Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

Self, World, and Time

Ethics as Theology 1

An Induction

Finding and Seeking

Ethics as Theology 2

Forthcoming:

Entering into Rest

Ethics as Theology 3

Finding and Seeking

• •

Ethics as Theology 2

Oliver O’Donovan

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2014 Oliver O’Donovan

All rights reserved

Published 2014 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Donovan, Oliver.

Finding and seeking / Oliver O’Donovan.

pages cm. — (Ethics as theology; 2)

ISBN 978-0-8028-7187-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4223-7 (ePub)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4189-6 (Kindle)

1. Christian ethics. 2. Self-knowledge, Theory of.

3. God. I. Title.

BJ1251.O3634 2014

241 — dc23

2014025022

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Preface

1. Spirit and Self

Ethics in the Spirit

The Giver of Life

Naming God

The Flesh

Sin against the Self

2. Faith and Purpose

The Root of Action

Command and Obedience

Self-­offering

Self-­consistency

Doubt of Purpose

3. Faith and Meaning

Know Thyself!

The Objectified Self

I and We

Mankind

Doubt of Meaning

4. The Good of Man

Self-­communicating Good

Love of the World

The Order of Love

Sin against the World

Virtue

Prejudice

5. Wisdom and Time

The Call of Wisdom

Seeking

Ideology

World and Time

6. Love and Testimony

The Analogy of Love

The Testimony

Receiving the Testimony

Confession

The Moral Confession

7. Hope and Anticipation

The Future of Today

Three Prospects

Critique of Anticipation

Hope and Anticipation

Endurance and Temptation

Sin against Time

8. Deliberation

Purpose and Deliberation

Against Deliberation

Prudence

The Ordering of Law

Consequentialism

The Particular

Circumstances and Consequences

Ideals and Compromises

9. Discernment

Indeterminacy

The Path

Vocation

Historicism

Prospective Postscript

Index of Subjects and Persons

Index of Scripture Quotations

Preface

In Self, World, and Time, the first part of Ethics as Theology, we described Christian Ethics, alias Moral Theology, as an intellectual discipline: distinct from moral thinking on the one hand and from moral teaching on the other, it offers to each of them an ordered reflection on their assumptions and procedures in the light of the Christian gospel. We came finally to focus on a conceptual trajectory which would encompass the logic of moral thought within the three virtues of faith, love, and hope (the sequence in which the three most usually occur in the New Testament). This now gives rise to two further tasks. One lies before us in this second part: to follow moral thought from self-­awareness to decision through the sequence of virtues from faith to hope. The second, guided by the claim made for the sovereignty of love, is to explore ends-­of-­action, penultimate and ultimate, the objects, natural and supernatural, that we may anticipate and pursue.

Today, if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts . . . (Ps. 95:7). Today is the day of some agent, some I or we who find ourselves addressed in that you; more precisely, this I or we — ourselves, as we take up the question of what to do as our own question. Another agent’s day is not today, but then. We do not deliberate about it. We deliberate about the today on which it is given to you, or me, or us, to live and act. But there can be no framing this today — it remains no more than a pleasing philosophical abstraction — unless the you, I, or we in question have come to know ourselves as agents summoned by God to answer him in action, and in that knowledge have addressed the question of what we are to do as the supremely important question. And there can be no framing this today except as a moment within world-­time. The subjective here and now of action has to be correlated to the objective there and then that can be seen and spoken of all around us. The today we face presupposes our agency and presupposes the world with its time. Ethics, in helping us face it, must point us to the knowledge of self and world that is actually given us, a knowledge through which the Spirit of God leads us to the action and life that are offered to us.

To the expressions of gratitude in the Preface of Self, World, and Time, most of which are relevant also to this volume, I must add thanks to the editors of The American Journal of Jurisprudence, in which parts of chapter 9 appeared, and of The Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture, which hosted parts of chapter 8. A section of chapter 6 first appeared on http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk, and, translated into German, in Wie kommt die Bibel in die Ethik? ed. Marco Hofheinz, Frank Mathwig, Matthias Zeindler (Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2011), 229-42.

Those who find themselves perusing a volume called The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O’Donovan, edited by Robert Song and Brent Waters, shortly to be published by Eerdmans, will find an unusual degree of overlap, I fear, between my essay there and some pages in this book. It was not quite what was intended, but that is how it turned out. Ignoscat lector! It is not for anything I have contributed, after all, that that book will make its appeal to the reader, but for the interpretative insight of a remarkable constellation of contributors. May the reader gain no less profit from it than I do, and make better use of it! Finally, in that context, I mention the staff of Eerdmans, of whom the conventional word of thanks says too little. In an age when publishers despair, they continue to encourage us all.

Chapter 1

Spirit and Self

Ethics in the Spirit

The Spirit comes to our aid in our weakness (Rom. 8:26). Weak in confidence, weak in understanding, weak in endurance, our sickened agency is restored, our ill-­conceived undertakings are given good effect. What do we mean by weakness? Paul has described it, borrowing a telling image from the Isaianic Apocalypse, as a world that groans and labors in the pangs of childbirth (8:19-22). Striving to produce something but unable to tell what it would produce, it is wholly bent upon painful effort, a world with a historical destiny but no vision of fulfillment. The future is laid upon it as a goal to strive for, but it is opaque and beyond any clear imagination. Within this world there are some who possess the firstfruits of the Spirit (8:23), who share in the cosmic groaning of history with a certain self-­awareness, knowing that their own accomplishment is bound up with a point of arrival for the material universe, the resurrection of the body.¹ But neither the unconscious groaning of the world nor the conscious groaning of the spiritually aware achieves anything. They are formless aspirations towards an object that is neither envisaged nor realized. The salvation they look for is hidden behind the curtain of the future; it has no presence, and they can only wait.

This shortfall in agency cannot be made good from the side of its object. From an abstract future there is no clarity or energy to be drawn, no meaning sufficient to direct or command. The shortfall must be supplied from the side of the subject. And here Paul speaks, remarkably, of a third groaning, one that arises in the being of God himself. God’s Spirit groans for the fulfillment of God’s purpose, and if the Spirit’s groans are inexpressible, that does not mean that they are doomed, like ours, to be contentless and ill-­focused. The divine purpose may be incommunicable, but the secret understanding of the future which the Father and the Spirit hold between them comes to our assistance. We do not know how we are to pray aright; yet prayer can be effective if it springs from the praying of the Spirit. Our formless aspirations, taken up and woven into God’s purposes, aim at more than we can know.

The Spirit comes to our aid, and active life with its active purposes comes within our reach. Rescuing us from a futile passive-­reactive immanence, the Spirit of God strives and works with and through our practical thinking. But as active life becomes thinkable, so does reflection upon active life. The Spirit comes to our aid in the practice of Ethics, too — not only, that is, in how we think about what we are to do, not only in our mutual communication and instruction as to what we are to do, but in the reflective analysis we bring to bear on them. For Ethics is not itself practical reasoning or moral instruction, but a reflection upon both. Especially the Spirit teaches us to reflect upon the moral instruction of Jesus, illuminating it for each successive attempt to understand, obey, and communicate. It was with well-­justified astonishment, then, that Johannes Fischer complained twenty years ago that the Spirit plays almost no part in contemporary theological ethics.² The essential note of an evangelical ethics will be missing if the freedom of the Gospel is not understood as life in the Spirit. Failure on this point must mean the failure of Theological Ethics as a whole.

There is, to be sure, some reason for hesitation. It might appear that the only effect of reflection on active life is to subvert the logic of action. Reflection and action, it may be thought, are mutually exclusive postures. Action is exertion seeking satisfaction in a point of rest. It seeks that it may find. It has an end-­of-­action set before it to attain. In the foreshortened view of active intelligence the end-­of-­action melts into the end-­of-­history. The whole of future time is divided into time before and time after, the time of exertion and the time of rest: If I can only get this rose bush to bloom on this plot, the garden will be really pleasant! Ethics knows how foreshortened that perspective is. It reflects on the place that the goal occupies within the world’s happenings, and foresees many more months and years of further aspiration in the garden after the blooming of the rose bush. Life does not stop and enter a new register of restfulness with each practical achievement. Find, and you shall seek! says the reflective ethicist back to the moral thinker. That is not good news for practical reason. It carries the warning of an illusory character in its ends and a futility in its exertions. As soon as we set practical thinking in a framework of reflection, we view the world of action as Qoheleth viewed it, bewildered at the vanity of each and every undertaking.

Yet that view cannot be escaped. Everyone who steps into practical thinking must at some point step out of it, and look back uneasily over the shoulder, wondering whether the project has been an illusion.

If an Ethics consists solely of reflective observations on the practice of moral thinking and teaching, it will lead into the stagnant marshes of nihilism. A moral science that begins and ends in an observer’s account will be a salt that has lost its savor, reducing practical thinking to a process. As P. T. Forsyth remarked, a process has nothing moral in it.³ There is room enough in Ethics, to be sure, for disciplined observations, generic (as in sociology, economics, or anthropology) or particular (as in history), which can contribute to the forming of a moral imaginary. Taken on their own terms, they are modest and useful scouts, reporting on the terrain. The trouble lies with a moral science that offers observations on the terrain in place of a strategy. An observational science can do nothing to help us evaluate our ends; it can only say that they are similar or dissimilar to the common run of human ends. It can only deflate us with the sad wisdom that action has no real end at all, but returns after every finding to seek some more, at best allowing the illusion of an end. For Kierkegaard the ethicist was trapped on the ground of resignation, cultivating self and life assiduously in the absence of ultimately satisfying grounds for doing so.

There is a certain practical coherence about conforming to the common run of humankind and the exigencies of natural existence. We begin most unreflective moral experience with little more than these to go on, and may tolerate an Ethics that speaks of them familiarly, even if it never takes us a step forward. Yet the question why? takes us beyond any such Natural Ethics. It is not an unreasonable or sophistic why? but a why? that asserts itself logically as soon as we achieve a sense of responsibility, as soon, that is, as we acknowledge that there is a reality to which we owe the questioning of social norms and natural exigencies. Since it is not a why? of theory but of practical reason, the only answer to which it is open is an end of history. Of itself Ethics knows nothing of an end of history, but it can point to a moral teaching that does. Seek, and you shall find! (Matt. 7:7). Like other teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, this word has two aspects, as acknowledged practical wisdom, on the one hand, as eschatological promise on the other. The proclamation of the Kingdom has, it seemed, stepped in to vindicate the cheerful logic of practice against the sad disillusion of ethical observation.

And with that vindication new possibilities arise for reflection. It becomes thinkable that Find, and you shall seek! need not deflate Seek, and you shall find! The perpetual return to seeking becomes a preliminary mapping of the way to the promise of an ultimate finding. Of itself Ethics has no resources to make such a promise, but it can hear it, and it can proceed on the basis that it has been heard. Such is Ethics undertaken in the Spirit. The Spirit is warranty of the promise (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph. 1:14), and under its leading Ethics can think about the perpetual seeking-­and-­finding of moral thinking, about its native ends-­of action and its formal accomplishments, in the light of what is promised over and beyond every intermediate finding and seeking.

Let it be said, first of all, that such an Ethics will speak of God’s action. It will speak of the groanings of creation and of the firstfruits in whom these groanings reach articulacy, but it will speak of them as moments in the purpose and work of God. Its discipline will be theological — not disregarding the contributions of philosophical analysis and phenomenological interpretation, but stepping beyond them to reach decisions which philosophy quite properly holds back from, decisions authorized and required by the Spirit who searches the deep things of God. In the second place we must add that it will speak of our human life and action as it is to be undertaken today, in the time that is given us to live. Here there is a delicate but important division of labor between a theological Ethics and a doctrinal theology. Doctrine rests in truth. It has to struggle hard for it, and can never perfect its articulation of it once and for all, but the truth of the matter and nothing else is its term, and to that extent it sets the activities of time in the light of eternity. It speaks of temporal moments in their unique unrepeatability, but since its concern is with what God accomplishes in them, it does not speak to those moments. In telling of God and his work done once for all in history, it tells truths that are good yesterday, today, forever. Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius (not Herod the Great or Nero), but the truth of his death in the reign of Tiberius was no less true in the reigns of Herod and Nero. If we say that he was crucified before the foundation of the world, we mean that his crucifixion by Pilate was always God’s purpose for mankind; if we say that he was crucified again in the martyrs, we mean that the power of his death under Pilate lived on in his suffering church. All times and places equally are governed by the truth that he suffered under Pontius Pilate. The perennial validity of this proposition belongs to no proposition framing a practical purpose or pursuing a moral deliberation. Deliberation is always a matter of today, if you will hear his voice. Ethics must speak, though reflectively, to each today, as each today is a fresh today, not a repetition of yesterday.

This means that Ethics has neither the first nor the last word in Theology. Those words belong to a doctrine that speaks of God’s purposes, acts, and ultimate ends. But because God’s purposes are alive and active, there is place for a word in between first and last words, a word that speaks reflectively on the Spirit’s aid to our present weakness, which discerns the present converse of the Spirit in guiding the human spirit to the service of God’s further ends. We are summoned to be alert and understanding, not passively reactive, and that means thinking what it is we are to do while it is ours to do it.

The point may be expressed crudely by saying that Ethics, though reflective, is still a practical discipline, not a theoretical or speculative one. It is not a branch of dogmatics, distinct in its special themes as the doctrine of the church is distinct from the doctrine of creation. Yet the polarity of practical and speculative should not seduce us into thinking that truths of dogmatic theology are without interest for practical life. An impatient would-­be-­up-­and-­doing theology may have a hate-­list of doctrines it stigmatizes as purely speculative — the Trinitarian doctrines, for example, or the doctrine of God’s electing decree before the foundation of the world. Yet these truths, too, can enrich and enlarge the moral imaginary. No theologian should accept that a truth about God is a function of its utility, and yet truths are useful to creatures such as we, who need truth in order to live by it. The despised Quicunque vult, with its almost mischievous exchanges of metaphysical confidences, may elicit a moral conversion, as a memorable passage in one of Charles Williams’s novels suggests.⁴ The simple truth that God is good in his being, and in his working good for us — Good art thou, and doest good! (Ps. 119:68) — focuses the excess of praise, where belief utters things beyond practical application while never ceasing to speak of moral reality. That is why Ethics must wait on Doctrine, content to say the second word, never succumbing to its worst temptation, which is to conceive itself as a kind of alternative doctrine, speculatively valid on its own terms, a mistake of some nineteenth-­century advocates of the Ritschlian primacy of ethics. This yields an impoverished substitute doctrine, shorn of the excess of praise and reduced to those divine workings we find most immediately to our purpose, and, if carried through to the end, will fail to yield ethics at all, since its false pretension to speak eternally loses sight of the distinct time of practical action.

Ethics can claim no primacy in theology, then, but neither should it be willing to grant one, however much it may accept that it can speak only after Doctrine has spoken. The two branches of theology are mutually complementary: Doctrine completes Ethics by speaking of an end of God’s works; Ethics completes Doctrine by offering it an understanding of itself as a practice of praise. Yet the two still proceed in a certain independence. If the truths they attend to are the same, the rational order in which they place them is different. Ethics, watching reflectively over practical reason, orders theology towards deliberation; Doctrine, with its task of expressing the truth of the divine, orders it narratively, following the work and self-­disclosure of God. That is one sense in which not only the first but also the last word is given to doctrinal theology. When it reaches its last word and speaks of the end of God’s works, it may entertain the thought that, since God shall be all in all, the actions of men can be no more than a pale and insignificant reflection of what God has done, a proper idea to entertain and perhaps God’s own last word on all human endeavor. Yet Ethics cannot allow itself to be brought to rest there before the time has come. It must call us back from the apocalyptic viewpoint to the moment that confronts us now: Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. And that is something most definitely to be heard and received with an impressionable and active heart.

The Giver of Life

The Spirit is the lifegiver (John 6:63). There are other titles that highlight other aspects of the Spirit’s work; if we give priority to this one, it is not that the others are of lesser weight. The giving of life comes first not in the logic of divine being but in the order of divine works. The Spirit will preside over our loves and our hopes, our knowing, our enduring, and our final glorification, but it is from the giving of our life that all subsequent life must flow. We are creatures of time, whose beginnings precede their continuations and their endings. Our first thought of life in the Spirit, therefore, must be directed to the gift received.

The word life has various levels of meaning, even confining its reference to humans and ignoring the life of plants and non-­human animals. It is true of us as humans that we are sentient and capable of feeling; it is true of us as humans that we are existentially self-­aware: both these powers are elements in what living means for us. But it is not to these that the title lifegiver points, but to something more lively, to the power of purposing and acting, of what we call living our lives, which human nature to all appearances possesses, yet is constantly in peril of losing. We note in the first place the connection of the verb to give life (zōopoiein) with the divine act of raising from the dead.⁵ Death has no quarrel with biological life; it is indispensable to recycling it. Death has no quarrel with consciousness, which can view the prospective limit of its own continuance with reasonable equanimity. But death is the enemy of all our purposes, and the Spirit’s power in raising the dead is of a piece with our moral recovery, the restoration of imperiled or decayed agency. Ezekiel’s famous vision of the dry bones of a battlefield reconstituted by the Spirit into a mighty army is meant precisely as a description of moral renewal (Ezek. 37:11-14).

To speak of moral recovery is to speak of a word in our mouths that is true and effective. The flesh is of no avail; the Spirit is the lifegiver; the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life (John 6:63). Or, again, contrasting the two covenants of law and spirit, the letter kills, the spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:6). Give me life according to thy word! was the repeated prayer of the poet of the Long Psalm, who meant not merely to claim a promise but to appropriate a word of God that was itself the life for which he longed. God-­given speech commands and orders the elements, and makes the life of the Hebrew poet, marshalling the letters and lexemes of his language, one with the very speech of God. When Jesus addressed the crowds on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, inviting anyone who thirsts to come to drink, he added, Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:37-39) The believer was to receive, and become, a source of words of life, one in whom the understanding and command of the Son of Man would be immanent. This was meant, John explains, of the Spirit, to be given when Jesus was glorified.

Intelligence, articulateness, authority, understanding self-­command and self-­disposal, the framing and execution of purposes that overcome death and decay, these are all elements of life in the Spirit. Taken together, they allow us to speak clearly and comprehensively about freedom, over which there can always be a temptation to equivocate. Freedom implies an emancipation from powers that oppress our agency and reduce us to a passive-­reactive existence. It is an event, and as such it can and must be experienced, once and more than once if need be. But the one event, taken on its own, is not enough to imprint the character of freedom upon a whole course of life. Some who have been emancipated busy themselves thereafter oppressing others as they were once oppressed, as though freedom were no more than an exchange of roles. Some attempt to recover and re-­live the pathos of emancipation over and over again, as though a step beyond it would be a step back into the old oppression. Emancipation is only the negative moment of freedom; it should open the way to fulfillment in self-­government. Freedom is a way of living that builds on the event of emancipation, preserving its gains and realizing its promise. "For freedom Christ has set us free, as Paul declared (Gal. 5:1). That is why life liberated from the oppression of law, which is how Paul understood evangelical liberty, is anything but a lawless life. To fly from law-­bound arbitrariness to spontaneous arbitrariness is simply to oscillate between passivity and reactivity, always threshing about within the toils of legal consciousness. It is the mark of true freedom that it can see the moral law from a new vantage-­point as a witness to God’s purpose to order and bless the life of the human race. What previously looked like disconnected arbitrary norms come together to form a coherent law of Christ, the love of neighbor as self. As with the claims of moral law, so, too, with the claims of community. Liberty may strike out to gain a certain initial distance on community, but it cannot take a permanent form as solitary independence, for freedom is grounded in communication. It is discursively engaged, not only with other agents, but in dialogical intimacy with God himself, who speaks with those who possess the Spirit as he did with Moses, face to face. Led by the Spirit and walking in" the Spirit, they find their human purposes shaped responsively to his purposes.

We may say that life in the Spirit is nothing less than a condition of moral maturity, in which the elements of moral experience — norms, good, demands of other people — are integrated into a competent discernment of God’s will, founded in an understanding of the order and destiny of the world. Yet nothing less does not mean nothing more. For the idea of maturity, prominent in Paul’s exposition of spiritual freedom in the Epistle to the Galatians, is not solely a matter of individual maturation, gaining confidence, exercising better judgment, seeing more clearly the purpose of different requirements and their application to different cases, and so on. It is not even a matter of power to will or courage to venture beyond what seems possible. The maturity of the believer is set against the background of a world-­historical narrative of new creation through the Son of God, a story of a once-­for-­all recovery of humankind that reaches its crisis in Christ’s death and resurrection. The world itself had to groan in labor-­pains. Morality had to come to its fulfillment in history. Until the disclosure of the Last Man, the lordly servant of God (1 Cor. 15:45), no authority could make sense of the moral law, no prophetic vision could tell of the life of the Kingdom of God. Life in the Spirit is the life of a post-­resurrection mankind, taken into the friendship of God, admitted to divine direction and guidance. I live, yet not I, but Christ in me (Gal. 2:20). And as the first gift conferred on two disciples on the first Easter evening was the gift of interpreting history, so an Ethics of the Spirit is an Ethics learned in Christ’s school of interpretation: the moral law fulfilled in himself, the Kingdom of God coming in himself, the authority to live in the world conferred by himself.

The concept of Spirit in Ethics, then, is an evangelical one, referring us to the narratives of resurrection and Pentecost, not, as Johannes Fischer expounds it, a formal one, framed to overcome the philosophical antinomy of deontology and teleology. First resolving that Spirit refers to a unity of life and action which determines us to and in communication, Fischer is led to posit behind every question of discursive practical reasoning a deeper question about the spirit that determines us to and in our communication, behind our back, as it were.⁶ A great variety of spirits, each specific to its own context of communication, leaves to Christian Ethics the essentially critical task of distinguishing among the multitude of spirits in quest of the Spirit that ensures ‘real’ life and led by the question of ‘true’ life.⁷ That Christian Ethics is guided in this task by the Pauline ethics of the Spirit, which fills the general concept paradigmatically with Christological and ecclesiological content, may seem to be no more than a particular variant on the general theme.⁸ Why should a critical Christian Ethics expect to identify just one such spirit, especially if the spirits are differentiated by a variety of cooperative tasks — banking, washing up the dishes, teaching in universities — in any of which we may frequently engage? Fischer’s two-­level method represents at its starkest the paradox of contemporary communitarianism: loudly protesting the sovereign rights of the particular, it keeps its own distance from it within a general theory of particulars. The ambivalence in which this leaves Fischer is suggested by the quotation marks that stand guard over every use of the words real and true: what is real from the point of view of the particular inner circle is only real from the point of view of the general outer circle, and in principle exchangeable with a thousand alternative realities. The gift of Pentecost, the reality of renewed mankind in Christ, these evangelical elements are kept strictly within the inner circle, while Fischer’s own Ethics of the Spirit roams free of commitments in the outer circle, ready to greet any new communal practice, and any new ethic derived from it, with the same kindly offer of a niche within the structure of the spirit-­directed life. We should not hesitate, of course, to speak of the Spirit of God as source and guide of every creaturely aspiration of human practical reason. But if we are to make that affirmation, we must be bold enough to remove the quotation marks that ghettoize the reality-­claim, and state, what you worship in ignorance, I declare to you! (Acts 17:23).

On one point at least, however, we must attend to Fischer carefully. Life in the Spirit, as he understands it, is a life of communicative reason, taking up the watchword of those who have used it to free the legacy of Kant from its relentless individualism. It participates in a moral awareness and responsibility that takes shape in dialogue between an I and a Thou. Practical reason cannot be solitary; it can only be an invitation and response. Behind every report of practical reasoning there is an invitation it has heard, an address to which it makes answer with a responsible and considered self-­disposal. In all the masterful discernment for which the Spirit equips us there must be an attentive response to the searching, questioning, and summoning of God.

Naming God

In a curious story from Genesis (32:22-32), primitive in detail and subtle in structure, the patriarch Jacob struggles with an unknown assailant in the night. The drama of the story lies in its unexpected outcome: Jacob’s life-­and-­death struggle becomes an encounter with a God who could, and would, bless him, a conclusion which turns upside down all the expectations built up in the course of the narrative. The slippery patriarch did not wrestle with God knowingly; he wrestled with a nameless threat, as he had often had to do before, and, as before, succeeded. The night visitor, one of those malign spirits that prowl in desert places, perhaps, and have power in the hours of darkness, struggles to get free as dawn approaches. But at this point the story assumes a new aspect: by a simple touch on the thigh the adversary asserts his power over Jacob in hurting him without killing him. Jacob, still refusing to relax his hold, demands a blessing from his victorious adversary. Told to state his name, the patriarch is given a new one, with a new moral import (Jacob means trickster, Israel striver), and in this form the blessing is given. When in turn he demands the name of the one who has blessed him, he meets refusal, but the very refusal contains a clue of self-­identification: Why is it that you ask my name? Why else, but because in all his struggles Jacob has been in search precisely of one who is not to be named as other beings are, the nameless one? And so he can announce with confidence that he has seen God, and lived.

Nameless, because he is not one among