The Cardinal Virtues of Openness

What is properly sacred? . . .

I want to argue: it isn't, in the first instance, any form of culture-specific metaphysical, ethical or historiographical truth-as-correctness; an ideal property of propositions.

No, it’s truth-as-openness; an ideal character of persons, potentially to be found in all manner of cultural expression.

The sacred enshrined in truth-as-correctness claims is like the usage of a language: a channel more or less adequate to the demands of this other essential quality, which it’s therefore either channelling or obstructing.

(Heidegger’s distinction between the Greek terms orthotés, ‘correctness’, and alétheia, ‘unconcealment’, is in the background here. And, still more significantly, Hegel’s polarising of Verstand, ‘Understanding’ or ‘Intellect’, and Geist, ‘Spirit’.)

But what then constitutes truth-as-openness, in itself? The following essay is intended as a programmatic beginning of an answer.

The Cardinal Virtues of Openness

Consider what one might call the ‘cardinal virtues of openness’.

How might we set about cataloguing these?

Quite unlike the virtues of ‘herd morality’, or of ‘gang morality’, the virtues in question are not the special virtues of a particular age; of a particular nation; of a particular religion; of a particular social class; or of a particular temperament. They are, on the contrary, always dissident, pushing at the limitations of the normal, anywhere.

I think, in fact, that one may distinguish three pairs of such virtue, six categories in all. Three, corresponding to the individual’s relationship to the three problematic others: (a) humanity as a whole, in its plurality of religious and ethical traditions, (b) the powers of the secular world, and (c) one’s own religious or ethical community. (Hence, also, in Christian-theological terms: the three-foldness of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, as these are severally revealed to us in and through the theological problem-areas relating to each of these three general domains of earthly relationship.) And each of them, further, paired, according to the basic duality of a proper restraint and a proper courage: holding back where appropriate, in the sense of renouncing the ‘deadness’ of a dead, ideologically dishonest faith; but stepping forward where appropriate, in the sense of actively confronting the various prevalent forms of ideological dishonesty in the secular world around. Thus:

Taking each of these in turn:

1. Intellectual chastity

By ‘intellectual chastity’ I mean the general virtue that most directly corresponds to a renunciation of what might be termed the ‘easy-answers’ motive for faith. The ‘easy-answers’ motive for faith: a basic failure to recognise the proper sacredness of truth-as-openness, resultant from an idolatry of sacralised truth-as-correctness. This first virtue, then, is a holding-back of the sheer lust for explanation, especially inasmuch as that lust feeds into a malign spirit of competition between rival religious (or secular-humanist) communities. Not that I think perfect truth-as-openness requires any dilution of loyalty to one’s own community. Only, it will preclude the usual form of competitiveness between incompatible religious loyalties, as each one claims to have a better explanation of the world than the others, a better grasp of global truth-as-correctness. If religious communities must compete, let them (like the three brothers in Lessing’s fable of Nathan the Wise) compete in openness; not in pretended explanations of the world’s metaphysical and moral constitution, or the course of its history. Intellectual chastity is the prime virtue of the via negativa in theology, pioneered by ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’. Which is by no means a community-endangering way of mere doubt; but quite to the contrary, precisely that absolute confidence in faith which best equips one to dwell in the ‘cloud of unknowing’. Again, such confident faith indeed explains itself, in the sense of bearing witness. But it does not – either correctly or incorrectly – explain the world. It is not meant to. Its calling is just to inspire; it generates love. And if this is a love infused with the spirit of openness – why, then it is true. It is true, just as is any non-theistic dedication to the sacred, likewise, infused with the same.

2. Xenophilia

How do we learn self-knowledge? Above all, surely: by learning sympathetically to understand the contrasting otherness of other people. And how do we come to recognize the ways in which we have been shaped, for good or ill, by our own cultural conditioning? Answer: above all, by lovingly investigating other cultures. A commitment to truth-as-openness involves taking a sheer delight in the strangeness of other people, especially those most different from oneself: in temperament; in life-experience; in cultural identity. And this means allowing the unfamiliar to remain strange. True trans-cultural sympathy does not seek to deny, or to minimize, the real differences between cultures. On the contrary, those differences are precisely what it laughingly enjoys. Again, perfect truth-as-openness involves, not least, the recognition of one’s own strangeness: sympathetically entering into the way that others, shaped by quite different world-views from one’s own, see one. It means constantly, therefore, taking less and less for granted; shedding the limitations of whatever cultural norms most naturally tend to constrain one’s thinking. Again, in Christian-theological terms, this, I would argue, is a key aspect of what it means to acknowledge one’s entanglement, from birth, in original sin. The inertia of original sin is just the banality of herd-conformity: being held fast in the normal prejudices of people like oneself. By ‘xenophilia’ I mean that form of virtue most energetically opposed to ordinary dishonesty-as-banality; inasmuch as banality, to preserve itself, always clings to what is most familiar, and recoils from the unfamiliar, as from a threat.

3. Good humility

Not only the passive inertia of banality, however, impedes our access to truth-as-openness; the active impulse of inflamed libido dominandi, the urge to exploit others, further resists it. To be committed to truth-as-openness, clearly, is to renounce the desire to domineer. And it means not wishing to participate vicariously in the glamorous domineering power of others, through supportive partisan self-identification with their projects, either. Here then we have the most direct restraint upon the mere social-disciplinary motivation for religious faith; as inflamed libido dominandi naturally plays upon that motive. Of course, law and order is desirable in itself. But the pursuit of truth-as-openness is a discipline of self-mistrust: never trusting the allure of one’s own class-privileges, as this allure tends to become entangled with one’s desire for law and order; and being wary of any propaganda-project, or any general mode of propagandist thought, designed to manipulate one through flattery of people like oneself. Here, there is honour only in openness. One is impelled to resist any rival notion of honour, liable to trap one into some species of gang-mentality. ‘Good humility’ is not just the submissiveness of the underling, in the hierarchy of a gang; no matter how ‘holy’ the gang in question may purport to be, or how much the submissiveness it demands is dressed up as piety. But, rather, it is simply a refusal to be bought by flattery. Such humility means repudiating both the potential privileges, for oneself, manipulatively proffered by ideology, and, by the same token, any bid for special privilege made by one’s own social group as a whole.

4. Good pride

Again, truth-as-openness is the truth inherent, not in any abstractly ‘correct’ set of propositions, but, on the contrary, in good conversation as such; and hence in the mind-set that most positively contributes to good conversation, as this is grounded in good listening. And yet – that does not mean it is all a matter of mere conversation, as opposed to action! Christian church-ideology, infested as it is by what Hegel calls das unglückliche Bewußtsein, the Unatoned State of Mind, tends to confront its adherents with the picture of a despotic ‘Lord God’ – the false deity that William Blake lampooned as ‘Old Nobodaddy’ – in effect demanding ‘humble’ obedience to a particular set of exploitative power-interests. It deploys a sort of theology designed to cow the discontented, and deter them from action. But the gospel itself, very differently, shows us God revealed in the person of a crucified activist: in other words, a figure of the most tremendous defiant pride, one whom the rulers of this world therefore desperately try to humiliate, but in vain. Over against church ideology, the original logic of this revelation defines all forms of exploitative power-interest as intrinsically secular, no matter how ‘holy’ their protagonists may proclaim them to be; no matter how deep their theological cover. In general, both within the Church and outside it, the ‘good pride’ that the gospel incites is pre-eminently the inspiration of stubborn dissidents. It is an active challenge to the interests of bully-rulers; the subversive self-assertion of the conscientiously defiant individual who, as far as possible, just refuses to be closed down and silenced; the moral energy that above all confronts the politics of manipulation, in any form.

5. Conviviality

By ‘conviviality’, as one of the virtues of openness, I mean a certain necessary self-restraint in one’s relationship to the community within which one seeks to be rooted; not just a quality of temperament (as the word might suggest) but a whole, difficult discipline of belonging. It is, in fact, the prime virtue of an ideally catholic (small ‘c’) institutional ethos, as such. In this specific sense, ‘conviviality’ is a cheerful acceptance of the inevitable limitations of catholic community life; that is, the absolute opposite to any sort of impatient sectarian divisiveness. So: on the one hand, it is the outworking of a profound caution with regard to would-be gurus, or to the protagonists of contemptuous intellectual elitism. And yet, on the other hand, it emphatically excludes conventional heresy hunting. Indeed, for ‘conviviality’, there is just one species of ‘heresy’ to be abhorred, and that is the root-impulse underlying both sectarianism and heresy hunting, itself. Of that, it is radically intolerant.

A church truly infused with the spirit of conviviality would thus be far more catholic in reality than any of the actual churches which jealously claim that designation for themselves have ever been. And it would also be far more liberal, in the best sense, than any actually existing form of self-professed theological liberalism; inasmuch as ‘liberal’, too, has become a term not only for openness, but also for a particular partisan tendency within the Church, associated with the somewhat attenuated religiousness of an academically privileged social class. ‘Conviviality’ therefore involves restraint of both the metaphysical and the social-disciplinary motives for religious faith, wherever either of these two motives stokes the fire of internal conflict; and wherever, as a result, rival parties, within a single tradition, competitively claim possession of ultimate theological truth-as-correctness, to the actual detriment of truth-as-openness.

6. Parrhesia

‘Parrhesia’, finally, is a Greek term. (It is pronounced with the accent on the ‘i’.) The Epicureans, in particular, regarded parrhesia as a prime virtue in the bringing-together of their therapeutic communities. For them it meant boldness of speech, or outspokenness, among friends, each helping the other in their shared attempts to escape addiction of every kind: that is to say, in their attempts to rise above all forms of moral weakness, everything tending to render them vulnerable to seduction by social forces inimical to their true self-interest. Hence, in the context of any religious community, it represents the sheer antithesis to any sort of merely kitsch piety. (As an Anglican, I think in this connection of R. S. Thomas’s delightfully dyspeptic poetry, for instance.) Going beyond the highly individualistic conception of the Epicureans, parrhesiac theology would, not least, be a completely honest, in no way self-defensive, acknowledgement of the elements of corruption in the actual history of one’s own community; a radical openness to the historically informed criticisms of that community by outsiders. It would be an expression of love for the community – only, a love, here, decisively purged of any ideological impulse to boast, or to deflect blame. The virtue of ‘parrhesia’ thus consists in an absolute owning of one’s own personal representative membership within one’s community, even as one also fully acknowledges all its legacy of corporate sinfulness. It is a willing readiness to bear that moral burden.

These are, surely, the constitutive virtues of (to adopt Hegel’s terminology) ‘absolute knowing’. What does absolute knowing know? It is, in essence, the know-how which knows what it truly means, as a matter of actual practice, to cultivate these virtues: intellectual chastity, xenophilia, good humility, good pride, conviviality and parrhesia.