“You Anoint My Head With Oil/My Cup Overflows”: Excellence and Honor in the Moral Life
eighth in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
You can find the previous article in this series here. Or begin at the beginning.
The Inequality of Excellence
The difficulty with virtue, Aristotle knew, was that it is inherently unequal: the lives of the sheep—though bound up together—is not that of the mass, but of a differentiated community. And in any community, the hands are not the feet, and the dishonored bellybuttons and hairlines are not the crown of glory. If we are going to name the moral life as “good”, and further, that there should be exemplars for us, we must take a half step with Aristotle and say that not everyone will be exemplary, and that virtue appears unevenly. Not all goodness is democratic in its appearance.
It is here that the oil overflows onto the collar, the head dripping with honor, in front of enemy and friend. The Psalmist is extolled for their excellence, an excellence which is not shared immediately with others, but runs down a particular head and covers one notorious set of ears. The flock is separated, the sheep grow restless, and other shapes of goodness are put forward as equally praiseworthy, equally justified in exaltation.
And yet: one sheep among others is pulled out for honor. Excellence calls for distinction among forms of goodness; blessing begins in some place before spreading outward from Abraham. And so, priority comes in, with subordination in the shadows; distinction invites not just praise but jealousy. For this reason, honor requires one sheep to be raised up as the example, but the example which must return to the flock. For this sheep will share with the flock their glory, the cup which overflows becoming the common cup of the LORD, and the gift named as excellent a gift which is given for the sake of the body.
For when excellence occurs, it not only returns to the corporate body, but from it as well. To name one part of the excellent body is to invite reflection on not just its autonomy, but its dependency: a heart functions only as well as the lungs will allow it, and the legs only as fast as the feet will allow. In virtue, there is no fairness, but there is justice, for in justice, all things are given what is due them, that the common good may be made whole, nourished on a vision of the upright, but a vision which emerges because of the flock. The flock recognizes its own contributions not in the fact that all of them are named, but that in the honored, all others find representation and recognition. That they are fellow sheep is enough; that their excellence is called forth by the exemplar is a sign that their own excellences are indispensable.
The flock is at its least utilitarian here: ranking one good over another in the pursuit of maximal happiness presumes that the goods are not related. But the goods of virtue are always interdependent and require one another. It is with good reason that the ancients held that the virtues were ultimately singular, better thought of as in the inseparability of what we might call “character”. And so, the honoring of one aspect of excellence is a sign of the whole. Humility depends love, and courage upon prudence: flourishing is a hallowing of the whole garden, not one discrete corner.
Excellence in a Time of Scarcity
The sheep, as we have seen, are those who do not generate their own goods, lives, or goodness. And so it is with moral excellence: the anointing of the sheep races calls to mind other anointings, gathering up oil which flows down Aaron’s beard, over Saul’s neck, and Elisha’s perplexity. It flows over the heads of the Levites, onto the altar next to Moses, into the eyes of Timothy, and on to the foreheads of the sick. The anointing which happens here and elsewhere is never for the sake of its own pride, but for the calling up of a people further up and in. To anoint the sick is to honor them as God’s beloved, that they might be healed, anointed not with a different oil than the kings and prophets, but as honored members of the same body. And like Elijah and the widow, this oil flows backwards and forwards, in and out of season, in abundance: in the darkest of moral times, God will not be without a witness. For oil here is a refraction of goodness, with any and all good gifts having but one eternal source. For the oil here is seen in the company of a sign of abundance: the overflowing cup.
The cup, a sign of God’s abundance, also runs backwards and forward in Scripture, but with a darker trajectory, one laced with histories of provision and hunger: Joseph’s deception of his brothers in famine, the cup which Christ drank in on a dark night, the drink shared by disciples in the Lord’s presence under the sign of blood. To embrace the cup is to embrace a history of provision and loss, of true and deep scarcity. That these two sit together—the oil of excellence and the cup of scarcity is to pose to us, the reader, a question: what does excellence mean in this world of scarcity? How can the excellence named by the oil appear in death’s shadow?
From the side, the widow of Zarepheth appears, the form of an answer. For in her day, the oil had run dry, and the wheat gone, and yet, the prophet asked for food. Asked for what she could not provide, she cooked and prepared for death, to be granted oil overflowing and endless wheat. The oil’s sign, denoting the exemplar to be followed, was pulled forth from her shelves, though she had none to share, and so, she deflates any pretentions we might have to the conditions under which excellence might occur. The oil appears where the LORD is present, even in famine, even in moral darkness.
This question of how excellence can possibly appear does not happen in times of abundance, but after we pass through death’s shadow, in the droughts and in a scarce world. And so, our attention to excellence must not focus on those who offer their excellence with great ease or in times of plentitude, but in poverty and nothing. It is with good reason that Scripture points us again and again to the poor as blessed and God’s favored, that Jesus says that his own anointing was for the liberation of the poor from death. For it is here that we find excellence chastened but not abandoned, stymied but not destroyed. One could say that poverty is excellent in and of itself, but more likely is that in poverty, excellence’s true nature is shown: of God, despite all circumstances.
Renaming the Abundance of Excellence
Abundance, far from being the norm, is a moment between scarcities: one need not be Ecclesiasticus to claim this. Reckoning with the witness of the widows and orphans requires us to name their state as the enduring state of a world under sin, sustained yet suffering, and with it, the conditions under which excellence may be found. For if scarcity is the experience of the world, then a baby born amidst Roman occupation displays for us the truth of Ecclesiastes: the world is vulnerable, laid open, and God’s provision appears in its poverty. As we look at a world of increasing poverty, of violence, of ecological collapse, nothing could be more good news.
Where then do we look, then for our excellence? We look to the least of these, for they are the measure of Christian fidelity, and the measure by which our works are judged. To where do we look for our virtue? Scripture directs us to look to the poor, for whom God is the only measure of hope, the ones for whom daily bread is not a theorem but a series of tangible tradeoffs. This is not to patronize the poor or overburden their virtue, but to displace the wealthy, not to shame the powerful but to banish the idols baked into our standards of praise. For moral excellence cannot be named according to its most lavish forms, but excellence amidst fragility, as a treasure in jars of clay.
To name moral excellence in this way is to invite an inversion in the moral life: we become morally excellent by inhabiting a world in which the gifts of the world and all its supports are just that—gifts, bonuses, gratuities. Gifts like these remain gifts when they are given, when we dispossess ourselves of them in gratitude for having received them. For in losing the very thing which might support an easier life of virtue, we embrace the very space where God Himself identifies with the world: the poor, the meek, the mourning, and the orphaned.