Reviving the Relational Ethics of Care of the Christian Desert Fathers
Discussion
Monica Belevan:
"what we need is the ethics of the Desert Fathers; that is, the ultimate ethics of care within its original Christian framework.
On the surface level, the Desert Fathers share many of the stoic takes on the world and others. They advise their fellow monks not to get attached to material possessions, and offer insights on how to best avoid melancholy, anger, fear, envy, pride, vainglory, and other unbecoming feelings. But their advice goes beyond temporary affective control, in that it is meant to help monks find their path to salvation. Evagrius (Sinkewicz, 2003), for example, experienced and carefully thought through the many temptations a monk faces on his way to God, offering a number of remedies. But in addition to writing for their fellow monks, some godly men responded to the worries and moral dilemmas of laypeople. In their letters, Desert Fathers like Barsanuphius and John (Barsanuphius & John, 2006) show a remarkably fine understanding of the difficult life choices their worldly contemporaries had to face. They respond to a wide range of pressing questions, including those from laypeople who asked whether they should sell or gift the land where a Church was going to be built, if they should lie in court when they had witnessed a murder, if it was morally acceptable for them to leave their spouses to join the monastic life.
What is striking in Barsanuphius’ and John’s answers is their focus on how these acts would impact other people, especially if it meant others would suffer. Their responses are guided by a profoundly Christian concern that we should help others, have mercy on others, forgive them and sacrifice for them in the way Jesus sacrificed for us. In this way, their advice is other-focused and attuned to other human beings and their needs. They never reply with a rule or an abstract principle, ignoring the particularity of a situation. Even the commandment ‘do not lie’ can sometimes be dropped. This is what makes their ethics both an ethics of care and a particularist ethics.
Now, can we keep the ethics of the Desert Fathers without this Christian ballast? In an insightful paper on theistic belief, John Cottingham (2006) notes that Christian virtues such as humility are easily expressed and explained within a Christian context. To be humble, to take a backseat and wait for our turn, to be aware that our gifts, if any, are not our own etc., makes perfect sense within a Christian framework in which we are who we are and have what we have due to the grace of God. But if we give up the framework, the incentive to be humble is slowly lost, because the goal of human life, its meaning—our place and our role in this world as a whole—are lost with it. The virtue of humility, as Cottingham says, ‘will be like a plant that grew in a certain soil, which could theoretically be uprooted and transported to a different climate and conditions, but which in reality cannot properly take root and thrive there’. Similarly, devoting ourselves selflessly to others, helping them, watching out for them—and in the end, sacrificing for them—have particular meaning in Christianity. Christ sacrificed everything, including his life, for us, and sacrificing for the other is the ultimate way to live within a Christian framework. Once that framework is compromised, the imperative to selflessly love and sacrifice for others is too. The reason why we should do so loses its force. A godless universe, in which Christ’s sacrifice has no importance, is a shaky ground for selfless love.
The ‘ethics of care’ of the Desert Fathers and the imperative to love, forgive, and sacrifice for our fellow man come with metaphysical baggage that cannot be simply excised for practical purposes. In order to revive such ethics and the good life espoused by the Desert Fathers, we must revive Christianity. But how are we to do this in a faithless world?"
(https://covidianaesthetics.substack.com/p/a-post-enlightenment-ethics-of-the)