the Rose Are One (1980). ⁴ Part Four of the latter contains ‘Retractations’. They indicate various moves: from the human self as oriented towards freedom to the human self as radically oriented to God, namely as a Godward-tending self; from Jesus as an archetype (in Jung’s sense) to Jesus as a concrete person with a universal import; from the individual ego to a new state in contact with divinity beyond the reach of one’s own deep self; and from sin understood as the result of fear to sin whose significance is apprehended in the believers’ contact with Christ’s death and resurrection. These points will be explained in this essay.

Moore’s second significant shift occurred in the mid-1990s, when he discovered the thought of René Girard, whom he called ‘the Poirot of theology’, that is, the detective who unrelentingly asks, about humanity’s crime: ‘Who did it, does it, and why?’. ⁵ It is in Girard’s studies of literature, with the latter’s keen anthropological eye, that Moore found ‘a basic grammar, derived from René Girard’. ⁶ Following Girard, he had a decisive insight into ‘the interwovenness of likeness with rivalry and conflict’: ⁷ a human individual envies the successful desire of another individual, who, given this similarity in desiring, becomes to be seen as a rival and as an enemy. ⁸ As we shall see later, this situation amounts to the basic distress of our sinful human race, for which God has provided a solution in the passion and resurrection of Jesus.

Human desire

Moore said much about desire. He continually asked: how do human beings experience desire? This experience is twofold. First, owing to their basic animal necessities, they experience in themselves lacks which make them reach out for known objects. The kind of desire that is simply a felt need ceases once the need is satisfied: after eating, drinking, sleeping, washing, and so on, the lacks disappear.

Second, the specifically human form of desire does not cease; after having obtained satisfaction, for instance in friendship, it does not dwindle; rather, it intensifies. In contrast to the need, which directly aims at the release of tension, the properly human desire is interested in its own increase, namely in mutual growth between two or more individuals who appreciate one another. Because this specifically human desire is not restricted to particular objects, it acquires fuller meaning from the fact that it is situated in interpersonal contexts. In relationality Moore sees intentionality at work. ‘The intentionality of the primal zest to feel myself alive is to enhance with itself the zest for life in another’. ⁹ Relationality is a self-transcending thrust towards the other. At its best, it intends a love for the beloved, which is based not on projection but on true knowledge.

Such relatedness can be lived both horizontally and vertically. We are related horizontally to other human beings, and we are related vertically to the transcendent Mystery. We are awakened to our own personal worth either from outside – by people who value us – or from within – by the Creator who has made us valuable in the first place. When we are awakened from outside, by parents, siblings, or friends, we know happiness; when we are awakened from within, by God, we know divine grace and we feel totally secure, entirely at peace, in ‘the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding’ (Phil 4:7a).

As he explores the horizontal side of this experience, Moore characterises the best interpersonal relationship as follows. There is nothing more rewarding than to feel the desire of the person I desire. Of course that person must be genuinely and happily interested in me. Moore extends this paradigm to all affirming interpersonal situations. When a person feels desired, she feels her own desirability. As she feels significant, she comes alive. She becomes aware of her own goodness and beauty, as that goodness and beauty is noticed by the other. From now on, each of the two lovers is someone for someone else, in a mutual bond. Furthermore, the multiplicity of human relationships makes for the rich variety of ways in which people enhance one another. Personal fulfilment and other-centredness go hand in hand. The ‘I am’ that exists thanks to those who appreciate me, is the same as the ‘I am’ that exists for them.

In addition to their horizontal relationships, humans are vertically related. To account for this vertical relatedness, Moore offers two approaches: an argumentative one, and a mystical one.

Argumentatively, the question of God germinates within the awareness of desire. For Moore the question of God, instead of being simply theoretical (i.e. restricted to cosmological, metaphysical or epistemological considerations) is intelligent-affective. Such a move is possible because he views human desiring as shot through with meaning.

Moore does not try to prove the existence of God, but rather the existence of a human desire for there to be God. He sees this desire for God’s attention as springing from a passionate request that our worth be recognised by others. Having been valued by other people, we become aware that we all come from and return to an unknown mystery. Clouded in unknowability, our origin and our destination give rise to wonder and, later, to enchantment. Nonetheless, for all their attentiveness and care, other finite loves cannot provide any final answer. The desire to be significant for another thus becomes the desire to be significant for the unknown mystery that is my beginning and my end. And since to be significant is ‘to be’, I can get a glimpse of what creation means: to be willed into existence. Those who have discovered their immensely valuable ‘to be’ in the eyes of the persons who love them, advance in the same direction when they perceive their own being as efficaciously wished by their Creator:

Thus what differentiates the love of God (or love with God) from all other loves is that the love of God is love as the place of reception of the creative act. The love of God is differentiated from all other loves not by having a different object (God) but by the fact that while other loves are specified by the object, the love of God is specified by the condition of the subject. ¹⁰

This vertical relatedness also unifies the intellectual and the affective. Intellectually, we realise that our mind is open to more than discrete objects. We can access a kind of consciousness that goes beyond images and concepts. Moore refers to John Chapman, abbot of Downside, who talks of ‘an idiotic state’; he gives an illuminating twist to Chapman’s phrase, ‘wanting nothing but God’, which becomes the more directly conscious experience of ‘just wanting’. ¹¹ Moore sees in it a peculiar longing, ‘a yearning for we know not what, … a strange, poignant, bittersweet desire for we know not what’. ¹² And he comments, ‘the one thing one longs for once the desire has gone is to have it again, to be once again aching with it’. ¹³

According to development psychology, to which Moore paid more than scant attention, in the process of growing, instead of always remaining one with the parents, the child becomes separate. Such episodes in their advance can be lived with a pleasant thrill – as when the parents approve and encourage the awkward efforts of the child to become an individual. But it can also be seen as a dangerous deviation – as when the parental message is: ‘Either you are a part of me, or you are totally on your own!’

This abrupt pair of alternatives has the effect of inducing children to begrudge the desire that led them into bitter disappointments. Such mistrust of one’s desire entails a rejection of a part of oneself – the best one. Desire becomes an object of suspicion. The result is that which Moore calls ‘erosthenia’, weakness in desire. The happiness of one’s desirability is replaced with envy, rivalry and power in the hankering for possession – a point on which he insisted more when he discovered the writings of René Girard. When it is embodied in an action that harms someone else, this refusal to trust one’s desire and to love is sin. To counter this basic attitude, Moore states, ‘So we should embrace, not shun our real desires, for desire is love trying to happen – a favourite aphorism of mine. And sin is the frustration of our real desire’. ¹⁴

Sin is the awkward self-asserting that cuts us off horizontally from other human beings and vertically from the Source of our desirability. It consists in failing and wounding oneself, the other, and God at the same time. It is an attack against desire, both in ourselves and in those we harm. We then succumb to fear of what may be involved in following our basic Godward orientation. Fear is the motive for sinning, although not its reason. In the last analysis, there is no reason for sinning. Like Bernard Lonergan, Moore thinks that sin is a surd, a choice for the unintelligible, the irrational, the ‘what has no reason’. ¹⁵

Sin produces dread of God. ¹⁶ In a couple of perceptive pages on Moore, Pheme Perkins mentions that he was aware of ‘a problem of the human psyche that lies even deeper than our anxiety about death’. She explains,

It is our anxiety in the face of the Other, of the transcendent, of God, of the eternal. Humans naturally desire to be a self before the Other, but that desire to be with God, to love and be loved by God, is haunted by our own knowledge of our failures. ¹⁷

This fundamental anxiety has the following consequence: ‘The most deeply repressed question in the modern world is the question about God … The fear of death serves to mask this more radical fear, the fear of God’. ¹⁸ Therefore, following Moore, Perkins draws attention to the resurrection of Jesus as the solution to this predicament, which amounts to a new affirmation of God: ‘As a therapy of the spirit, it [the resurrection] provides a vision in which the ego’s suspicion that death and divine love are incompatible is overthrown’. ¹⁹ As Moore puts it, ‘the risen victim [Jesus] is the indisputably unique model for the limitless generosity in us that, until thus empowered, is helpless’. ²⁰ Accordingly, let us now see how he explicates the process by which the disciples of Jesus overcame their dread of God and, more precisely, their dread of meaninglessness and despair.

Phases in the disciples’ experience of Jesus

As he proceeds to retrieve the experience of the first Christians, Moore introduces a threefold schema which sums up the successive phases in their relationship with Jesus. This sequence is based on a parallel between the classical three mystical phases and Christian discipleship. The analogy drawn from mysticism is meant to be an analogy, that is, to indicate similarity and difference between the mystical journey and the experience of the disciples of Jesus (both first- and 21st-century disciples). It does not assume that they were (or are) mystics in the strict sense.

The first phase in the arousal of desire is what happened to the disciples in Galilee. The spiritual strength of the one who was proclaiming the reign of God, in the midst of the crowds’ enthusiasm, had an enormous impact on the disciples. The integrity of the sinless Jesus stirred up the sense of their own beauty. They were thus awakened by Jesus from outside, and such an awakening triggered an awakening by God from within. Moreover, a dependency may very well have occurred, as they hung all their hopes upon their charismatic leader.

The stage was thus set for the collapse of their dream – second phase. ²¹ The followers of Jesus fought to the last moment his disconcerting acceptance of forthcoming defeat. They did not understand that he could not give up the very authenticity which had become a threat to the inauthentic guardians of the religious and political status quo. As he proved to be a loser by suffering humiliation and death, they felt completely disillusioned – a devastating, mercilessly shattering realisation. They were separated from their beloved friend. He had passed into the realm of the dead. Therefore, no relationship was any longer extant between their deceased master and them. They were alienated from their dream, and from the two sources of their dream: Jesus and his God.

For one thing, he had been the charismatic, ‘larger-than-life’ person, who had promised nothing less than the kingdom of God; second, within the severe limits of space-time, their leader, being human in their sight, was now perceived as being incapable of delivering the total presence of the Infinite, for which people hunger and thirst. He had definitively disappointed them, he had let them down. As a result, in order to survive psychologically and subsequently to get on with life, they clung to their amputated ego and they ignored Jesus’ authentic self, with which they could no longer cope.

In this reconstruction of the disciples’ odyssey, Moore envisages the experience of death as preparatory to Easter faith. The death was twofold: Jesus’ and theirs. Bereavement placed them on the side of death. The loss of Jesus cut them off from the awakener of their desirability. After the execution of Jesus, his God was no longer a living reality for them. Their dream had evaporated and nothing could make up for it. This descent into hell apparently precluded any superficial resolution such as the emergence of another dream – an Easter dream – coming after the bitter disappointment occasioned by the first dream. It was pure desolation.

Besides the analogy of bereavement, Moore has recourse to the analogy of ‘bottoming-out’ to suggest the kind of purification undergone by the disciples. ²² We have already seen that Jesus had stirred up in them the desire for infinite life. That desire was bound to take the form of an addictive relationship to him, in the sense that their unlimited desire became hooked onto the person that seemed to promise satisfaction. Now the disciples went into a bottoming-out during the stage in which their addicted ego fell to pieces and the finitude of Jesus was revealed. The most noble form of idolatry had to be exploded before they could enter a third phase.

They had also to come to grips with their recent firsthand contact with violence. That violence had crushed their leader. According to Moore’s reading, after the resurrection and the appearances of Jesus they understood that pervasive violence must find its victims. They discovered in Jesus the victim par excellence, the Lamb of God, because he was the only one to be entirely innocent and utterly open to the divine. Jesus had to be a victim.

I have already indicated that according to a fundamental experience in the spiritual life, the second phase is envisaged as a condition for the third. Mystics undergo death in the sense that they suffer from the fact that God is no experience, no image, no thought, no feeling, no reality, no hope in this world. ²³ Such a spiritual fasting is an extreme form of purification, opening up the soul to something profoundly other than what is ordinarily lived. ‘There is in this experience a radical spaciousness of the soul, a totally new capacity to perceive’. ²⁴ During Holy Saturday, the disciples began to enter into ego-death as they underwent a liberation of consciousness from its worldly limits.

Moore’s three phases in the journey of Jesus’ first disciples are noticeable in Cleopas’ avowal on the way to Emmaus:

Jesus of Nazareth … was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people [phase 1], and … our chief priest and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel [phase 2]. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. … They had indeed a vision of angels who said that he was alive [phase 3]. (Lk 24:19–23)

Interestingly, the Rosary reflects a threefold meditation: first, the joyful and luminous mysteries; second, the sorrowful mysteries; and third, the glorious mysteries. The concluding prayer of the Angelus also alludes to the threefold process: ‘that we to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may, by his passion and death, be brought to the glory of his resurrection’. ²⁵

Moore introduces his third phase, in dialectic with the second one. After the horror of Good Friday, the disciples were on their way towards renouncing the Jesus who used to awaken them principally from outside. According to Moore, they encountered the risen Christ as the one who from now on would awaken them principally from within, that is, as God. In that new offer of love, Jesus was granting them what only God could do: not a condemnation – something they could have dreaded – but a forgiveness which filled their inner void with a new being. Instead of seeing themselves as loved by God apart from their sinning, they perceived themselves as sinners who were forgiven and loved. The God who had raised Jesus from the dead was revealed as the One who accepts humans even at their worst. ²⁶

By moving into death, Jesus had entered a state in which no communication was possible between him and the disciples. He had descended into ‘hell’, namely what the Hebrews called sheol, that is, into the shadowy place where the dead are cut off from the realm of the living. As he appeared to his disciples, however, Jesus made them understand that the destruction of his body cancelled the limit placed on his power to communicate fully with the world. Effective forgiveness entails this establishment of intimate communication among reconciled human beings, all of whom recognise themselves as both victims and victimizers.

Progressive ego-death is the expanding of desire. Only in physical death is there a complete ‘de-limiting’ of desire, a falling-away of all ties, a total disconnection-with-all. After his human desire has been de-limited by dying, the risen Jesus grants a de-limiting of desire to anyone who would believe in him. We can observe an expansion of desire in human beings who, having entirely accepted their coming death, become detached from everything except from their relationships with their friends and with God. Hence, their state of beautiful peacefulness.

The capacity that Jesus has to make such an incredible offer corresponds to the exercise of a divine function. As the disciples discovered the divine role Jesus had begun to fulfil in their favour, they realised that he had been raised from the dead and exalted as Christ and Lord.

The great breakthrough consisted in encountering a transformed Jesus, who inaugurates a new relationship with human beings. In interaction with that positive experience stands a problematic experience, the women’s discovery of the empty tomb. The shock of seeing that Jesus’ body was no longer there affected their psyche and added to their confusion. Moore underlines the dramatic character of the symbolism: the removal of the corpse sends a direct message to our animal nature, which cannot but be acutely conscious of its fragility. Something totally unexpected happened to the body of Jesus, hitherto so weak in the vast universe, destined to ‘disintegration and reabsorption in the huge natural process of things’. ²⁷

Faced with the harsh reality of biological death, mysticism can remain hesitant. For those who had seen the appearances of Jesus, the sign of the empty tomb was given as a concession of the mystery to their natural incredulity. It simply removed a visible, psychically powerful, obstacle to their faith in the invisible reality of the resurrection. The ‘two men in dazzling clothes’ who appeared to the women on Easter Day said, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen’ (Lk 24:5b).

Consequences for christology

So far, readers may ask themselves, how can we know what the early disciples’ experience of Jesus actually was? Moore knew that the stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus are not straightforward, non-interpreted reports of what happened to the first disciples. Notwithstanding this admission, he did not consider the various events surrounding the resurrection to be totally unknown to us. To make them intelligible, however, he did not engage in ‘the new quest for the historical Jesus’. Only occasionally did he refer to a point made by a contemporary exegete. Although he displayed interest in historical criticism, his contribution does not rest on the findings of exegesis. The intellectual challenge he wants to meet is different and complementary.

As he examines the narratives of the empty tomb and of Jesus’ appearances, Moore does not concentrate on the exegetes’ empirical studies, but on that which takes place in the interiority of those who say, ‘The Lord is risen!’ Consequently, he states,

We are undergoing a shift, in the study of the first Resurrection experiences, from an objective and empirical centre of interest to a subjective centre: from ‘Who moved the stone? What became of the body?’ to ‘What was happening in the minds of the people who were saying: ‘the Lord is risen’? ²⁸

As far as this Easter faith is concerned, there is a certain discontinuity for Moore between the 1st- and the 21st-century believers. Nonetheless his theological endeavour is based on the church’s conviction that, even though there is a difference, yet there is no rift between the faith of the first witnesses to the risen Christ and the faith of Christians down the ages. Furthermore, neither is there is any chasm between what happened to Jesus after his death and what happens now to the believers. Like Jesus and thanks to meditating on the risen Jesus, they participate in the mystery of the divine life granted to him and his followers.

Besides that substantial identity in terms of religious experience, Moore believes that a substantial identity also obtains in terms of the interpretation of that experience. Both the post-Easter Jesus and Holy Spirit guided the early Christian community. In particular, the risen Jesus ‘must have seen to it that he was understood by his disciples sufficiently for their preaching to proclaim him. He must have seen to it that they got him right’. ²⁹ Moore’s bold self-confidence in his attempt at making sense of the disciples’ journey rests on the conviction that there is a continuity of right interpretation, through enriching cultural diversity, from Jesus to his first disciples and to his subsequent disciples over two millennia. No doubt this represents a big claim. Nevertheless, it is no blind belief on the part of Moore, who is acutely aware of the distortions that have affected the handing-on of the Christian tradition regarding the resurrection. Rather, it is a faith assumption, many times confirmed by his own familiarity with the major church councils and theologians.

On the one hand, then, we must posit two things: the independent reality of the resurrection of Jesus by God and his capacity to make himself known in a way that eludes any precise analysis. As regards this revelatory capacity, perhaps Moore should have pointed out that a component of the disciples’ recognition came from the risen Jesus himself, who was a real partner (though no longer in an earthly way) in the relationship. On the other hand, we must answer the question of the meaning of the resurrection. Moore emphatically and honestly raised that question. This is the reason why he privileged a subjective approach to the central belief of Christianity. For us, humans, there is no access to the resurrection apart from engaging in a personal quest for meaning.

Let us observe that a subjective approach is totally different from a subjectivist point of view. From Lonergan, Moore learned that, whenever conducted by a person healthy in mind and heart, a subjective approach tends to be objective. ³⁰ In human relationship, only deep appreciation allows someone to discover the profound qualities of another person. Whenever this is the case, we can say that the beauty of that person is present in the delighted awareness of the true friend. Subjectivity becomes objective as the real beauty of the other shows in the loving mind of the beholder.

Moore notes that the post-paschal warming of the heart, in the early disciples of Jesus, is amply documented in the New Testament and is ascribed to the work of the Holy Spirit. It is in order to shed some light on that transcendent experience that he has recourse to the interpersonal analogy. The glory of Jesus appears in the transformation it effects in the consciousness of the believers. To account for the conjunction of the Holy Spirit and the risen Jesus in the disciples’ resurrection experience, he employs what I would call the pair immediacy/mediation. ³¹ The warming of the heart, the absolute forgiveness, the great illumination are immediately given to the soul; at the same time, Jesus offers himself as the focus that mediates transcendence to the human imagination and intelligence.

In a ‘Review Symposium’ on Jesus the Liberator of Desire, which included a reply by Moore, ³² three thinkers offered penetrating and profound reflections on his book and discussed the possibility or impossibility of reconstructing the early disciples’ vécu. In this regard, it seems to me that negative conclusions stem from presuppositions that Moore could not accept, and rightly so. As early as in 1980, he wrote, ‘the type of experience in question pertains to those deeper levels which always surprise us by their universality’. He added,

There is also a broader assumption behind this enterprise: a fundamental belief in a community of human experience across the great stretches of human time and human space. It is the sort of belief Eliot had. Eliot ‘knew’ what Shakespeare was trying to do, knew it very accurately by his own attempts to create poetry. ³³

Interestingly, after each of his two or three pages of reflections, Moore had regularly recourse to a poem, in order to sum up his thought in a suggestive manner.

Perhaps the following distinction could help diminish the distance between Moore and his critics. Personal experience as felt differs from personal experience as understood. The former is inaccessible, except to a few intimates, whereas the latter is shareable with many people. What is strictly individual in the experience of Jesus or of his first followers is definitively lost and irretrievable. But that very same experience, as meaningful, has been communicated to generations of Christians. It can be reenacted without having to be felt in exactly the same manner. The reason why such communication can be successful is that there is, in human beings, a capacity for understanding situations, events, feelings, ideas. For example, although they do not exactly feel the same, good therapists understand what their clients went (or goes) through, poets resonate to one another, critics discern what is excellent in works of art or literature, Christian mystics are on the same wavelength as non-Christian mystics, etc..

Moore defends his use of psychology as follows:

Pheme Perkins [an exegete] is right in finding the main evidence of the resurrection in the spontaneous way the community from the beginning understood Jesus as the circumambient presence in which they now lived a totally transformed life. And if the main evidence of the resurrection is psychological, what is going to happen to the resurrection in the mind of a theologian who eschews the psychological approach? It is not psychology as such that is to blame for a reductionist understanding of these matters, but psychology deprived of the transcendent intentionality that properly belongs to it. ³⁴

Moore has recourse to Lonergan’s transcendent intentionality in order to make sure his enterprise would not be confined within the horizon of a reductionist psychologizing. Hence, the accuracy of Stephen Duffy’s assessment: ‘What Moore has attempted is to unlock the intelligibility of the Jesus story by way of a psychological mediation. … Human interiority has for Moore an invariant set of psychic structures and operations that govern the dynamics of self-emergence’. ³⁵

Conclusion

Although in dialogue with biblical scholarship, Moore’s originality consists in having recourse to that which Lonergan calls ‘foundations’, which is a theological specialty whose goal is to explicate a theologian’s state of conversion – a basic requirement in theology. ³⁶ By doing so, Moore provides us with a heuristic model, which is derived from an exploration of human interiority. This exploration takes place after two stages of expressing meaning: common sense and theory. Thus William Loewe rightly states that ‘Moore’s soteriology exemplifies theology in what Lonergan discerns as the third stage of meaning, beyond symbolic consciousness and objective theory’. ³⁷

However, this emphasis on interiority must be accompanied by an openness to the human studies, in conformity with Lonergan’s model of an upper blade in a scissors movement which also comprises a lower blade attentive to historical data. ³⁸ The validity of the upper blade comes from what is universal in human interiority. It functions in interaction with the suggestions provided by exegesis, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, mysticism. Many of the highly perceptive observations on human life that we find in Moore’s writings are due to his familiarity with those fields of human experience. In this enterprise, he sets an example of how the conjunction between the upper and the lower blade will work in the future when scholars bring in more data.

In sum, I would venture to say that Moore’s writings are more than inspirational, because the meanings they convey are true, once and for all. Of course, minor revisions have been made by several commentators: details have been added or subtracted, items have been nuanced or qualified, in interaction with the wealth of data and reflections that are progressively gathered. Nonetheless, his meta-psychological Christology has universal validity, since the pattern of related concepts it offers can be transculturally re-expressed, in a continuity of understanding that, far from being abolished, is enriched by language diversity. ³⁹