by it. |
The righteousness that may be seen in our decision is that of a court against which there can be no appeal. Before we obey or disobey we are in no position to test the rightness of the claim made upon us, or the value of the good, or the obligatory character of the command. When Paul in Philippians 1:10 tells Christians that they must “approve what is excellent,” he certainly does not mean that they must first test what is divinely commanded and recognize it as such. In the New Testament sense to “approve” here means to set aside all irresponsible possibilities and to resolve on responsible action—action responsible to a court which must be acknowledged without test—whose goodness cannot be decided by man. Where there is room for testing the command, where an ethics of being can be pursued in some sense, the good, the command, the claim is undoubtedly present already but it is not recognized as such, its unconditioned nature is not perceived, nor is it realized that Romans 9:20 is applicable here: “But who are you, a man, to answer back to God?” In face of the good that is told to us [cf. Mic. 6:8] we have no recourse to a higher good that is not told to us but that we tell ourselves and whose superiority is obviously our own. The good that is told to us is the good itself, his good, not that of our own choice and not the excellence of a standard at our own disposal, even though finally our own excellence reveals itself in our decision and act. |
For this reason there is no possibility of putting off the decisive decision to the next but one moment, of interposing a neutral moment in which we can busy ourselves appealing from the given command to one that is not given, using the standard that is ready to hand, and thus acting as our own judges of good and evil and masters of our own eternal destiny. This will not do. There is no point in such activity. It can only show that we do not yet know that the good has no lord over it—least of all ourselves—but is its own lord; that we do not yet know that the very next moment will bring to us the claim that judges us and should find us, not dreaming as Hercules at the crossroads dreams, but watchful. The content of the present moment should be that we prepare ourselves to come before our judge with our actions. Prepared or not, dreaming or watchful, we will come before our judge with our actions. The one thing that we can meaningfully do on our own is to come before him watchful. This is the light or shadow which the revelation of the command always casts in advance on the present moment: the cry: “Watch—that the evil times do not suddenly come upon you”1—the time when as those we are—with what we do we fall into the hands of the living God [cf. Heb. 10:31]. In its own way the present moment is itself decision, action, and therefore the revelation of the good. But we may add at once that it is so as a prophecy of the one who comes, who is even at the doors, and hence the cry: “Watch. Watch and pray” [Mark 14:38, cf. Eph. 6:18]. The judge comes ineluctably, and then our whole pose of being Hercules with a free choice has been just a pose. What will be revealed will not be our own but God’s predestination.
2
Thus the truth of the good is the truth by which we are measured as we act, the verdict toward which we go. The point of ethical reflection is that we become aware of our responsibility to this superior court so that the very next moment we act in awareness of this responsibility, not having chosen and grasped the good—how could we, that would be foolish effrontery—but in awareness that we are making a response with our act; in awareness of the absolute givenness of the command, over or behind which there stands no higher general truth to which we can look apart from the command, or appeal beyond the given command, but the command which is itself the truth, the truth of the good. |
All this—we are simply analyzing—implies also that the truth of the good is always a concrete individual command, just as concrete as our existence will be the very next moment, or as our action—there is no resisting this—will be concretely and individually this action. So concrete and individual is also the command in which our action will find its judge. If we take seriously the positive givenness of the command against which there is no appeal, then it cannot be just a rule, an empty form, to which we must give content by our action, so that the form of the action stands under the command and its content under our caprice. This idea seems to be unavoidable wherever the court which we obey or disobey in our moral decision, whether it be the moral law, or the idea of the good, or the more or less categorical imperative understood in Kant’s or some other sense, or the will of God, or our own conscience—wherever this court is thought of as something that is indefinite in content, wherever it is made into a purely formal concept whose truth has first to be investigated. On this view the idea of a necessary and obligatory form of the will is what is described as the revelation of the command and its definition and content—which are moral decision—arise on the basis of free choice controlled by the concept. On this view we mysteriously acquire from somewhere the knowledge that the doing of the good stands under an unconditionally valid rule and must always have the form corresponding to this rule, but assuming this rule to determine what the good is, what we should do is our own affair, and no matter how we act we can count on doing what is good so long as we conform to this rule. This view, too, is thinly disguised paganism and it is one that is quite impossible. On it our action would be free as such and would not be set under the command. It would be a doing of what we want and in relation to the claim that is made upon us, our concrete decision would be a decision for ourselves. We should have our own say about what we regard concretely as good, about what we pour into the empty vessel of one of those formal concepts, about what we happily (only too happily) give the form of a claim which we supposedly obey, although in reality we are our own lawgivers. If we take this path, how can even those generalities, those formal concepts, be really understood as command?
Is not the good again robbed of its originality, is it not thought of as placed in the lower order of being, if it is possible to regard it as a form which has still to be filled, if it is possible to differentiate it as an intrinsically general and abstract good from the definition that arises only with our own decision, if we can have knowledge of it without what we will and do being automatically determined by it in advance?
A general, formal, and abstract command is obviously no command but an object of theory like any other. If the good is indeed unconditioned and therefore not general and theoretical truth; if it is command, claim, a claim made upon us and not just a statement of our own thought that is given the rank of claim; then it is concrete, individual, definite command [a command] whose content is not under our control, but which is controlled with the same unconditionality as is proper to its form, a command which comes to us already filled and definite in content. It is then for the first time clear to us that the good is a question which is directed to us and which we must answer with our act, with an act which for its part is always concrete and individual. Nor will this answer be one that we have given ourselves, so that with our act we shall simply confirm and repeat it, thus remaining faithful to the choice and preference that follows our knowledge (and therefore to ourselves), or at worst being again unfaithful to them (and therefore to ourselves). This agreement or nonagreement with ourselves, which is confirmed by our act, may be an interesting matter but it has nothing whatever to do with obedience or disobedience to the good; if by the good we do not uncritically mean our own goodness but are clear that the good means the challenging of our own goodness.
We clearly misunderstand the meaning and scope of those general concepts, the moral law, the idea of the good, the categorical imperative, the will of God, etc., if we try to find in them the good or the command that is given to us. The moral law or the idea of the good is, as the name says, conceptualized being, the concept of the good, of morality or the command. It is the good projected on to the plane of being and the knowledge of being in a way that cannot be avoided in thinking about the good. It is the good as the ⌜real⌝ thought of a norm that unconditionally claims our will and conduct. Even ethical reflection is thinking and as such theory. To limit that plane concretely by the very different plane of practice, to push on to the thought of the norm which is not one of being but is original, which is not conceptualized but real—to do this it must first enter that place unafraid. How else can it leave it with the ostentation that is needed? But as ethical reflection arrives at the thought
