Surely Goodness and Mercy: the Shape of the Moral Life, the Heralds of the LORD
ninth in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
The Elusive Companions: Goodness and Mercy
As the flock moves forward, the rod and the staff are joined by two additional companions: goodness and mercy. Consider these four as our guides, with goodness and mercy the late appearing aids in our story. In the genre of writing in which the moral life is depicted as a journey, the role of the guide is well-trod: Virgil, Beatrice, Hopeful, Gandalf. For we have always known that we cannot undertake an arduous journey alone; by God’s grace, the lone sheep is known by Scripture only as the lost sheep, not the virtuous one. The rod and staff join us as we travel through Death’s valley, but goodness and mercy are not noticed by the Psalmist until the end. Have they been waiting for us at the journey’s end, the reward only for those who have come so close to the end?
Rather, it is the case that goodness and mercy have been lurking among us all the time, but only now noticed by us. For without goodness in some form attending us, some sense of what is good for us to desire and for us to be, we would never begin a moral journey. And without mercy—for our own failures, at a minimum—we would never keep going in our shortcomings. Goodness and mercy are, and have always been, the way in which we know the words of the Shepherd-LORD, the way in which we have been preserved in this road: that they are only now visible is due more to our inability to name them fully in times of plenty. Who thinks of mercy when they are in green grasses or beside still waters? It is not as if goodness and mercy were not there as well, but that in my satedness, they were unseen: the still waters quieted my need, and with my need, my gratitude.
That goodness and mercy are singled out here is to see these two as the culmination of the moral life, and in that, to ask hard questions of the moral life. These have no place among the cardinal virtues, no home when prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude take center stage. But without goodness and mercy, we have no sense of what we are justly moving toward, and no ability to forgive ourselves when we act imprudently. For these virtues—the cardinal ones—may very well be how the sheep move forward in the world—but they are not why the sheep move forward.
The Gentle Capstones of Virtue: Goodness and Mercy
That they appear here, at the end, revealed for what they are, is to invite us to reconsider the way in which the moral life takes shape. The cardinal virtues—as central as they are to the moral life—are not in some way unique to the Christian; they are scattered throughout the nations, though sometimes as buried treasure hidden under dilapidated freeways. The Christian is not the only one called to the moral life, for the LORD owns the cattle on a thousand hills, has other flocks that I do not know of. But there is a restoration of the moral life which the Shepherd-LORD, the Word Incarnate, effects which remains distinct.
In naming the life of virtue as one which chastens our courage, sharpens our judgment, restrains our actions prudentially, we are saying that the life of virtue is one which orders and disciplines: the moral life, as the ancients described it, was one of separating the waters and holding back the deep. Our passions overrun us, and the life of virtue bring the waters back into the channels. But the frame of the moral life needs to be expanded, both in time and space. Cicero, in describing the moral life, aspires to extend the good life to the whole world, but concedes that we are limited to first our families, and then, our own polity. Aristotle, less optimistic than Cicero, closes in the moral life to the polity, and more specifically, to our friends: the life of virtue is owed first to one’s friends, with the polis a place of agonism. But it is the darkness against the world, not as a matter of the world’s nature, but because of our finitude as humans: we have no way of being friends with all, or belonging to all people, and so, our virtue is owed to those closest to us.
Goodness and Mercy, at this point, take the virtues by the hand, and transfigure them, pushing them from behind and coaxing them further forward. For if we only do good to those who do good to them, we are no better than publicans and Gentiles. And though most of us are Gentiles by birth, it is because of God that the way of virtue—our ruined inheritance—is quite literally born again, raised up to live in a new life shaped by the Spirit. Goodness and mercy pull the frame of courage open, transforming the exemplar of the courageous from the solider to the martyr. Goodness and mercy, patient with ourselves, expand that patience to others, offering more time for our enemies to become friends. For we ourselves were enemies of God, longsuffering and merciful.
Goodness and mercy, in other words, are the doormen to the house of the Lord, transforming our moral lives into the image of the Gracious Shepherd-Lord, who leads us all the way into eternity. Our moral lives, drawn from the shared earth of creation, from the shared holding back of chaos, are made more than they are by nature, and into what they are by grace: the image of Christ which makes new the bones and gristle of the sheep.
There is no competition here, in other words, with faith, hope, or love: faith and hope, we are told, are companions of time, leading us toward our end of love. Goodness and mercy have no desire to make themselves first, but only shapers of that which finds its fullness in love. What has not been opened up cannot receive its rest in God, and what has not is able to forgive its faults will not make room for the faults of others. These are, as it were, the hands of God visible to us in time, that faith might see what lies before it, and hope might not despair.
Goodness and Mercy: Looking for Friends
Though the moral life is, in the end, about the shape of restoring the face of creation toward God—and thus, primarily about virtue—virtue’s question of character must exercise questions of how and when. It is not enough for us to lean on intuition, that we will simply know what to do and how. We have been given guides of the rod and staff, of the Shepherd-LORD’s voice and ministers, of the words of the LORD proceeding to us in bleats.
But virtue, to be true, must be able to name the goods at stake in our journey, to know what must be taken and what can be left behind. In doing this, it needs some forms of evaluation, of inquiring what courses are open and what courses lead to ends we do not desire. To make this journey, virtue must not only know what kind of character is good, but to know what rules lead it to that goodness. These rules cannot be simply what the sheep intuit from their weakened capacities, for they will set the bar too short, be content with grass and water when they are meant for feasts later on. And these rules cannot be simply the rules we give ourselves, for are afraid of Death. Rather, the virtue we are called to must first be called out of us—commanded—with the knowledge that what the Shepherd-LORD accompanies and walks with those who are commanded.
In our journey toward the end, with goodness and mercy, there is much to be remade, hearts to be remade and valleys to be filled in, wills to be bolstered and mountains to be laid low. It is not enough for the way to the house of the LORD to be a matter of piety, but of asking what pitfalls arrest the sheep, why the water is not flowing or is polluted. These are not, as we might suspect, alternate paths of the moral life, but those things which make the pursuit of virtue possible: questions of justice, access, and equity, that no sheep might be left behind. For the flock gets there together, and the LORD will have a people who are light unto all the nations.
And so, goodness and mercy, compelling us from behind and ahead, also look to the sides, above and beneath, that the way of the sheep might be clear, and that other sheep might not be kept from the LORD. It does us no good to name something as lost which never had a chance to be found, something as choked out by thorns when the sheep did not take it upon themselves to devour the thorns, something as hopelessly broken when the sheep did not seek to share the waters and the grass, that all might be invited to the endless feast. Justice will lead the cardinal virtues, but it too must be saved: a just world absent goodness and mercy is a tyranny, and the LORD is no tyrant, but a servant.