Abstract
Entering into Rest concludes Oliver O’Donovan’s much anticipated trilogy on ethics after Pentecost. While the first two volumes consider the study of ethics and moral thinking respectively, the final volume investigates the object of moral reasoning. Examining how the agent reflects and deliberates about her duties and the ends of her actions, O’Donovan continues to unfold his twin framework of the theological virtues and the trifold dimensions of self, world, and time.
As in the previous volumes, O’Donovan resists any reduction of Christian ethics to a single motif or method, whether virtue, duty, utility, natural law, or command. Deftly interweaving elements of these traditions, O’Donovan continues with his rigorous commitment to practical reason as the agent’s mode for deliberation on action. The whole book, then, is concerned with the agent deciding to act in relation to the world, looking ahead to ‘what is likely to come of [her action]’ (p. 23). Thus, while the work of ethics is necessarily occasional, arising from the texture of human existence, a unity may be discerned. It is this architecture—of ‘variety-in-unity of the moral landscape’—that O’Donovan traces, for the sake of both instruction and better action (p. 104).
As with the previous two volumes, the structure of the book emerges only as the reader moves through the successive and wide-ranging meditations. Clues are buried within the text: the conclusion of the first chapter lays out the subsequent three, and an outline of chapters five through seven can be found several pages into the fifth chapter. The final chapter returns to the concerns of the first, without recapping the work in its entirety. In other words, the reader enjoys few handrails for guidance, yet her patience is rewarded as a loose arc of the book gradually appears.
The inverted triad of the theological virtues, culminating in love, gathers the book into a whole and places it in continuity with its two companions. While knowledge of love is only partially disclosed in the present age, it nevertheless directs practical reasoning. Love orients the agent to make space for others’ efforts, even to rest in these labors, and, if assisted by revelation, to look towards its final rest in the divine Other. Accordingly, Entering into Rest finds its title.
This centring of love as the ‘summit of moral reasoning’ moves the agent to anticipate the effects of her actions in the world (p. 14). O’Donovan characterizes this looking ahead in three ways: the agent considers the purposes of her action, its availability to others’ observation, and how it fits within her broader sense of self. These three elements compose chapters two to four, examining action’s ends, communication, and sanctification respectively.
The following three chapters continues to develop how God sanctifies human communications. While dogmatics speaks generally of God’s sanctifying work, ethics must discern the particulars of human action (p. 74). Using a tripartite division based on the Pauline anthropology of body, soul, and spirit, O’Donovan suggests that human activity occurs at three levels: material, social, and hermeneutic. This ‘organization formula’ then serves for considering the questions that human creatures encounter in spheres of work, friendship, and meaning, their characteristic wrongs, and God’s activity in sanctifying them ‘for service, assembly, and witness’ (pp. 103–7). Finally, the book concludes where it began, with love, attending to its bewilderment in the face of suffering and death.
More than the preceding two volumes, Entering into Rest foregrounds the human agent within a web of human relations. While reviewers of the earlier entries noted the apparent isolation of O’Donovan’s agent, the human creature of this text is embedded within community, characterized by ‘relation-in-freedom’ (p. 20). Love commands practical reason in deferring to others: it cooperates with others’ action.
This recognition of the neighbor’s agency presses against patronizing and managerial forms of care, and throughout the text, O’Donovan excavates the moral perplexity prompted by institutional forms of neighbor love that are both ambiguous and necessary. Acting within modern bureaucratic conditions invites ‘painful and difficult discernments between the work of the Spirit and of the Antichrist’ (p. 96). Thus, Christian witness requires efforts at identifying cultural forms that preserve the freedom for such skilled judgments (p. 123). As O’Donovan notes, even good causes are rife with compromises, and Christians must both actively participate and engage in social critique whilst looking for ‘traces of the Spirit’s working’ with longing and thanksgiving (pp. 96, 101).
As this brief review suggests, Entering into Rest continues in the spirit of the previous two volumes, offering wide-ranging and scripturally-infused insights. Moving between topics as diverse as labor conditions, friendship, church–state relations, and aging, O’Donovan models the integration of contemporary ethical reflection with scriptural exposition. Scriptural idiom not only illustrates but provides the scaffolding for these engagements, and forays into more obscure sections of wisdom literature and the prophets complement routine invocations of the Pauline epistles. Accompanying this scriptural ressourcement is O’Donovan’s signature dexterity in engaging philosophical and theological themes drawn from classical and modern periods.
O’Donovan masterly blends academic rigor with a pastoral tone, a quality frequently missing in much contemporary ethical writing. Entering into Rest gently draws the reader to reflect on the character of her own action in the light of the Spirit’s mission. This observation bears qualifications, however. As a white woman working in the academe, I recognize many of O’Donovan’s descriptions of moral thinking and acting as practical wisdom appropriate also to my place and time, and thus the text invites me into a deeper awareness of the ends of my own action. Yet the very character of practical reason in its particularity mitigates against the universal, a possibility that O’Donovan notes is eschatologically deferred (p. 57). Accordingly, the limits of O’Donovan’s account merit acknowledgement: as O’Donovan observes, social location offers not only insight but blind spots (p. 100).
In a book that I find otherwise apt, I am saddened to find (again) O’Donovan’s persistent use of male nouns and pronouns to depict agency. ‘Humankind’ occasionally replaces ‘man,’ but the usage is infrequent, causing the text to risk alienating unnecessarily otherwise sympathetic readers. While O’Donovan’s refusal to pander to passing fads might be celebrated in other regards, adjusting language to include all human agents is not among them. As O’Donovan observes, ‘[t]he best performances are open to doubt and deconstruction’ (p. 44), and thus, an augmented attention to the moral relevance of identity (in all its complexity) would advance O’Donovan’s account.
Despite this shortcoming, Entering into Rest recompenses both the lay reader and senior scholar with its lyrical depiction of ethics as theology. By directing attention to the theological virtues marked by the rejoinder of love’s sovereignty (‘But the greatest of these is love’), O’Donovan offers an pneumatological account of human agency responsive to God and moving towards rest.