Against Rectitude: Ecclesiological Holzwege VIII
“Rectitude” (Righteousness) is an important religious and human value, but it’s not absolute. No virtue is absolute, since not only vices but—paradoxically—even virtues can warp life and prevent us from doing what circumstances and God require of us. This happens when one ceases to monitor and direct them toward the promotion and flourishing of one’s own life, and the lives of others.
But mainline Adventism has elevated rectitude to an absolute value. It does so based on a well-known phrase by Ellen. G. White in the book Education:
“The greatest want of the world is the want of men-women who will not be bought or sold, men who in their inmost souls are true and honest, men who do not fear to call sin by its right name, men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole, men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.”[1]
An “Ethics of Rectitude,” as expressed in this quotation, creates very consistent and reliable believers from the standpoint of this expressed norm. But not necessarily from the standpoint of what circumstances require of us. Attention to circumstances, thus the very necessary connection with reality, is seen from this perspective as a useless, if not downright dangerous, exercise. Rectitude then can easily become a self-referential exercise, in which each person obeys only the internal forum of their own conscience. But we can forget that, in our own conscience, we only have a subjective perception of God’s commandment, not the direct commandment. And we can also forget that external reality always serves as the true testing ground and verification of our moral action. To construct a morality, a way of believing, a spirituality, from only an abstract ethical perspective is short-sighted, limited, and counterproductive.
European Adventism has always been wary of this “Ethics of Rectitude,” not because it fails to perceive the value, but rather because it sees the limitations and one-sidedness. Instead, European Adventism embraces what we might call an “Ethics of Paradox,” believing that dialogue with external reality (circumstances or people) is not only necessary but decisive. It is only in the connection with reality that a virtue or belief highlights its value and goodness.
Connection with reality forces us into two important, though demanding and not always immediate, exercises. The first is that, in ethical deliberation, there is not just one single element to take into account (our conscience). Moral choice is complex, precisely because of this plurality of heterogeneous and asymmetrical elements. We must take it all into account and learn to keep them in tension. Ethical choice cannot aim only at overcoming or erasing decision-making tension. Sometimes the opposite is true in that ethical responsibility aims at maintaining that tension, as it is a sign of how complex life is. The second exercise is realizing that these “other elements,” in relation to one’s own consciousness, are not contour elements, but they modify one’s consciousness and force it to compromise. The idealization of a pure and coherent consciousness thus appears, to this “Ethics of Paradox,” as pure idolatry, as a moral compulsion. It is dependent on an abstract programmatic mechanism that refuses to reflect on the true meaning of one’s action, and limits itself to seeking only the linear result.
This is what feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, from the University of Verona, reminded us of in her visit to our Adventist School of Religion, Villa Aurora-Florence, in presenting her book “Inclinations. A Critique of Rectitude.”[2] Cavarero reminded us that a one-sided attention and care for righteousness can become an obsession that deforms us. But above all, the human always presents itself with some opacity, with some curvatures (“inclinations”), which not only must be respected, but also safeguarded. True morality is not human formatting according to some abstract model, but listening to our humanity, linked to a respect for some of our most essential inclinations. Virtue has a double way of existing. It must be able to change reality by affecting it, but it also must be changed by the indelible curvatures of that surrounding reality. Sometimes a crooked reality is truer than an obsessively linear and straight virtue.
The one-sided aspiration for righteousness, from an ethical orientation, has now become a psychological attitude that Christopher Bollas[3] calls, “normopathy.” Normopathy is that psychic dysfunction that forces us into a formal righteousness (normality) that brackets the complexity of our deep self and external reality. Our living space can appear organized and ordered only when we shrink and detach it from the most typical and characterizing areas of our humanity. The human, in its truth and reality, is always curved and tilted. It is never “normal” nor “normalizable.”
This is what Linn Marie Tonstad[4] also reminds us of in her book: Queer Theology. Beyond the fact that she describes this legitimate curvature (“queer”) at the level of gender, she actually defends the curvature (“queerness”) of the whole human as such.
Life has an intrinsic structural opacity that resists our attempts to clear it up. In this, Linn Marie is a courageous thinker for at least three reasons. First, because she doesn’t escape, but rather faces the human territory as it is, without any theological or cultural sublimation. At least she tries. Second, because in facing this human territory, she doesn’t want to give up her faith. She explores it as a theologian. Not an ecclesio-centric, but a peripatetic theologian, who walks and does theology in the streets and crossroads of our current life. Where every true theologian should always be. That’s where wisdom walks and calls (Proverbs 8:1-3). Third, because she is not afraid of contaminating theology, if that means remaining faithful to the earth, to humanity, to the body. A relevant theology is always a “contaminated” theology. Purist theology is a de facto contradiction. Contamination is the true mark of theology’s nobility and strength. It’s what incarnation is really all about. Linn Marie’s theology is thoroughly an incarnated, bodily theology.
Let’s now briefly describe why, after a European Adventist “Ethics of Paradox,” the human is necessarily “curved” and “queer.” Then we’ll consider why, as Cavarero, Bollas, and Tonstad have stated, a unilateral theology or “Ethics of Rectitude” compromises human and spiritual growth, instead of promoting it.
1. Every real thing is factually “queer”
Over time the word “queer” has gone through various specifications. We can discard the meaning of “queer” as oddity, and choose instead that of asymmetry, surplus, and contingency.
— Asymmetry because the “queer” category claims validity for the exception, that which is under or over the norm. Simply because the norm—any norm—is an ambivalent reality. It introduces order but also arbitrariness and exclusion.
— Surplus because “queer” is somewhat synonymous with excess, of an unexpected addition. The refreshing gift of, and unmerited, flourishing.
— Contingency because “queer” doesn’t obey the law of what is fixed, structurally necessary, or predetermined. Queer is the thing that couldn’t be. It’s not foreseen or planned, but nevertheless is. Queer is a temporally fragile event that dares to exist. It embodies the courage to be.
When we carefully consider these main characteristics of what “queer” can mean we then might perceive a surprising and strong parallelism with real life. True life manifests itself in the main stages of our existence as an asymmetric, excessive, and contingent event. And theology can’t avoid becoming “queer” because it cannot afford to be detached from real life.
2. The asymmetries of a “queer” life are not necessarily pathological
According to Michel Foucault we live in a paradoxical historical season. On one side it’s a time of unlimited freedom. Conversely there has never existed such a repressive society. Ours is a “Panopticon society,” characterized by repressing and ordering instances, paradoxically more implicit than explicit, and coming from below rather than above. While in pre-modern times the order was static and independent of human intervention, in our contemporary societies the strong normative impulse is dynamic and man-made. It is particularly impregnated, as James Hillman notes, with a strong tendency to pathologize the normal asymmetries of life, simply because these are not functional to the efficiency and goal-oriented perspective of our productive societies. And in trying to make straight what is normally queer, the functional societies of today use theology, religion, ethics, and medicine as their best and presumed-infallible allies.
The asymmetries of queerness are not pathological but could be the best expression of a true life. A life that is always slow and vulnerable.
In this sense European Adventism has always tried to correct, or at least temper, the typical Pelagian soul of mainline Adventism, which is obsessed with rectitude. And, for the same reason, Martin Luther’s idea of “simultaneously justified and sinner” (“simul peccator, simul iustus”) appears to mainline Adventism as a contradictory theological formula. But European Adventism sees it as a visionary and precious anthropological formulation of the complexity of life and salvation.
[1] Ellen G. White, Education (Hagerstown: Review and Herald Publishing Association 1976), p. 57.
[2] Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations. A Critique of Rectitude, (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2016).
[3] Christopher Bollas, “Normopathy and the Compound Syndrome”, in, Meaning and Melancholia. Life in the Age of Bewilderment, (New York: Routledge 2018), pp. 41-57.
[4] Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology. Beyond Apologetics, (Eugene: Cascade Companions 2018).
Title image: George Bakos on Unsplash
