This conversation began for me in a station wagon forty years ago. I was sixteen or so, on my way with “The Group” (a collection of self-declared—and real—misfits on whose outskirts I lingered) to a weekend retreat at the Episcopal campground 50 miles south of Indianapolis where I grew up. Though I’ve forgotten his name, I idolized the young curate who chaperoned us. The rest of the party were friends in the high style of high school soap opera, thriving on strife and stoking their depression and alienation at every opportunity. They wrote poetry, talked about Existentialism, hung-out at each other’s houses bewailing their lot. I wrote poetry, too, but I was undeniably the more conventional, the middle of the roader and more inclined to fit in—or try to.
On the hour drive along two-lane, farm country roads, talk turned, somehow, to absolute and relative truth. A favorite intellectual adversary (Bill, are you listening?) had recently shocked me by declaring, “There are no absolutes.” Brightest and most intellectually mature of all the bright intellectual crowd, he may, even at that age, have read some Nietzsche; regardless, he had read me perfectly and recognized a comment that would spark me to passionate dispute.
I was honestly disturbed—perhaps experiencing what I learned years later to call “aporia,” a dizzying sense that reality had suddenly ruptured beneath me and I was falling through a continental divide into outer space. Take no prisoners relativism still bothers me, but at least now I understand the concept that founds such a radical—and absolute—statement.
So I asked my recently ordained chaperone if there were absolutes and, not missing a beat he replied, “Of course there are.” Coming from him, at the time, this was answer enough.
Like most post-modern philosophies, relativism is fraught with paradox. For Catholicism and other orthodoxies, things go easier. “Absolutely no relativity” leaves no logical wiggle room. But “absolutely only relativism” immediately undermines its own pronouncements, by being, itself an absolute. Unfortunately this clever parlor game entertains mostly the reactionary and terrified orthodox, who like a scholar who’s just found a single spelling mistake in his rival’s dissertation, hold this one kink as disproof of an entire, sophisticated, often unarguable observation of fact. Anyone living in this world without hypocrisy has encountered, I’d venture, at least one instance where “absolute rightness” seemed impossible to determine or when a sudden exception dashed a previously unquestioned and unqualified assertion: an abortion that saved a woman’s life, a theft of bread to feed the hungry, a lie that gentled a hurtful truth, an adulterous affair that saved a despairing life, a war that seems just (at least to some). . . Depending on the commandments you start with, you can make your own list.
At church and in Christianity generally, people talk a lot about “God’s will” and, lately, discovering “God’s purpose” for one’s life. I have great trouble with the latter, as I decline to regard my life as a B-grade movie pre-ordained and edited, now screened without preview so that I, its audience rather than its protagonist, am the only one who doesn’t know how I turn out. I am said to have free will but in fact, as God foreknows the choices I will make, it hardly seems to merit the term “free.” It’s like being in a first person shooter where suddenly the machine takes over and all you can do is cling to the controls and marvel (or recoil in horror). I don’t want to be God’s errand girl, with the entire “purpose” of my life a simple to do list for the almighty.
Still, I want to be and act in harmony with that will. I have no argument with the larger dimension of divine purpose, if by that we mean, quite simply, what God would prefer. I’m down with real free-will and undetermined futures. And, though it opens quite a can of worms, I’m down with the will of God. And troubled by the question of whether it is absolute—in all or part.
Unfortunately, being finite creatures we can’t always absolutely or immediately ascertain what precisely is the most just, most right configuration of a specific situation. In fact, philosophically as well as literally, “just” and “right” are more like directions, as in “to the right”, than fixed locations. Preferences. In other words, it’s relative.
Two things seem to happen if this is true (maybe more, but these are a good start): First, God’s Will sounds a lot like the Dao. The path and our direction on it trump the indeterminate destination as proof of our “righteousness.” And that correct directionality is itself relative to where we began—kind of like Mecca is a different direction from wherever you are and, if we’re honest, Mecca itself is spinning in orbit on earth and around the sun—not fixed at all. Second, the “righteous” have no “right” of self-righteousness. As Jesus insisted, they had better look to their own sins: take the beams from their eyes and drop their stones. Directionality shifts, almost literally with the tides. The rightness of an action shifts as other beings—sentient, conscious and inert—adjust, take action and move in a direction of their own, whether with or against what from your perspective looks best at the moment. The truth of chaos, the unpredictability of phenomena, derives from their interconnectedness. So acknowledging connection—which we Christians call surrender to love—is the origin of ethical behavior.
So, are there absolutes? If not, can we have righteousness—or even rightness or ethics without them? In avoiding absolutes, I would assert just one. It comes from the old testament. It’s written into many hymns, here it is in the lyrics of one of my favorites:
“What does our god require of you? To seek justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God.”
In accordance with that absolute, we make our relative way. I think that’s probably what my newly collared young cleric meant. It makes me happy to think I’m still down with his viewpoint as well.
