Patristic Ethics (review)

Stanley S. Harakas. Patristic Ethics. In Wholeness of Faith and Life: Orthodox Christian Ethics. Pt. 1. Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 161. $12.95 (pb).

Perhaps Father Stanley Harakas's collection of six studies in patristic ethics will frustrate both historians and ethicists, at least those who insist on strict borders between their fields. Yet that lack could also be its chief virtue. The first in a series of three short volumes of Harakas's writings on Christian ethics in the Orthodox tradition, the book is instructive for those in other traditions as well. For along with its expositions of specific patristic authors, texts, and topics, it illustrates the possibilities (and possible traps) of ethical reflection done through living conversation with the ancient wisdom of a tradition. Done well, such a mode can only be good for the field of early Christian studies.

Harakas's book is most helpful when he allows patristic authors to set the terms of inquiry. "If by ethics we do not only mean a sustained rational argument on deontological or teleological themes" then not only may the approach "fill one's net with a rich harvest of material" as Harakas hopes (40), but a larger conversation with historical sources offers ethicists a way out of some of their more tired debates. Key to the approach is the conviction that ethics is insep-arable from theology, and thus, that many more patristic texts than first meet the eye exhibit ethical presuppositions and speak to ethical questions.

The first three chapters carry through on the promise here. Chapter 1 argues that a fundamental method for Christian ethics can be derived from a work not usually associated with ethics at all, the Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzos. Gregory's theology involves ethical presuppositions insofar as the triune God is identical with the good; for human beings in relationship to the Trinity, ethical judgment requires "wholistic and aesthetic" attention to what is "fitting and appropriate" (12). Rules and law merely express this in "pithy form" (16). A second chapter on Gregory suggests practical applications to contemporary debates such as ecology and criminal justice. Chapter 3 turns to John Chrysostom on the resurrection. For Chrysostom, Christ's resurrection does not simply promise life after death, but promises and motivates qualitatively new, resurrected moral lives in the present age. For Harakas, Chrysostom's view of the resurrection shows why doctrine and ethics are inseparable.

Chapters 4 and 5 are more problematic, precisely because Harakas seems to let modern philosophical ethics set the terms of inquiry in spite of himself. Chapter 4 seeks to identify the approach to ethical decision-making operative in the Long Rules of Basil the Great. An opening section on Basil's discussion of whether ascetics should rely upon "the medical art" is fresh and imaginative as it yields a whole (and holistic) worldview affirming by analogy the value of creation, arts and sciences, agriculture, and even cooking. But then Harakas takes the organic whole of Basil's ethical reflection and begins to dissect, then extract, eight criteria for ethical decision-making. Chapter 5 does something similar with the Canons of the Penthekte Ecumenical Council of 692. If Harakas is trying to show that premodern Eastern ethics can meet modern Western muster by elucidating abstract categories of rules, consequences, intent, motives, means, and so on, then his project risks becoming curiously though momentarily counter-productive insofar as he implies that it needs to meet Western muster. In any case, his work is probably of most interest for patristics when the moral wisdom of the Fathers is more clearly accessible on its own terms.

Standing somewhat on its own, chapter 6 surveys "The Teaching on Peace in the Fathers." While not attempting to break new ground on continuing debates over how consistent was the pacifism of the pre-Constantinian Church, the essay does break some ground simply by turning from topics of war and military to the "pro-peace bias" of...