This review covers the newly released editions of Graven Images: Substitutes for True Morality and Morality and Situation Ethics published by the Hildebrand Project in 2019. They are companion pieces, closely related in theme and concern with other of Dietrich von Hildebrand's most important writings, including Fundamental Moral Attitudes (1930) and Ethics (1953), among others. In both works Hildebrand seeks to recover the authentic eidos (essence) of morality, partly in an effort to respond to the relativism, authoritarianism and utilitarianism that increasingly characterised philosophical approaches to ethics from the later nineteenth century onwards. One of Hildebrand's invaluable contributions to twentieth-century philosophical theology is his examination of the inextricable relationship between lived experience, human flourishing, the objective nature of morality, and Christian charity—all of which is formed and informed by ‘the love of God, the highest of all value-responses, [and] simultaneously the very basis of all morality’. His work approached questions of truth in relation to the categories of lived experience, history, and eternity (eschatology), as is typical of the methods of Christian Personalism—the school of phenomenological thought to which he belonged and significantly contributed. In so doing, he prophetically modelled the kind of theological and philosophical engagements with modernity particularly discernible in the papacies of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.
We see this modelling in Morality and Situation Ethics, which Hildebrand prefaces with a quotation from Augustine's commentary on Psalm 31, which reads: ‘Make neither of your own righteousness a safe-conduct to Heaven, nor of God's mercy a safe-conduct to sin’. This quotation is a rationale for the book as a whole, encapsulating its aim to explore or recover the authentic nature of morality over and against its principal counterfeits in emerging modernity—namely, ‘situation ethics’ and ‘sin mysticism’. Both of these terms originate from Karl Rahner's article of the 19th of April, 1952 for L'Osservatore Romano, upon which Hildebrand drew heavily. Engaging with Rahner, Hildebrand argues that one of the key challenges, particularly for committed religious people, is proper attunement to the true nature of morality itself.
Hildebrand begins his project with a foray into literary criticism to underscore the growing ‘moral symptom’ of disenchantment with the spiritual that took hold of the Modernist imagination, broadly conceived. Rather surprisingly, he proposes that even amongst twentieth-century Catholic thinkers and artists (such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and others) there often exists a sense of spiritual apathy towards the call to holiness, an apathy which Rahner called ‘sin mysticism’. Hildebrand suggests that writers of disenchantment are not very interested in magnanimity or the universal call to sanctity and, instead, present the ‘complicated’ or ‘the uncommon’ person as the primary, and most relatable, example for us. He argues that preoccupation with the mediocre problematically dominates the novels of Waugh, Greene, and others, and holds up Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) as an aesthetic exposition of Christian magnanimity and the moral sense.
This is a bold reading, and poses challenges to scholars who work in the interface between religion and literature and have stressed the Catholicity of Waugh, Greene, et al, without perhaps giving enough attention to the limitations (and not just the merits) of these novelists and their explorations of Catholicism's concerns, teachings, and values. Interestingly, Flannery O'Connor echoes Hildebrand's rather singular viewpoint in many ways. Her literary criticism often circles back to the question: why do artists prefer to depict evil or mediocrity as opposed to goodness or saintliness? She proposes this is because the former is easier than the latter to imagine since the goodness of the saint demands a generous and humble interest in the least of these. (As an important aside, the spiritual and intellectual sympathies between Hildebrand and O'Connor, especially in relation to the ethics of aesthetics, are abundant and have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve). As with both Rahner and O'Connor, Hildebrand sees ‘sin mysticism’ as one of morality's counterfeits. It is a ‘lived, existential approach … to moral problems’ shaped by a lack of a sensus supranaturalis (‘sense of the supernatural’).
Along similar lines, ‘situation ethics’ also ends up compromising with morality out of a desire to correct the self-righteous and accompany the wounded. It seeks, Hildebrand argues, to push back against the pharisaic conflation of the moral law with the juridical sphere. It ‘reacts … against the tendency to substitute legality for morality’ and the ‘overemphasis on actions seen in an abstract light’, disassociated from the reality of personal, lived experience. Hildebrand praises the good intentions of such a resistance but argues that unless purified they can lead to a radical subjectivism which rejects the objective truth that affords authentic liberation and relational flourishing.
Overall, Hildebrand posits that both situation ethics and sin mysticism are not developed intellectual theories, per se, but two strands of an emergent attitude or ‘trend, whose extent varies greatly’ and which stems from an understandable desire to resist pharisaic self-righteousness. Fundamentally, they both seek to redress spiritual pride which Hildebrand, picking up from John Henry Newman's Discourses to Mixed Congregations, identifies as principally a ‘bourgeois, conventional deformation of Christianity’. However, in so doing, the moral motivations of both situation ethics and sin mysticism, in their related but distinctive ways, are primarily concerned with ‘ends’ and not ‘means’. In other words, neither attitude towards morality sufficiently ponders the how in its inextricable relation to the why. They therefore fail to recognize that the primary motivation, purpose, and way of the authentic moral life is relationship with, and transformation in, Christ: ‘[t]he fundamental obligations of the moral law are based on the essence and the nature of man, and on his essential relationships [which are, in turn] … based on the essence of the supernatural order established by the Divine Redeemer’.
In Graven Images Hildebrand continues the work of Morality and Situation Ethics by studying the nature of morality, particularly in terms of how authentic morality may be glimpsed within, but remains ultimately distinct from, the spheres of custom and cultural codes. ‘There are various notions’, he says, ‘that function as the decisive moral standards and norms in the life of both individuals and communities, such as honor [or] the notion of ‘the gentleman’’ and ‘for many people those different norms function as substitutes for the categories of morally good and evil’. He notes how various societal norms carry ‘moral connotation[s]’ but are largely predicated on various ‘extramoral element[s]’ which cannot make full demand upon the person in a way that her conscience must. In so doing, he ‘throw[s] into relief’ the ‘formal’ or fundamental ‘eidos of the moral sphere’, showing us the degree to which ethics is not just about delineating the nature of the culturally acceptable, prohibited, or ‘morally objectional’.
Hildebrand highlights how the ethical imperative, written on the human conscience, is an inherently spiritual one, a manifestation of the ‘task that can never be concluded on earth’. Therefore, the moral sphere is anything but enclosed, prescriptive for its own sake, insular or dictatorial. Rather, Hildebrand implies morality's teleological (or eschatological) character consists of three dynamic ‘features’: ‘[f]irst, it is not restricted; secondly, it is always unconcluded [as the process of transformation ‘confronts man, as long as he breathes’]; and finally, it is endowed with a fully positive character’. The ultimate conclusion of Graven Images is that Christ is both the form and face of the ethical since, in his person, he fulfils and transfigures natural morality, most fully embodying and demonstrating its inner depth dimensions. Through the Incarnation, the ethical is shown to be aimed at not just the good or peaceable life but, instead, at ‘[t]ransformation in Christ’ or ‘the imitation of His Sacred Humanity’. In all of this, Hildebrand is principally concerned with showing how Christian revelation uniquely opens up and reveals aspects of the ‘formal character’ of ethics.
Morality and Situation Ethics and Graven Images: Substitutes for True Morality both propose and explore the continual need for people to renew or rediscover their moral understanding, especially in the pressing contexts and aftermaths of various forms of twentieth-century political and social tyrannies. However, whilst Hildebrand advocates for the necessity of an overall return to the moral sense, the specific audience he has in mind are Catholics who are called to ever renew their personal relationship with Christ. In so saying, Hildebrand is not arguing anything new, per se. He is drawing from the rich, perennial, theological tradition rooted in both scripture and theology. However, what he offers that is unique is a careful accounting of the inextricable relationship between lived experience (personalism) and the moral life (ethics). Specifically, he explores how the moral sphere reveals the way in which human desires are brought to fulfilment through response to the divine invitation (and call) to agapic encounter.
These newly released editions published by The Hildebrand Project are timely contributions (interventions, even). They are beautifully designed and accompanied by perceptive prefatory remarks by Alice von Hildebrand, John Finnis, and Rocco Buttiglione, respectively. These new editions provide a great opportunity to further discover Hildebrand since, as I have noted elsewhere, ‘[d]espite his major contributions to philosophy of religion and Christian culture, Hildebrand has, until more recently, remained a niche figure, well-known to only a particular segment of Catholic academia’. This is in spite of the fact that Popes Pius XII, John-Paul II, and Benedict XVI have heralded Hildebrand as one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century. Indeed, Benedict XVI said that ‘when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time’. It is thanks to the Hildebrand Project that Ratzinger's prophecy may be realised sooner rather than later. Through its efforts, headed by Alice von Hildebrand and John Henry Crosby, the life and legacy of Hildebrand is becoming more widespread, especially in North America and Continental Europe.
