Ellen T. Charry

I think this is an important book, and I’m very glad it’s been written. I still believe it will prove useful for my research, though now that I’ve actually sat down with it, I’m a little disappointed.

I love that the Preface begins, “This book arose from reading classical texts of Christian theology slowly.” From that reading emerged the thesis that “when Christian doctrines assert the truth about God, the world, and ourselves, it is a truth that seeks to influence us” (viii). show more This would seem to be an uncontroversial statement, but Charry argues that, after the 17th century, modernity disjoined truth, beauty, and goodness, undermining the pastoral function of doctrine in the process.

To demonstrate her thesis, Charry examines a handful of “the most distrusted of Christian theologians,” looking at “unlikely texts for demonstrating the salutarity of doctrine.” Those figures include Athanasius, Basil the Great, Augustine, and Calvin. Some biblical themes and medieval theologians are also discussed, but, like a good academic, I skipped over the chapters that weren’t directly pertinent to me…

Earlier Christian tradition stressed sapience (not just knowledge, but engaged, emotionally attached knowledge) as the foundation of human excellence. Charry goes through each theologian to show how their writings attempted to form readers in Christian excellence, i.e. a life shaped by knowledge and love of God. She follows what she calls the “salutarity principle,” that “Christian doctrines function pastorally when a theologian unearths the divine pedagogy in order to engage the reader or listener in considering that life with the triune God facilitates dignity and excellence” (18). From the Greek, she also coins the terms aretology/aretegenic—“conducive to virtue.”

Of the patristic chapters, I liked the one on Basil of Caesarea the best. Charry gives a close reading of On the Holy Spirit to uncover Basil’s argument that spiritual transformation testifies to the truth of orthodox trinitarianism. For Basil, the language used about God in public worship must be theologically precise and accessible in order to be pastorally salutary. I really like how she uses an apparently theoretical work to demonstrate that dogmatic exegesis has practical ends (105). Though I agree that cognitive assent is only one part of what “sapience” entails, I didn’t completely follow how dogmatic exegesis goes as far as to help us “become loving by being loved” (115).

Her reading of Calvin is fairly sympathetic, all things considered. While she appreciates that Calvin wants Christians to take comfort in God’s love for them even though they deserve only wrath, she doesn’t think it effectively outweighs the Calvinist emphasis on self-despair (i.e. despairing of one's sins) and self-denial. In fact, she traces back to Augustine a shift of concern from sapience to the quest for certainty and assurance; i.e., before the medieval period really, the questions “does God love me?” and whether and how one’s sins can be forgiven were not foremost in people’s minds. While we might worry that an ancient Platonic worldview risks blurring the line between creator and creature, Charry sees the medieval rise of belief in enmity between humans and God as at least equally damaging. (Shockingly, I find the above claims problematic… :) )

All the same, this book is helpful for my purposes in its call for a renewal of a pastoral theology of doctrine, and its encouragement to read the Fathers in that light. Charry is clear that not all Fathers wrote “aretegenically” and that the answer for our day isn’t a wooden adaptation of their worldview(s). But she provides a helpful reminder of the Fathers’ eminently pastoral concerns and of how they understood the nature of the theological task and use of doctrine. I especially appreciate her comments (229) that moderns find the ancient use of Greek categories problematic because our epistemology doesn’t understand the relationship between happiness, goodness, and truth in the same way.

I’ll probably want to come back and mull over pp. 228-233 further. I can’t help but think there’s more to what the patristic writers were doing than “doctrine shows people that God is loving and thereby inspires them to practice virtue,” but I’ll need to do some more digging… show less

B&C review (5-6/13) by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson on Ellen Charry's God and the Art of Happiness: a Christian theology of happiness

Ask a Christian if she's blessed and she'll reply--or at least she'll know she's supposed to reply--yes. Ask her if she's happy, and her instinct might be to deny it, whatever the reality. ... If you're happy, you're probably not very good at the Christian thing.

This skittishness is demonstrated by the extreme poverty of Christian reflection on the felicitous life. show more Charry excavates nearly all the sources in the first half of her book. She begins with the philosophical scene onto which Christianity burst: the competing schools of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism, each of which passed something on to the newborn faith while at the same time being fiercely criticized by it. The next episode in the story centers on the prolix St. Augustine, who treats the topic more than nearly any other theologian in Christian history. Contrary to what one might expect from his searching self-examination in the Confessions, Augustine argues strenuously in favor of self-love: that is, true self-love, divinely directed self-love. The conjunction of knowledge of God through Christ with love for God leads us toward our true happiness—eternal life with the Holy Trinity—and in the meanwhile gives us tools for retraining our souls divided by sin. "To be healed is to be happy." This is how Charry will ultimately construe her own proposal for Christian happiness.

The next step takes us into the cell of Boethius, an upright Roman Christian wrongly accused and sentenced to death. Facing an untimely end despite a life of virtue, Boethius writes out his own interview with Lady Philosophy, whose tough love prods him past self-pity, toward a confrontation with the fickleness of Fortune, and finally to an assurance of the reward in the life to come. Christologically impoverished and not terribly encouraging in hard times or even helpful in good ones, Boethius' vision seems to dominate even now when Christians give official voice to their views on happiness.

The picture improves when we skip ahead some centuries to the Angelic Doctor. Thomas Aquinas' whole theology is oriented toward the beatific vision, which is happiness supreme. Knowledge of God is also union with God; thus true intellectual growth is also moral growth. En route, human beings take righteous pleasure in their "secondary agency," enhancing the well-being of creation through use of their gifts and skills, helping God to achieve his own ends for the world. "Self-realization is living as an agent of the divine will." Happiness in this life is practice for happiness in the eschaton, which in both aeons includes a flourishing body and friends.

Charry gives a brief overview of Luther and Calvin before documenting the "rise of psychological egoism" in such figures as Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Mandeville, who could no longer distinguish between divinely formed self-love and sheer selfishness. They also assumed selfishness to be the single most driving force in humanity—Mandeville even suggested harnessing it for the sake of economic growth, and it would appear now that his prediction has been confirmed beyond his wildest dreams. Others tried to paint a less bleak picture of the human situation: Lord Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and to an extent Pascal.

But the figure Charry lifts up for renewed consideration is the Anglican divine Joseph Butler, who strove to combat the moral cynicism of his day by preaching the startling message that "self-love is obedience to God." Acknowledging sin, Butler argued from an imago dei anthropology that to live well is to fulfill our God-given nature; that we must learn from Scripture and preaching how to overcome our tendencies toward self-deception and self-gratification; and that we can indeed move toward moral integrity to live at peace with ourselves and God alike and with genuine benevolence toward our neighbors. These should not be perceived as being in competition with one another: "One does not subtract some affection for self and give it to another who needs it." Butler's arguments cut through the stale contemporary discussion about so-called altruism: loving one's neighbor is not a matter of self-sacrifice but of self-love—and it is perfectly good for it to be so. Christian cynics about the human capacity for love will be as startled by Butler's claims as his secular detractors!

After this doctrinal review, Charry moves to the second half of the book, where she coins her term for a long-overdue Christian doctrine of happiness, "asherism," derived from the Hebrew word asher, "happy." Her "realizing eschatology" of happiness emphasizes that we begin now what will be completed in the life to come...

Accordingly, Charry exposits the Ten Commandments and the Holiness Code with an eye to the moral development they inculcate to bring the people of Israel into a happy relationship with God and one another. Her handling of the commands to genocide is particularly valuable.

Theology has likewise often failed to recognize that "[h]appiness is not a matter of manipulating the world to secure our desire, but taking pleasure in being who Scripture teaches we are.

"The point is not how much we accomplish, but enjoying what God accomplishes with us." show less

Given to Matthew Hayes - 05/04/2023