Unity and the Holy Spirit 1st Edition

John E. Hare.
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/unity-and-the-holy-spirit-1st-edition-john-e-hare/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Destination C1 & C2 : grammar & vocabulary with answer

key 18 [printing]. Edition Malcolm Mann

https://textbookfull.com/product/destination-c1-c2-grammar-
vocabulary-with-answer-key-18-printing-edition-malcolm-mann/

English Grammar Exercises with answers Part 5 Your

quest towards C2 1st Edition Daniel B. Smith

https://textbookfull.com/product/english-grammar-exercises-with-
answers-part-5-your-quest-towards-c2-1st-edition-daniel-b-smith/

The Holy Spirit and Christian Formation:

Multidisciplinary Perspectives 1st Edition Diane J.
Chandler (Eds.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-holy-spirit-and-christian-
formation-multidisciplinary-perspectives-1st-edition-diane-j-
chandler-eds/

The Unity program 2021st Edition John Meadows Dave Tate

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-unity-program-2021st-
edition-john-meadows-dave-tate/
Genders, Sexualities, and Spiritualities in African
Pentecostalism: 'Your Body is a Temple of the Holy
Spirit' Chammah J. Kaunda

https://textbookfull.com/product/genders-sexualities-and-
spiritualities-in-african-pentecostalism-your-body-is-a-temple-
of-the-holy-spirit-chammah-j-kaunda/

The Holy Terrors (A Holy Terrors mystery) Green

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-holy-terrors-a-holy-terrors-
mystery-green/

Mastering UI Development With Unity An In Depth Guide

to Developing Engaging User Interfaces with Unity 5
Unity 2017 and Unity 2018 1st Edition Ashley Godbold

https://textbookfull.com/product/mastering-ui-development-with-
unity-an-in-depth-guide-to-developing-engaging-user-interfaces-
with-unity-5-unity-2017-and-unity-2018-1st-edition-ashley-
godbold/

The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire 1st Edition Sverrir

Jakobsson

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-varangians-in-gods-holy-
fire-1st-edition-sverrir-jakobsson/

The Holy Terrors 2nd Edition Simon R. Green

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-holy-terrors-2nd-edition-
simon-r-green/
Unity and the Holy Spirit
Unity and the Holy Spirit
J O H N E . HA R E
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© John E. Hare 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943507
ISBN 978–0–19–289084–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Preface vii
1. Introduction 1
1.1 The Four Main Influences 3
1.2 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy 5
1.3 Three Descriptions of the Good Life 9
1.4 The Beautiful and the Sublime 11
1.5 Gender 14
1.6 Love of Country 16
1.7 Contemplation 19
1.8 Unity 22
1.9 Conclusion 24
2. The Beautiful and the Sublime 26
Introduction26
2.1 Beauty as a Symbol of Morality 27
2.2 The Sublime 35
2.3 Beethoven and the Sublime 37
2.4 The Slow Movement of Op. 2, No. 2 40
2.5 The First Movement of the Third Symphony 41
2.6 Christian Autonomy 47
2.7 The Holy Spirit 49
3. Gender 55
Introduction55
3.1 Social Construction 57
3.2 What Is the ‘Something Inside’? 63
3.3 Centrality 65
3.4 Three Objections to Life-Narratives 71
3.5 Centrality and Gender 74
3.6 The Holy Spirit 79
3.7 Is There Only One Normative Trajectory? 83
3.8 Can We Change the Trajectory? 85
3.9 Is Gender Eschatological? 89
4. Love of Country 96
Introduction96
4.1 Kant’s Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Particularity 97
4.2 Love of One’s Country 100
4.3 Cosmopolitanism and Realism 105
vi Contents

4.4 Two Empirical Objections to Strong Cosmopolitanism 108

4.5 Kant on Theology and the Philosophy of History 111
4.6 Two Contemporary Atheist Cosmopolitans 117
4.7 Patriotism as a Perfection of Love of Humanity 122
4.8 The Holy Spirit 129
5. Contemplation 135
Introduction135
5.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I and X 135
5.2 Three Questions 142
5.3 What Is the Role of Desire in Contemplation? Augustine,
Bonaventure, and Scotus 147
5.4 Belief, Desire, and Justification 152
5.5 Who Is Doing the Contemplating? Ibn Tufayl, Maimonides,
and Eckhart159
5.6 God and Creature 166
5.7 How Is Contemplation Related to the Rest of Human Life?
Scotus and Kierkegaard 169
5.8 Contemplation and Haecceity 175
6. Unity 180
Introduction180
6.1 Unity 180
6.2 Unity with the World 182
6.3 Unity within a Person 191
6.4 Unity between People 200
6.5 Unity with God 208
6.6 Why Does the Spirit Aim at Unity? 214

References 221
Index of Biblical Passages 233
Index of Names and Topics 235
 Preface

This Preface is not going to try to introduce the book in terms of its content or
method. That is the function of the first chapter. The Preface will serve to thank
the many people who have been involved in the book’s coming to be.
The group I am most grateful to consists of Neil Arner, David Baggett, Chet
Duke, James Dunn, Karin Fransen, Janna Gonwa, Layne Hancock, Justin
Hawkins, Ross McCullough, Kaylie Page, Kyler Schubkegel, Matthew Vermaire,
and Sarah Zager. We went through the material chapter by chapter, and I received
many suggestions which ended up in the book. It was a privilege to discuss these
ideas with such talented and knowledgeable people.
The first four chapters were, in their original form, the Stanton Lectures at
Cambridge, just as the first chapters of the second volume of this trilogy (God’s
Command) were originally the Wilde Lectures at Oxford. At Cambridge I was
helped especially by the work of David Ford, Simeon Zahl, and Catherine Pickstock.
In addition, I have given the material to various audiences, and I would like to
thank the following people: Robert Audi, Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Chua, C. Stephen
Evans, Tony Ferraiolo, Bridget George, Philip Gorski, Thomas Hare, Julian
Johnson, David Kelsey, Charles Lockwood, Sarah Coakley, Markus Rathey,
Stephen Rumph, Chris Tilling, Linn Tonstad, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, and
Norman Wirzba.
I am very grateful to William Rowley, who has been my research assistant in
the revising stages and who has pointed out all sorts of errors as well as giving me
many suggestions for improvement.
My anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press gave me much
good advice.
The person who has been most influential in the substance of the book has
been my wife Terry. She died in July 2021, as I was starting to revise, and she was
sick with cancer for the three years before that. The four areas where I claim in
this book to see the influence of the Holy Spirit are all areas where Terry flour-
ished. She was a fine musician, specializing recently in the viola da gamba; she
and I lived through our son’s gender transition and she was a leader in our putting
our love for him first; she taught me what it is to be an American who loved her
country, even while being open-eyed about its faults; she was a person of deep
Christian faith and had a daily practice of prayer and reading Scripture. I miss her
terribly. I am not sad for her, since I think she is now in heaven, but I am sad for
all the rest of us who have to live without her. I have found that God still has good
things, however, even for those who mourn.
 1
Introduction

This first chapter is going to try to give a sense of the project of the book as a
whole. This is the third book in a trilogy, of which the volumes already published
are The Moral Gap and God’s Command. The overall project is trinitarian in the
following way. All three volumes concern the connection between moral theory
and the doctrine of the Trinity. The Moral Gap is about the work of the second
person, especially about atonement and justification. God’s Command is about the
work of the first person, especially about creation. This last volume is about the
work of the Holy Spirit, and especially about the Spirit’s work in the world. When
I described this project to my colleague at Yale, David Kelsey, he said that I needed
to write a fourth volume, explaining why I have split up the works of the persons
of the Trinity in this way. To be sure, we can properly talk about all three persons
doing all of these works. But I am not going to write this fourth volume, and the
trilogy is not in that sense about the doctrine of the Trinity at all. It simply appro­
priates a traditional reading of the assignment of different works to different per­
sons, and does not try to parse out in each case what part in these works each
person of the Trinity is playing in relation to the other persons.
The book is also not aiming at a complete doctrine of the Spirit. In particular, it
has more to say about the general work of the Spirit in the world than about the
special work of the Spirit in the church. The general work of the Spirit is very
broadly God’s activity within creation, from the time when ‘The Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters’ at Genesis 1: 2. But the project of this book is a
cumulative look at human engagement with the Spirit. The hope is that as we look
at various examples—­at the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, at gender
transition, at the relation between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and at the
practice of contemplation—­we will see that in each case an appeal to the work of
the Spirit helps us understand something that is otherwise mysterious. This gen­
eral work of the Spirit has been neglected in favour of treatments of the Spirit’s
work in the church, and this book is a corrective. We will connect the general
work of the Spirit with the doctrine of common grace in Chapter 4, section 4.8.
And we will discuss what kind of access we have to this work in Chapter 3,
section 3.8.
This project is a work of philosophical theology. This is the attempt to do the­
ology using the concepts and techniques of philosophy. Most of the great theo­lo­
gians in the Abrahamic faiths have in fact used philosophy, but philosophical
theologians make this use central and explicit, and are equipped by their training

Unity and the Holy Spirit. John E. Hare, Oxford University Press. © John E. Hare 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192890849.003.0001
2 Introduction

to do so. The contrast, when the term starts getting used in the eighteenth ­century,
is with biblical theology. Thus Immanuel Kant writes in Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason:

Over against biblical theology, however, there stands on the side of the sciences
a philosophical theology which is a property held in trust by another faculty.
This theology must have complete freedom to expand as far as its science
reaches, provided that it stays within the boundaries of mere reason and makes
indeed use of history, languages, the books of all peoples, even the Bible, in
order to confirm and explain its propositions, but only for itself, without carry­
ing these propositions over into biblical theology or wishing to modify its public
doctrines, which is a privilege of divines.1

By using the phrase ‘boundaries of mere reason’ Kant indicates that his own
­project in this book is the kind of philosophical theology he is talking about. The
context is that the theology faculty, made up of divines, has tried to restrict what
Kant is licensed to write and teach, and in this preface he defends his freedom
and the freedom of all those in the philosophy faculty (where this is construed
broadly to include all the academic disciplines except theology, law, and
­medicine). How exactly one sees the relation between theology and philosophy is
going to depend on one’s conceptions of the two disciplines. Just to take two
examples, already in the New Testament there are warnings against philosophy
(Colossians 2: 8) and Calvin in the Institutes inveighs against the Scholastic
philosophers.2 But in neither case is the attack on philosophy as such, but on
certain uses of it. Kant suggested that we see the relation between philosophical
theology and biblical theology as that between two concentric circles, with the

1 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni (henceforth Rel),
in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6: 9. I will make reference to Kant’s texts by the volume and page
number of the Berlin Academy Edition (Berlin: George Reiner, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900‒), and
I will use abbreviations of the German names for the works, as given in that edition. I will quote from
the English translations mentioned in this footnote, unless otherwise specified. The other texts are
these: The Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth MdS), in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans.
Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Conflict of the Faculties (hence­
forth SF), trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology; On the
Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy (henceforth M), trans. George di Giovanni, in
Religion and Rational Theology; Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth KrV), ed. and trans. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Critique of Practical Reason
(henceforth KpV) in Practical Philosophy; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth Gl), in
Practical Philosophy; Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987)
(henceforth KU); End of All Things, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology,
221–31; On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but it is of no Use in Practice, trans.
Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy; Lectures on Ethics (Collins), in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Toward Perpetual Peace (henceforth PP), in
Practical Philosophy.
2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles
(Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.2.2, 544.
 The Four Main Influences 3

historical revelation (for example in the Bible) in the outer area of revelation and
the revelation to reason as the narrower circle within it. He does not here put
philosophy as such within these limits, but the religion of reason, though philo­
sophers as such (including the philosophical theologian) on Kant’s conception
have to abstract from everything historical. He explicitly states that he is not
going to try to intervene in the outer area (biblical theology). He uses the Bible
frequently, but as a ‘vehicle’ to help him understand what is within the inside cir­
cle. The project of the present book is different in this respect from Kant’s. As with
Kant’s stated purpose, it is going to try to keep within the constraints of what the
Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit, as far as we can determine what this is, and it
is going to use the resources of philosophy to help us understand this. But unlike
Kant’s project in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, it does not treat
the Bible as merely a vehicle towards understanding something that is in principle
intelligible on its own.
One way this book is different from its two predecessors is that its subject mat­
ter is more personal. All four of the central examples that constitute the discus­
sion of Chapters 2‒5 come out of the author’s own experience. The book is more
personal because it is about the Holy Spirit, whose work is often inside us in our
hearts. This subject matter calls for a more personal treatment. Having said that,
the book is not merely about personal experience. It tries to locate its themes
within the long history of their discussion. Sometimes philosophers think they
can conduct their inquiries from scratch, but the ideas they use always in fact
have a history. Knowing that history helps because we can then see the original
association of the ideas we like with other ideas we do not like, and that can give
us a salubrious humility.

1.1 The Four Main Influences

The four main philosophical influences that have informed this work are Aristotle,
Scotus, Kant, and my father R. M. Hare. I wrote my Ph. D. dissertation at
Princeton about Aristotle’s account in Metaphysics of substance and essence, and
the effects of this account on his theory of the human good, or eudaimonia. His
treatment of contemplation and of unity will be our starting points in Chapters 5
and 6. When I was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, I lived for a year
in the room that Gerard Manley Hopkins had lived in, looking out of the same
window at the garden quad. I read all of his poetry, and because he was deeply
influenced by John Duns Scotus, I started reading Scotus. This is the second great
influence. From him I have taken themes of the individual essence that each one
of us has, and the priority in our relation to God of the activity of the will to that
of the intellect. The third great influence is Immanuel Kant. The philosophy and
classics degree at Oxford in the 1960s contained nothing on the syllabus between
4 Introduction

Aristotle and Frege. When I went to Princeton to study in their classical philosophy
program, I again read nothing for my courses between the Stoics and Bradley, and
only Bradley because Richard Rorty taught a course called ‘Idealism from Bradley
to Quine’. But it seemed to me that if I wanted to understand why we think now
the way we do in the West, I needed to understand Kant. So I read the whole of
Kant’s critical corpus on my own, without the benefit of any instruction or any
secondary sources. And because I read him that way, I was able to see in him
themes that the usual twentieth-­century secondary sources would have screened
out. I saw the centrality to Kant’s system of his moral theology. There has been a
sea change over the last thirty years or so in the study of Kant, and it is now more
common to spend time on his thoughts about God. This change has affected not
just the study of Kant, but of all the great founders of modernity in philosophy:
Descartes, for example, and Leibniz. When Bertrand Russell wrote his account of
Leibniz, he tried to formalize the whole system in five axioms and derivative the­
orems. God appeared in none of the five axioms.3 And Russell thought he was
doing Leibniz a favour; because Russell himself thought a system was better with­
out God in it, and because he deeply admired Leibniz, he min­im­ized Leibniz’s
own pervasive recurrence to the theme of the divine. So Kant appears a good deal
in this book, but it is not the Kant who is familiar from the prevailing scholarship
of most of the twentieth century.
The last of the four great influences is my father R. M. Hare, whose voice I con­
tinually hear in my head. His relation to Christian theology is complicated. His
first book was An Essay on Monism, which he wrote as a prisoner of the Japanese,
working on the Burma-­Siam railroad. It is strongly influenced by Plato and
Whitehead, whose Process and Reality was one of the few works of philosophy in
the library at Singapore where my father was stationed before he was captured.
I am his literary executor, and he gave me strict instructions not to publish the
book, even though it is full of the seeds of his later work. In this book he describes
himself as a Christian and the book is full of God. I have put the manuscript
together with the rest of his papers in an archive at Balliol, and I have written a
long chapter of God and Morality about my father, in which I quote lengthy
excerpts from the book that I thought would not embarrass him.4 When he came
back to Oxford after the war to complete his undergraduate education, there had
been what he called ‘a revolution in philosophy’. This was a revolution under the
banner of the logical positivists, and at Oxford the leading figure in the revolution
was Gilbert Ryle. In the new way of doing philosophy which my father embraced
there were two criteria for a statement to be meaningfully assertable: it had to be
verifiable (or falsifiable) empirically or a tautology. Sentences like ‘God created

3 Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Cosimo

Classics, 2008).
4 John E. Hare, God and Morality (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 156–62.
 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy 5

the heavens and the earth’ failed both of these tests for meaningful assertability.
On the other hand my father attended church regularly, and at Ewelme (where
my mother was director of the choir) he sang tenor, and he knew many of the
psalms by heart. He would say the Apostle’s Creed with the rest of the congrega­
tion, but always a little ahead, as though to express that he did not believe it in
quite the way they did. He published a famous contribution to what was called
‘The University Discussion’, responding to Anthony Flew and Basil Mitchell, in
which he called religious belief a ‘blik’, and adopted a position rather close to that
of Richard Braithwaite at Cambridge, that when I say something like ‘God created
the world’, I am expressing an attitude of confidence that in this world the good is
more fundamental than the evil.
In God and Morality I have tried to give a sustained account of the moral the­
ology of all four of these figures—­Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, and R. M. Hare—­and
I have suggested ways we might think about contrasting them and retrieving what
is useful from each of them.

1.2 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy

There are some themes from the first two volumes of the trilogy, The Moral Gap
and God’s Command, that this third volume will need to use.5 The theme of the
first book, referred to in the title, is that we need to see morality as having a gap-­
structure. There are three parts to this picture. The first part is the moral demand,
which the book claimed, following Kant, to be very high. The second part is our
natural capacities which are inadequate to the demand. The third part is as­sist­
ance from outside us to meet the demand.
Kant gives us various formulations of the supreme principle of morality, which
he calls ‘the categorical imperative’. The two most important are that we have to be
able to will the maxims of our actions as universal laws and we have to treat each
other as ends in themselves and never merely as means.6 Kant immediately refor­
mulates the first of these formulas: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to
become by your will a universal law of nature.’7 He is talking about the actions of
free agents, and so he does not mean that the maxim (the prescription of the
action together with the reasons for it) will become a law of physical nature, which
would imply on his view that humans lose their freedom. But nature has one fea­
ture that makes the analogy useful: nature is a system in which the same kind of
cause produces the same kind of effect in a lawful way wherever and whenever it
occurs. The law states not that this stone breaks this window, but that any stone of

5 John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996) and John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
6 Gl 4: 421, and 4: 429. 7 Gl 4: 421.
6 Introduction

a certain mass thrown with a certain velocity breaks any surface of a certain
­fragility. A law is expressed entirely in universal terms, where a universal term
(such as ‘mass’, ‘velocity’, ‘fragility’) is one that makes no reference to a particular
place or a particular time or a particular thing; a singular term is one that does
make such reference (such as ‘this stone’, ‘this window’). Kant is asking us to
imagine a similar system, but a system of moral permissions, in which our maxim
is included. Willing the maxim as a law requires that singular reference be elim­in­
able, just as in the statement of a law of nature, and this means that it requires
eliminating reference to me, the agent. As R. M. Hare puts it,

It follows from universalizability that if I now say that I ought to do a certain

thing to a certain person, I am committed to the view that the very same thing
ought to be done to me, were I in exactly his situation, including having the
same personal characteristics and in particular the same motivational states.8

The second formula, the formula of the end in itself or the formula of human­
ity, requires me, on Kant’s account, to share the morally permitted ends of those
affected by my actions; this is what treating another person as an end in herself
involves. The word ‘merely’ is important in this formula. Kant is not forbidding
using people, but we must never merely use. As he explains, to treat humanity as
an end in itself requires that ‘everyone tries, as far as he can, to further the ends of
others. For, the ends of a subject who is an end in itself must as far as possible be
also my ends, if that representation is to have its full effect in me.’9 Cases of decep­
tion and coercion are usually ruled out by this test because they are cases where
one party prevents the sharing of ends either by disguising her own end, or by
imposing it by force on another. I am not required however to share the immoral
ends of those affected by my action; that is the limitation Kant intends by saying
‘as far as possible’, and this means that the formula ends up defining what is mor­
ally permitted in a circular way.10
Both of these formulas of the categorical imperative R. M. Hare endorsed. He
learnt his Kant from H. J. Paton, and his own moral theory is best seen as a
restatement of a rational ethics in the Kantian mould, acknowledging the recent
developments in the philosophy of language associated with J. L. Austin and the
‘ordinary language’ school. My father had become a regular member of Austin’s
Saturday morning group, and he took from Austin the account of a ‘descriptive
fallacy’, the fallacy of supposing that the function of moral language is to describe,

8 R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 108.
9 Gl 4. 430.
10 MdS 6. 388: ‘whose permitted end I thus make my own end as well’, and 450: ‘The duty of love for
one’s neighbor can, accordingly, also be expressed as the duty to make others’ ends my own (provided
only that these are not immoral).’
 The Two Previous Volumes in This Trilogy 7

rather than, as Austin put it, ‘to evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to
influence it in special ways. Here too KANT was among the pioneers.’11
The moral demand is the first part of the ‘moral gap’ picture, and the second is
our natural capacities which are inadequate to the demand. Here too Kant is a
source. He believed in radical evil, which ‘corrupts the ground of all maxims’, and
which ‘cannot be extirpated by human forces, for this could only happen through
good maxims—­ something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme
ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.’12 The term ‘natural’ here is
tricky, and Kant uses it in different ways. In this passage he means the capacities
we are born with. In his view of radical evil Kant is following Luther in The
Bondage of the Will, who says ‘It is true that we stand where two roads meet, . . . and
the law shows us how impossible is the one, that leading to good, unless God
bestows His Spirit.’13 This takes us to the third part of the ‘moral gap’ picture
which is the assistance from outside us given so that we can live according to the
demand. The Moral Gap claims that the Christian picture is that God is the source
of the demand and God offers the assistance, and it discusses in particular the
assistance given in Christ’s atonement and our justification.
The picture of the moral gap allows us to see the central moral problem, which
is that we seem to be under a demand that we cannot meet, in Kant’s terms that
there is an ‘ought’ which does not imply a ‘can’. Actually, in Kant’s picture ‘ought’
still implies ‘can’, but it does not imply ‘can by our own devices’. Here again he is
following Luther, who is following Augustine who says, ‘God commands some
things which we cannot do, in order that we may know what we ought to ask of
Him.’14 So we see the Christian picture here which solves the problem by invok­
ing divine assistance. We also see three non-­Christian strategies for dealing with
the problem: I call them ‘reducing the demand’, ‘puffing up the capacity’, and
‘finding a substitute for God’s assistance’. Kant discusses all three of these strat­
egies and rejects them all.
The second volume of the trilogy, God’s Command, works out further what it
means to say that God is the source of the moral demand, the first part of the
moral gap picture. But here the book goes back not to Kant, but to Duns Scotus.
To understand this, we need to start with Aristotle’s account of substance. He says
in Metaphysics, ‘The complete result, such a kind of form in this flesh and bones,
is Callias or Socrates. What makes them different is their matter, which is

11 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3. The cap­­
ital­iza­tion of KANT is in the original, and Austin here makes Kant a hero of anti-­descriptivism.
12 Rel 6: 37.
13 Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Westwood, NJ:
Fleming H. Revell Co., 1957), 158.
14 Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 32, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. I, ed. and trans.
Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 759.
8 Introduction

different; but they are the same in form, since their form is indivisible.’15 Aristotle’s
account of substance here is that two individual substances, Callias and Socrates,
are made different by their matter, and they are the same in form or essence,
which is for both of them ‘humanity’.16 He says that what distinguishes a sub­
stance from a mere heap is that there is a cause of its unity.17 With a mere heap of
sand there is no good answer to the question: ‘Is this the same heap when five
grains of sand have been blown away?’. There will still be a cause of some grains
sticking and some not, but the cause is not internal to the nature of ‘heap’. With
natural substances, however, there is a nature given in a definition: ‘A definition is
a unitary formula, not by being bound together (as the Iliad is) but because it is
the formula of a unity.’ The nature ‘human’ determines when change is of such a
kind as to destroy the substance.
Scotus, by contrast, thinks there is an individual essence (e.g. ‘Socrateity’), the
philosophical term is a ‘haecceity’, which is something positive conferring a
greater and more perfect kind of unity on an individual substance, in the same
way that ‘human’ confers a greater and more perfect kind of unity than ‘animal’,
and ‘animal’ than ‘living thing’.18 A haecceity is in principle intelligible, and is in
fact intelligible to God. It is not intelligible to us, because of the limits of our
knowledge, so that our ability to refer to an individual essence outruns our ability
to understand it. It is, however, possible to love what one does not understand.
This is how we can love the individual essence of God even though we do not
understand it. The same is true about our love of our neighbours and even our
love of ourselves. We can love the individual essence of our neighbour, or of our­
selves, without understanding it. Scotus is in this way different from Aristotle, but
the emphasis on unity remains. There is a unity which all humans have in com­
mon and it comes from the being they have in common, and so too does any
unity follow by virtue of itself on some being or other.19 Scotus says here that just
as ‘human’ has the kind of unity that cannot be divided up into sub-­species, so
‘Socrateity’ has the kind of unity that cannot be divided up into littler substances.
In this way being human and being Socrates are different from being animal,
which can be split up into being human and being hedgehog.

15 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 8, 1034a5‒8, in Metaphysics Books Z and H, trans. with a commentary
by David Bostock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 14. I will cite the translation of Metaphysics by
Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973) unless I specify otherwise
(as here).
16 Not all scholars agree with me about this. See T. H. Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), 218.
17 Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII, 6, 1045a8ff, 39.
18 See Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 3, q. 5 and 6, in Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals:
Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham, trans. and ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 93–113.
19 See Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 3, q. 6, 101.
 Three Descriptions of the Good Life 9

There is a biblical passage that contains a related idea.20 We are told in

Revelation that God has for each of us a new name written on a white stone, which
God will give us in the next life but which we do not yet know. Names in Scripture
can express character, as when Jesus gave Simon the name ‘Peter’, literally ‘rock’,
and said ‘On this rock I will build my church’.21 So we can think of God as already
calling us by a name that expresses what God is calling us to become, even though
we do not yet know this name. Scotus says that the natural will ‘is directed
towards a perfection in which the will is really perfected; but real perfection is not
something general or universal, but something singular.’22 He goes on to describe
our beatitude as consisting in the enjoyment of the divine essence shared by the
three [divine] persons, so that we become co-­ lovers (condiligentes). God’s
Command suggests that we should see our destination as a particular way of lov­
ing God, and God’s command and (differently) God’s call to us as God’s way of
prescribing a route for us to this destination, which is not just our individually
loving God, but our doing this together with all other individual and unique co-­
lovers. The book also suggests that this destination is what gives us our dignity,
and so it is the foundation of the moral law that respects the dignity of each
human being. This proposal has the merit of not requiring that we now be mani­
festing our unique love of God to any observable degree, and so not ruling out
many human beings from having dignity. And it is consistent also with allowing
that we have the freedom to reject this destination.

1.3 Three Descriptions of the Good Life

We can now go on to the present project, the third volume of the trilogy. We will
look at the intersection of the doctrine of the work of the Spirit with moral theory,
paying attention to some ingredients of the good human life. There have been
many accounts over the last few decades of what the good human life contains.
Here are three such accounts. One version is given in the ‘objective list’ version of
utilitarianism found in Jim Griffin’s Well-­Being.23 He sets up a list of prudential
values, which he calls ‘the common profile’ because it provides a picture of nor­
mal human desires. ‘Virtually all persons, when informed, want to live autono­
mously, to have deep personal relations, to accomplish something with their lives,
to enjoy themselves.’ He then adds understanding, which is knowing about one­
self and one’s world. But this list of five has some important omissions. Here are
two. The list contains no communal values and no religious values. For Socrates,

20 Revelation 2: 17. 21 Matthew 16: 18.

22 Scotus, Ordinatio IV, suppl. dist. 49, q. 9, trans. Allan B. Wolter, ed. William A. Frank
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 157.
23 James Griffin, Well-­Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 114. I have discussed this list in more
detail in The Moral Gap, 128–33.
10 Introduction

it was a central value not merely to have a flourishing personal life but to be part
of a flourishing polis. Indeed, this puts the point too weakly. The institutions
(nomoi) of his polis were like his parents in that they formed his identity. His full
name included reference to his city: ‘Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, the
Athenian.’ And religious values are central to most people in the world. On one
account, on current rates of growth, by 2050 80% of the world’s population will
belong to one of the major religions.24 Suppose my deepest value is disengage­
ment from the world, or a life of union with God, would I be abnormal? Griffin’s
response to this point is to say that religious values are not in the ordinary sense
prudential values at all. But they do not belong in his account of moral values
either, and they are thus not given any place in his account of how we should
make decisions. What matters is not whether we call them ‘prudential’ values, but
whether we allow that they can be the central values in the desire profile of a
normal human being. Griffin’s list is symptomatic. To put this harshly, the list is
characteristic of an individualist, achievement-­directed, secular Westerner.
A second list that accommodates these two additions is John Finnis’s list of
basic values in Natural Law and Natural Rights.25 His list is not (like Griffin’s)
presented as comprehensive, but he thinks anything not included can probably be
explained in terms of what is. He lists life (and also health and procreation);
knowledge (making true judgements about the propositions we affirm or deny);
play; aesthetic experience (the appreciation of beautiful form); sociability (espe­
cially friendship, but also political and other forms of community); practical rea­
sonableness (including an intelligent ordering of emotion); and religion. It is
worth mentioning two omissions here as well. The first is that the good human
life is not here said to contain any particular relation to non-­human species of life.
We are now much more conscious than we were in 1980 of the importance to our
lives, not just instrumentally but intrinsically, of our relations to the whole array
of life forms around us. The second omission is the importance for human life of
the imagination, but this can probably be accommodated under ‘play’.
A third list that accommodates the two additions just made, as well as some
others, is the capability approach of Martha Nussbaum.26 She lists life; bodily
health (and so food and shelter); bodily integrity (and so security against vio­
lence, but also opportunities for sexual satisfaction); senses, imagination, and
thought (and so education, freedom of expression, and freedom of religious

24 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is
Changing the World (London: Penguin Books, 2009), vii. Both the term ‘belong’ and the term ‘religion’
are problematic here, but what matters is not the specific figure, but the point that excluding religious
values cuts out what very large numbers of people in the world care about deeply.
25 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 85–90.
26 Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 19. There are different ways to interpret her project, but I am assum­
ing her list is supposed to be more or less complete, and that the omission of gender identity is there­
fore a defect.
 The Beautiful and the Sublime 11

exercise); emotions (and so attachments to others, allowing love, grief, longing,

gratitude, and justified anger); practical reason (and so being able to plan one’s
life, and liberty of conscience); affiliation (and so freedom of assembly and pol­it­
ical speech, and not being discriminated against); a relation to other species of
living things; play; and control over one’s environment (and so political participa­
tion and property rights). Nussbaum has added to this list at various times. But
there is still a striking omission, which will be the main topic of Chapter 3, namely
a healthy relation to one’s own gender.
To try to discuss how all of these constituents of a good human life relate to the
Spirit’s work inside us would be truly an enormous undertaking. We are going to
look at just four: aesthetic pleasure, the relation to one’s gender, love of one’s
country, and contemplation. The principle of selection here is that these four are
examples of the four main different kinds of unity involved in a good human life:
unity between ourselves and the world (as in aesthetic pleasure), unity within a
life (as in gender transition), unity between human beings (as in love of one’s
country), and unity between us and God (as in contemplation).27 The project is to
learn about the character of the Spirit by learning about these different kinds of
unity that the Spirit leads us towards.

1.4 The Beautiful and the Sublime

Chapter 2 is about aesthetic experience. It will start with Kant’s argument that we
need to appeal to divine agency in order to explain how our experience of beauty
generates legitimate claims of universal validity. The chapter will continue with an
account of Kant’s treatment of our experience of the sublime, and it will illustrate
his meaning by an analysis of one of the movements of one of Beethoven’s early
piano sonatas and one of the movements of his symphonies. The account of aes­
thetic pleasure is important to Kant for its own sake, but also because he thinks
beauty is a symbol of morality, and because of this it can increase our respect for
the moral law when this is waning.28 Kant distinguishes between what he calls a
‘revolution’ of the will, which is outside of space and time and enabled by an
‘effect of grace’, and what he calls ‘reform’, which is a process within space and
time.29 He then associates the second with the work of the Holy Spirit.30 When he
argues for the place of God in explaining the extraordinary pleasure we get from
beauty and explaining why we ‘quarrel’ about it, it is again the Holy Spirit he has

27 There is a traditional idea of a fourfold alienation caused by sin, between us and the cosmos,
ourselves, other people, and God. See Anthony Akinwale, ‘Reconciliation’, in Oxford Handbook of
Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press,
2015), 545–57. The Spirit can be understood as working against this alienation. I owe this reference to
Neil Arner.
28 KU 5: 351. 29 Rel 6: 47. 30 Rel 6: 68–71.
12 Introduction

in mind, though he does not make this explicit in the Third Critique. Chapter 2
will go through the argument in detail, because it is obscure and not widely
known. It is significant here that Kant grounds aesthetic pleasure in the ‘free play’
of our two faculties of imagination and understanding, and the sense of life when
both faculties are in full, unimpeded activity and in unity with each other. This is
significant because it suggests that our experience of beauty lies in movement, and
Chapter 6 is going to suggest (using the work of John Dewey) that the unity
between us and the world which is manifested in our experience of beauty is
dynamic. We can see movement from the life or breath of the Spirit as moving us
towards beauty, both in its creation and in its enjoyment. When we see beauty as a
symbol of morality, it is because it gives us a perceptible reminder or image of the
way God fits what is outside us and our inner soul activity together into a coher­
ent whole. The union of our happiness and our virtue is our final end, our highest
good, and Kant is here translating within the boundaries of mere reason the idea
of the Psalmist that under providence justice and peace will kiss each other.31
Again, this fitting of the two together is a dynamic process, and again the Christian
will readily attribute it to the work of the Spirit.
The sublime has for Kant the same function as the beautiful in this respect, but
the structure is different. The sublime attaches, for example, to our experience of
power in nature: the hurricane and the stormy sea. As with the feeling of moral
respect there are two moments in this experience; first there is the moment of
humiliation in which we recognize our powerlessness, and then there is the
moment of recovery when we see our worth, and in particular our freedom which
transcends nature. Chapter 2 will try to illustrate this structure of the two
moments by referring to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 2, written
in 1796, just six years after Kant’s Third Critique, and the first movement of the
Eroica Symphony. Beethoven knew of Kant. He exclaims, ‘The moral law within
us and the starry heavens above us—­Kant’, quoting (the wrong way round) Kant’s
conclusion at the end of the Second Critique about what filled his mind with ever
new and increasing admiration and reverence.32 These are the words that appear
on Kant’s tombstone in Königsberg. Beethoven also uses the term ‘sublime’ (in
German erhaben), but this does not tell us much, because the term has various
senses, not all of them consistent with Kant’s usage, and Chapter 2 will try to
­distinguish them.
The association of beauty with the Holy Spirit is present in both Scripture and
tradition. We learn from Exodus 31: 2‒5, for example, that the Lord filled Bezalel
with the spirit of God, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of

31 Psalm 85: 10.

32 A. W. Thayer, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, vol. II, revised and ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 167. Beethoven is actually quoting from the astronomer
Littrow’s misquotation. The passage from Kant is KpV 5: 161.
 The Beautiful and the Sublime 13

craft. In the Christian tradition, the association is made by Irenaeus and Clement,
and by the Cappadocians.33 In Western theology, a conspicuous proponent has
been Jonathan Edwards, who says that the Holy Spirit, ‘being the harmony, excel­
lence, and beauty of the Deity, has the particular function of communicating
beauty and harmony to the world.’34 It is one of his great themes that the Spirit has
the special work of the production of beauty in us and the world, and though
Edwards does not use the term ‘sublime’ in this context, he has the same structure
as Kant of the two moments and he attributes to the Spirit the work of moving us
through them.
Kant is probably wrong in his single-­minded focus on moral goodness as our
end. He thinks of the next life as centrally an infinite progress towards this. He
thinks our moral goodness is the purpose of the whole creation. He thinks our
relationship with God is centrally a relation to the commander of our moral
duties. All of this is wrong. I suspect that even if the next life contains something
analogous to morality, it will look quite different and not present itself as con­
straint. But Kant is right that in the experience of the beautiful and the sublime
we come into contact with what holds the whole universe together. And on the
account in this book this access is the work of the Holy Spirit. One picture of this,
inspired by Plato, is Iris Murdoch’s picture in The Sovereignty of Good of the mag­
netic centre towards which everything else is drawn, and we will look at this in
Chapter 5, section 5.4.35 If we allow personality in the divinity (as she does not),
we can see this power of the good and the beautiful over us as not just ‘the con­
stant overflow of the life of God into creation’ in a Neoplatonist way like the sun
which ‘through no choice or deliberation, but by the very fact of its existence
gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its
illumination.’36 Instead, we can see this activity of God as God’s loving us and
manifesting this love in the person of the Spirit. The suggestion of this book is
that our experience of the beautiful and the sublime is one way the Spirit reaches
us to draw us to our destination. This idea implies that our experience is one of
movement, and Chapter 6 will use the aesthetic theory of John Dewey to look
at how dynamic form allows us through the work of art to reach the ‘unity of
experience’ which makes us ‘fully alive’.37

33 See Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2002); and ‘The Beauty of
God the Holy Spirit’, Theology Today, 64 (2007), 5–13.
34 Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 293, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed.
Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 384.
35 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970).
36 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24.
Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt, in The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology
(London: SPCK, 1940), 86–7.
37 John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin, 1934).
14 Introduction

1.5 Gender

Chapter 3 is about gender. I am starting from my knowledge of our eldest child,

born Catherine, who is now Thomas. He has given me permission to talk about
him. The strength of my starting point is that there is a real person involved,
though it would be better if he were writing this himself, and I cannot claim to see
inside his mind. The weakness is that my point of departure is anecdotal. I started
my reading with what he gave me to read, and I have met the friends that he has
wanted me to meet. It is quite possible that my sample is not properly representa­
tive. For example, it is possible that being trans male in a way like him differs sig­
nificantly in respects relevant to this chapter from the way many people are trans
female, and it is possible that what I write fits the first and not the second.
Chapter 3 will raise two presumptuous questions: What is gender identity?
And how essential is it to a human life? It will try to think about these questions
theologically, and transgender identity will be the lens through which we look at
them. The discussion is not about sexual preference or sexuality, which is separate
though not independent. The trans male whose life is the starting point of the
chapter has in fact lived with a cisgender male. But he went through a time before
transition when he identified as lesbian, and at transition he was then rejected
painfully by that community. All the various combinations of gender and sexual­
ity are possible here, and it is a different topic to discuss this.
We will look at the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and in particular the
claim that ‘sex’ is a biological term and ‘gender’ a term of culture or social con­
struction. Thomas has been insistent that his gender identity as a man is some­
thing he discovered, not something he made, though he has made his presentation
of this identity; in that sense he is a self-­made man. Again, this may just be him
and his friends. But this idea is a rich one. Chapter 3 will think of gender identity
as a three-­term relation, metaphysically speaking, though this is my phrase, not
his. He found something inside and he matched it at least roughly with some­
thing outside, with a social picture of what a man is like, and he himself, the third
term in the relation, his heart or his will, endorsed this match. Even if the social
picture is a construction, it does not follow that what he found inside himself and
matched at least roughly with this outside picture is itself a construction. The fact
that it is something found does not, however, mean either that it is something
immutable or that it is something about which the finder is infallible. In respect of
immutability, Thomas had an initial stage just before reconstructive top surgery
(at the age of 30) and just after it in which he was rigidly ‘man’, down to the colour
of his socks, but he has now become looser and more fluid. He would now
describe himself as gender-­fluid and non-­binary, though still not-­woman. And in
respect to infallibility, he would say that he was, for much of his life, not fully
conscious of his gender identity, trying to fit into a mould that was never, in fact,
comfortable for him.
 Gender 15

Thomas went through a period of severe depression before transition, and my

wife Terry and I had been worried that he might kill himself. He has given up the
Christian faith of his youth, and I think part of the reason for this is what he per­
ceived as the normativity about gender inherent in Christianity and in the church.
He is now much happier, and he has been involved with an organization
‘Transmission’, which runs retreats for trans males, who often find themselves in
isolated and vulnerable circumstances. He has been freed to care for others and to
pay attention to the beauty of the world around him in ways that are, to our
observation, new to him.
The project of Chapter 3 is, however, theological, even though Thomas does
not construe his life theologically. The part of theology in question is the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit, and this in two ways. First, there is a good route, so to speak,
from where we are now, taking into account where we have been, to where we are
headed, and the Spirit guides us along this route. Speaking theologically, our des­
tin­ation is to become, as Scotus puts it, co-­lovers (condiligentes), entering together
into the love that is between the persons of the Trinity. But, second, the Spirit has
the role of convicting us of sin. The three-­term relation mentioned in the previous
paragraph involves reference in its second term to a ‘social picture of what a man
is like’. Speaking theologically, we should be deeply suspicious of these social pic­
tures, because they have been corrupted by sin. The prevailing social categories
entrench power relations. This does not mean that they are solely sinful; they may
contain good. The point is that they are a mixture.
The three-­term relation mentioned previously contains in its first term some­
thing found inside. Chapter 3 will try to give a positive account of this in terms of
a set of preferences, for example for having hair on the face and other places on
the body, a preference for having a voice in the lower register (so as to sing tenor
or bass, and not alto or soprano), a preference for having a flat chest and a certain
musculature. These are all what are often called ‘secondary’ sexual characteristics.
They are amazingly manipulable with hormones and surgery, and they are sep­ar­
able from reproductive capacity. But the preferences extend further, and here it
gets tricky. There is a whole set of practices conventionally associated with these
characteristics, and the trans male may accept some of these practices, and have a
preference to play a certain role in them, and reject others. The central con­struct­
ive suggestion of the chapter will be that the set of preferences he discovers can be
described under a normative life-­narrative that relates where he is now, how this
has developed over time, to where his life is headed. The narrative is normative in
the sense that it is a story about where we should be ending up, not merely a pre­
diction about where we will in fact end up. The narrative gives a sense of unity of
meaning and purpose to a life. But it is perfectly possible to have the sense that
one is not at the moment in the place the narrative says one is supposed to be. We
can then ask whether gender is central to the narrative. For Thomas for a while
gender transition was the most important thing in his life. The chapter will
16 Introduction

accordingly distinguish between centrality to the path and centrality to the

­des­tin­ation. For many people, including him, gender is central to the path. But
the chapter will remain agnostic about the destination.
This will bring us finally to the theology, and we will look at a poem by Richard
Crashaw about Teresa of Avila that describes her in transgendered language. The
chapter will raise four theological questions about gender, taking gender transi­
tion as the starting point. The first question is whether gender is a proper part of
our eschatological destination, and the chapter will answer that we just do not
know. The second is whether God has for each of us only one trajectory, or
whether God has alternatives. The third is whether we can change the proper tra­
jectory by our own choices, or whether it is all God’s choice. The fourth question
is whether we should think that gender transition might be an answer to a
prompting by the Holy Spirit. There is a weighty objection to this from the first
few chapters of Genesis, which we will look at. But the chapter will say yes, partly
because we can sometimes see in such a transition the fruit of the Spirit, though
this is not usually sufficient to establish this. The chapter will describe some
changes in the trans male we have been thinking about that seem to fit this claim.
The chapter will say yes also because we can see in the trajectory that includes
transition the kind of unity that is characteristic of the work of the Spirit. What
kind of unity is this? In the case of the third chapter the unity is teleological; the
path makes sense because of the destination. This is also true in the middle of the
path which can make at least provisional sense of the earlier stages. Looking back
after the transition, we can see that what earlier seemed like anomalies now
become intelligible. Looking forward, we get glimpses of what is to come. We get
now in this life, through the Spirit, something that points forward to and is an
earnest of our life in the world to come. Chapter 6 will discuss Kierkegaard’s
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing as a source of the idea that there is a kind of
unity in a life that is transparent to vocation.38 The narratives that people can tell
about their lives including transition makes sense of those lives as responding to a
call. Even though parts of those narratives include significant suffering, the shape
of the life allows even that suffering to be used for the benefit not only of them­
selves but of others who are going through the same sort of trauma.

1.6 Love of Country

Chapter 4 is about our political lives. It reflects on the situation as the chapter was
being written under the presidency of Donald Trump. The chapter reflects on my
experience of leaving one country that I loved and becoming a citizen of another.

38 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper &
Row, 1956).
 Love of Country 17

It is thus about a kind of transition, in a similar way to Chapter 3. I was also for
one period of my life back in the early 1980s working for the U.S. House of
Representatives, on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the
Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, and what I say will be informed by
that experience. Lee Hamilton, who was head of the committee, used to say that
he was afraid that more and more of American political life was becoming like
abortion, an area of policy where Congress was long paralysed because opinion
in the country was so polarized that any position taken by a member of Congress
would fire up equal and powerful opposition. Hamilton’s fear about polarization
has turned out to be justified.
The chapter will start with a tension in current political life in the United States,
and maybe it is the same in other countries, between two ideals: cosmopolitanism
and patriotism. Cosmopolitanism is the idea that we are citizens (politai) of the
cosmos. This is Kant’s home territory and he has been very influential in the
development and the spread of the idea. Patriotism is love of one’s own country,
and Kant, though he manifests it, says less about it explicitly. Chapter 4 suggests
that there are resources in his moral theology for holding these ideals together,
and that when this moral theology is rejected the tension between them becomes
acute. Kant says that we have to be able to will our action together with our rea­
son for it as a universal law. His formulation makes it morally impermissible to
make ineliminable reference to individuals. R. M. Hare, following H. J. Paton,
repeats Kant’s exclusion in affirming the necessary universalizability of moral
judgement. This strongly affects the question of the moral status of patriotism.
I can, to be sure, love my country for universal properties that it has that other
countries could also have, for example the property of having lofty mountains
and fertile plains. But I can also love it because of its unique history or because
it is my country. It would seem that on the Kantian formula, this cannot be a
morally permitted love, because it contains ineliminable reference to an individual
region of space and time or to me. Chapter 4 will challenge this claim.
Cosmopolitanism comes in different forms. We can define cosmopolitanism,
as Robert Audi does, as giving ‘some degree of priority to the interests of human­
ity over those of nations’, and we can say that the stronger this priority is, the
stronger the cosmopolitanism.39 But there has been a long tradition in US foreign
policy of denying the claims of strong cosmopolitanism. The so-­called ‘political
realists’ such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau held that while it may
be reasonable to hope for altruism or self-­sacrifice at least in a tainted form from
individuals in some contexts, it is never reasonable to hope for it from groups,
and especially not from nation states. It is striking, however, that the political
realists, no less than the cosmopolitans, relied on Kant. It is a different part of

39 See Robert Audi, ‘Religion, Politics, and Citizenship’, in Reasons, Rights, and Values (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 286.
18 Introduction

Kant they relied on, the doctrine of radical evil and the doctrine that it is by social
association that this evil is activated. Since both the political realists and the
cosmo­pol­itans trace their ancestry to Kant, we should ask whether he has a con­
sistent view about these questions. The important point for our present purposes
is that his moral theology here, the possibility of divine assistance, makes it
­consistent for Kant to say both that, as individuals and groups, we are subject to
rad­ical evil and that we are under the obligation to seek for a greater union.
When this moral theology drops out, the tension between cosmopolitanism
and patriotism becomes acute. Two examples of this are the work of Seyla
Benhabib and the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah.40 Benhabib has a teleology.
She is committed to a ‘cosmopolitanism to come’ and she expects it to come, but
she has explicitly rejected the Kantian ground for such a hope, namely the op­er­
ation of providence. What, then, grounds the hope? Appiah has a different view of
the meaning of ‘cosmopolitanism’. But he too is left, since he has abjured any
theo­logic­al resources, with an unmediated conflict between local and univer­
sal values.
Chapter 4 will discuss what loving one’s country is like, and the various ways it
can go wrong. There is a ‘practical contradiction’ when one violates, in the name
of love of country, some value for the sake of which one loved one’s country in the
first place. Examples are not hard to find. How does moral theology help with
avoiding these practical contradictions? The central point is that God both binds
us into local community and then sends us out beyond it. In the story of the Good
Samaritan, neighbouring the wounded Jew does not require abandoning the
Samaritan community. The neighbour is a good Samaritan by neighbouring if he
is following the commands of his God. Surely the point of the story is that if
Samaritans can do this, Jews should be able to do it too? It is our very commit­
ment to the God worshipped in our community that then sends us out beyond it.
There is a principle of providential proximity, that God puts us next to the people
God wants us to help. Whereas for the Good Samaritan this was geographical
proximity, it is not always this. The Holy Spirit helps us discern whom we are
being put next to. This work of providence solves what Kant sees as a co­ord­in­
ation problem. ‘This duty will need the presupposition of another idea, namely of
a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single
individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.’41
Talking about God including us within a community and then sending us out
beyond it makes it sound as though the community has only instrumental value,
and this is not right. In fact, achieving love of country is an accomplishment
in itself, and the love perseveres when we go beyond it. Again writing

40 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
41 Rel 6: 98.
 Contemplation 19

autobiographically, when I was working for the U.S. Congress in Washington,

I met regularly with a group that was started by John Bernbaum. He was working
with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and had been
working before that for the State Department. The group was composed of staff
members from all over Congress, working for Members of the House and for
Senators who came from all over the political spectrum. What we had in com­
mon was that we were Christians. I do not know if such a group exists now. What
was remarkable is that we were able to pray together for the country. This was not
bipartisan, in the sense of somehow accommodating the interests of left and right
(though some of what I did for the Committee on Foreign Affairs was, in that
sense, bipartisan). Rather, what we did together went beyond partisan loyalty to a
love of the country that was better than this. This was difficult then, and is even
more difficult now, but I think it was our common Christian faith that made it
possible for us. We sometimes experienced together the Spirit drawing us towards
unity. Chapter 6 will use the work of Philip Gorski, American Covenant, to illus­
trate the idea of a covenant between God and a country, which is different from
religious nationalism, and holds that country accountable to standards that it
often in fact violates.42 The unity involved here is unity around a set of values or
aspirations embodied in a history even if that history does not live up to
those values.

1.7 Contemplation

Chapter 5 of this book is about contemplation. It starts with Aristotle and a ten­
sion in his account. Aristotle is important not only because of the merit of his
ideas in themselves, but because all the major Abrahamic faiths have reached
their theologies in dialogue with him. Both Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics
end with the teaching that the best human life is one focused on contemplation.
But both works also begin with an emphasis on the active life. In the middle ages
this distinction gets abbreviated into the dispute between the active life and the
contemplative life. The chapter will go through various exegetical ways of trying
to resolve this tension, none of which succeed. Still, the tension is fruitful. Both
Aristotle’s teaching in praise of the active life and his teaching in praise of the
contemplative life have merit, and we need to find a way to think through whether
we can combine these merits into a single account.
The chapter will proceed by deriving three questions from this tension in
Aristotle. The first is about what place Aristotle gives to desire in contemplation.
He says different things about this, and the central difficulty is whether to think of

42 Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
20 Introduction

contemplation as an activity, in his technical sense, or as a process. The focus in

this chapter is not on whether we can make Aristotle consistent, but on what we
should ourselves say about the place of desire or love in contemplation. We will
start with Augustine On Free Choice, and his account of wisdom (as opposed to
knowledge) as discerning the highest good and then acquiring it by loving it in an
activity of the will or heart. We then go on to Bonaventure and Scotus.
Bonaventure sees himself as following Augustine here, and says that our loving
God transcends our understanding, so that the heart has to leave the intellect
behind.43 The question of how the intellect relates to the will raises a prior ques­
tion of how belief relates to desire. Contemporary philosophy has coined the term
‘besire’ to indicate something that is both a belief and a desire, when we think
a thing is good.44 We can avoid the neologism by appealing to the doctrine of
‘prescriptive realism’, which was the topic of chapter four of God’s Command.
Prescriptive realism combines prescriptivism about the evaluative judgement
with realism about the evaluative property. We contemplate the goodness or bad­
ness that is really there, and in that contemplation we are moved towards it or
away from it. In this way we can admit the loving and the activity of the heart into
the contemplation. The chapter will discuss the implications of this view for
accounts of justification by faith.
In this life the loving may sometimes be a longing, as the Psalmist says: ‘As the
deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.’45 In the next life
we do not know, but we can speculate that there too there may be a sense of God’s
greatness as greater than ours and then a sense of God’s sweetness as accepting us,
and perhaps this is an analogous transition of moments within the next life to the
Kantian sublime in this life. This assumes that our next lives are in something
analogous to motion, and in this way differ from God’s life. This does not mean
there is no rest for us there, but perhaps the rest is best seen as part of the path
rather than its destination. In the Abrahamic faiths the more usual word for our
attending to God is ‘prayer’ rather than ‘contemplation’. And the prayer, and the
longing it expresses, will not only be for personal union with God but for a world
in which justice and peace embrace.
The second question from Aristotle is whether the person doing the contem­
plating is in fact the human being or, rather, some divine entity occupying the
human soul. Aristotle’s notorious treatment of the active intellect in De Anima III,
5 raises this same question. But again the goal is not to determine what Aristotle
himself meant, and the text here is so terse that determining this may not be pos­
sible. Rather, the goal is to look at the resonance of this question within Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. I will talk about three figures: Ibn Tufayl (Hayy Ibn

43 Bonaventure, Collations II. 30, in The Works of Bonaventure V: Collations on the Six Days, trans.
José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970).
44 Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 45 Psalm 42: 1.
 Contemplation 21

Yaqzan), Moses Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed), and Meister Eckhart

­(especially his account in his Sermons of the story of Martha and Mary). While
there is ambivalence in all three, there is also in all three the following argument:
First, our chief good is centrally an activity of the intellect; second, our intellects
are identical with their contents and in the case of contemplation this content is
God; third (in conclusion), our chief good is to become identical with the divine.
This is how the second question from Aristotle relates to the first. If we admit the
loving or longing into the contemplation, there is less inclination to say that we
disappear into God.
The third question from Aristotle is about the place of contemplation in the
rest of life. Suppose we say that the goal of our lives is ‘to love God with all our
heart, mind, soul and strength’, and (like Scotus) we say that loving the neighbour
is included, because we love the neighbour’s potential or actual love of God. Still,
following Scotus, it might seem that we would have to be thinking about God all
the time and with perfect intensity and ‘a recollection of all our faculties’ in order
to love in this way, and that this is beyond our capacity in this life. Perhaps the
closest we could get would be to enter a monastery. But here Kierkegaard gives us
a good corrective. There are spiritual dangers in the monastery no less than in the
public square. The chapter will end by distinguishing the kind of prayer that is
being open to God in the way our lungs are open to the air and the kind that
requires different degrees of separation. In regard to the second kind, it will pro­
pose that there is no ranking across lives of a ‘contemplative’ life over an ‘active’
life. Everything depends on a person’s particular ‘haecceity’ or thisness, seen as a
particular way of entering into the love that is between the persons of the Trinity.
In that sense we participate in the divine loving. But the destination is that our
different ways of loving God are completed by each other and so are ‘perfected
into unity’.46
This account of contemplation tells us something about what we are contem­
plating. God moves us by loving us from outside us, and the divine love generates
a human love in response. But this love of ours is inadequate to its object. We
need and call for help, and God supplies it. This is the origin of the term ‘Paraclete’,
which is from the Greek for someone who is called (kalein) alongside (para). But
we get not just divine assistance but a particular answer to the three questions
from Aristotle. The Spirit is the source of our love for God, which the Spirit pours
into our hearts.47 The Spirit is also the presence of God in us.48 And finally the
Spirit, by being present in us, guides us into how to live the rest of our lives.49

46 John 17: 23. 47 Romans 5: 5.

48 Galatians 3: 2–5. I am influenced here, and elsewhere in this book, by Simeon Zahl, The Holy
Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 124f.
49 John 14: 25–6.
22 Introduction

Chapter 6 will use some ideas from Pascal’s Pensées to make the point that the unity
we can have with God is centrally a unity of love and so a unity of the heart.50

1.8 Unity

All four of the preceding chapters have been about examples of different kinds of
unity: unity between ourselves and the world, unity within ourselves, unity with
each other, and unity with God. The book has not yet asked explicitly: What is
unity? This is the topic of the sixth and final chapter, and we start again with
Aristotle. In Metaphysics Aristotle gives us a list of the senses in which something
can be said to be ‘one’.51 Something can be one by ‘continuity’, as when pieces of
wood are glued together to form a platform, or one by ‘genus’, which can mean
one in matter or one in logical genus. But the most important kind of unity is
where there is a whole constituted by a form. Aristotle’s example is a shoe. If I take
the shoe parts and glue them together randomly, I may have the unity of continuity.
And if they are all made of leather, and are all shoe parts, I may have the unity of
genus. But I do not have the unity of form until the parts are assembled in such a
way as to give protection to the feet when I walk. Artefacts are not, however, the
best examples of what Aristotle means by ‘form’; his paradigm is the life of an
organism. Two individual humans, Socrates and Callias, are the same in form
because they both have human life, and the form ‘human’ is indivisible into other
units that give form or essence. Scotus here disagrees, but that does not matter for
present purposes. The rest of the chapter looks at different ways we can think of
the Spirit bringing unity as a kind of life.
In terms of aesthetic pleasure, the Holy Spirit acts, on the account in Chapter 2,
like an artist bringing about what is beautiful and sublime, which is in both cases
a kind of wholeness. In the case of beauty we have what Kant calls ‘purposiveness
without a purpose’, where the form is not one for which we can give the rule, but
it still gives us the vitality of ‘free play’ between the imagination and the under­
standing. In the case of the sublime the unity is that of two ‘moments’ making
something together that neither could make on its own. We can see how the
Spirit, being an artist, would inspire human artists to do the same. Chapter 6
looks at some places in Scripture where the Spirit is said to do this. But though
Kant’s analysis of what is beautiful and sublime is the focus of Chapter 2, we
should allow, as Kant does not, that the final value of beauty goes beyond its value
as a symbol of the highest moral good. It may be that there is something analo­
gous to what is beautiful and sublime in our eventual state, and what is beautiful
and sublime in the present life can be a foretaste of this. Bonaventure is better

50 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995).

51 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 6.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
minute) and respirations (6 per minute) in connection with a mild
peritonitis, intestinal catarrh, colicy pains and diarrhœa. The
conjunctiva is pale, the pulse compressible, the respirations unequal
and accompanied by a moan, and the appetite impaired or lost.
If confined to mere spots on the liver, a restoration to apparently
vigorous health may take place, but if extensive it may lead to
compression and obstruction of the portal vein or bile duct, or to
compression and atrophy of the liver, with corresponding symptoms.
Treatment. As in other congestions of the liver, the use of salines
to deplete the portal system, and of alkaline diuretics are especially
indicated, to be followed by bitters and mineral acids. Sinapisms and
other counter-irritants to the region of the liver are of great service.
If not complicated with abscess, or microbian infection, cases of this
kind will often do well.
 CIRRHOSIS OF THE LIVER. FIBROID
DEGENERATION.

Definition. Increase of connective tissue, decrease of gland parenchyma. Causes:

in man, alcoholism; in animals, chronic heart disease, chronic recurrent
perihepatitis, biliary obstruction, toxins. In horses: age, emphysema, unwholesome
fodders, vegetable alkaloids, infection. Symptoms: prostration, hebetude, impaired
appetite, colics, constipation, later diarrhœa, unthriftiness, emaciation, dropsy,
icterus, ascites, intestinal catarrh, tender hypochondrium, early fatigue. Lesions:
increase of connective tissue, compression and absorption of parenchymatous
tissue, greatest around portal vessels, thickening of fibrous stroma between
capillaries of acini, shrunken, granular, pigmented liver cells. Treatment: salines,
Glauber salts, diuretics, sodium carbonate, or iodide, or salicylate, derivatives,
mineral acids, bitters, open air, laxative food, pure water. In cattle: obstruction to
circulation or the flow of bile; advances from the vessels, causes absorption,
caseated foci, adhesions, enlarged liver. Symptoms: jaundice, yellow, red,
albuminous urine, chronic indigestion, tends to fatal though slow advance.
Treatment: green food, open air life, saline laxatives, alkalies. In dog: common
following heart disease, parasites, bacteria. Lesions: Congested brownish red liver,
fibroid increase from Glisson’s capsule, compression of acini, their elevation above
surface, fatty and pigmentary degeneration of hepatic cells, increasing sclerosis.
Symptoms: as in parenchymatous hepatitis with slower advance, in time tender
loins, brownish or reddish urine, ascites, intestinal catarrh, it may be icterus.
Treatment: Correct cardiac troubles, digitalis, strophanthus, and intestinal, careful
diet, mineral acids, bitters, pure water, saline laxatives, antiseptics, alkaline
diuretics. Potassium iodide. Derivatives. Draw off liquid. Laxative non-stimulating
diet.

Definition. An interstitial inflammation of the liver characterized

by a great increase of the connective tissue and compression, atrophy
and degeneration of the glandular elements.
The same final result may undoubtedly originate in various
different primary morbid processes.
 In man cirrhosis is looked upon as almost always the result of
abuse of alcohol. In animals this cannot be the case, apart from a few
kept in connection with breweries or distilleries.
In heart disease a long continued mechanical congestion of the
liver causes compression and degeneration of the secreting cells in
the centre of the acini (around the intralobular veins), while the
peripheral portions undergo cell proliferation and increase of
connective tissue.
In chronic or recurrent perihepatitis, a whole lobe may be
compressed by the hyperplasia of the investing connective tissue,
and the hepatic cells are degenerated and absorbed.
Overdistension of the biliary ducts from obstruction to the flow of
bile (gall stone, catarrhal inflammation, constipation), leads to
proliferation and hyperplasia in the walls of the biliary radicals
throughout the entire liver.
The presence in the liver of toxic agents, ingested, or generated
from microbian fermentation in the intestinal canal or liver is
another recognized cause of connective tissue hyperplasia.
 CIRRHOSIS IN THE HORSE.
Cirrhosis of venous origin has been observed mainly in old horses,
while hypertrophic cirrhosis from biliary obstruction occurs rather in
the young (Cadeac). Bruckmüller records a case of the first kind in a
horse with extreme pulmonary emphysema. Walley gives a bad
condition of fodders as the main cause, virtually implying, in many
cases, infective catarrh and obstruction of the biliary ducts.
A form of the disease prevails at Schweinsberg in Hesse, and has
been variously attributed to spoiled fodders (Nicklas), to vegetable
alkaloids and other poisons in the food (Friedberger and Fröhner), to
clover, to telluric poisons (Redner), to infection (Meminger), and to
heredity (Neidhardt). It is a suggestive fact that it is confined to the
valleys of the Ohm, Glon, and Zusam where the land is peaty or
swampy and subject to inundations, while it is unknown on the dry
table lands (Friedberger and Fröhner). This strongly suggests
intoxication with microbes or their deleterious products. The gastric
catarrh that frequently attends the disease may point in the same
direction.
Symptoms. These are too often general rather than diagnostic.
Dullness, prostration, hebetude, yawning, hot, sticky mouth, lost,
irregular or depraved appetite, colics, constipation or diarrhœa, dry,
harsh coat, emaciation, weakness, œdema of the limbs, vertigo and
drowsiness may be among the symptoms. More characteristic are
icterus, abdominal distension from ascites, or congestion of the liver,
yellow or high colored urine, intestinal catarrh, indigestion, and
tenderness in the region of the liver. The mucosæ are usually pale at
first and not always icteric later. On exertion the horse shows early
fatigue, tumultuous heart beats and oppressed breathing.
The Schweinsberg disease often lasts for months, with alternate
improvements and exacerbations, but almost invariably ends in
death, and sometimes completely depopulates a stable.
Lesions. These consist primarily in the great increase of the
connective tissue and the relative decrease of the hepatic tissue. This
is usually mostly around the divisions of the portal vein and the
periphery of the acini, but also in the end around the hepatic veins as
well. When it has formed around the biliary canals there is a great
increase of the liver (often doubled) and its edges have become
rounded. Within the acini the increase of the fibrous stroma is seen
between the radiating capillaries, and the hepatic cells are
contracted, granular, pigmented, and comparatively destitute of
protoplasm around the still persistent nucleus.
Treatment. Glauber salts to clear the bowels of offensive matter,
and deplete from liver and portal vein, bicarbonate of soda or iodide
of potassium to eliminate the poisons through the kidneys and to
lessen the induration, and finally salicylate of soda as a liver
stimulant and intestinal antiseptic are suggestive of the line of
treatment that may be pursued. The saline laxatives and diuretics,
and antiseptics may be changed for others according to special
indications, and bitters and mineral acids may be resorted to.
Counter-irritants to the right hypochondrium should not be
neglected in case of local tenderness. In the otherwise fatal
Schweinsberg disease, Imminger, Künke and Stenert had a
remarkable success from the free use of potassium iodide, which
suggests a cryptogamic origin, as this agent is so valuable in polyuria
which results from musty fodder. In all cases, gentle exercise in the
open air and a moderate ration of laxative food (green) are of great
value. Above all the old suspected diet should be carefully avoided,
also any impure water supply.
 CIRRHOSIS IN CATTLE.

This has been recorded by different observers and usually as the

result of some obstacle to the circulation, or of catarrh and
obstruction of the biliary passages. Morot saw it in young calves,
which showed greatly enlarged liver (in one case 24 lbs.) and
kidneys, the former containing numerous cysts and marked sclerous
thickening around the vessels. This advancing thickening of the
connective tissue, causes increasing firmness of the liver and
absorption, distortion and diminution of the lobules. Albrecht
describes a chronic interstitial hepatitis with caseated centres
(nontuberculous) many of them an inch in diameter. The liver is
brown or grayish with whiter callosities which extend into its
substance and make points of attachment to the diaphragm or other
adjacent organ. The contrast between the fibrous layers and the
hepatic tissue has been likened to a checker board (Höhmann). The
enlarged liver may weigh 30 lbs.; in one remarkable case it weighed
300 lbs. (Adam). The bile is of a light color and mixed with mucus.
Symptoms. The symptoms are indefinite: a gradually increasing
jaundice, the passage of yellowish red urine becoming more and
more red and albuminous, and finally coagulating on the walls of the
urethra or on the litter, chronic indigestion, salivation (Schäffer),
weakness, breathlessness and more or less fever may give indications
of the disorder. Höhmann failed to find tenderness of the right
hypochondrium. The disease is liable to go on to a fatal issue, so that
it is often sought to prepare the animal for the butcher.
Treatment will follow the same line as in the horse. Green food,
pasturage, open air life, saline laxatives, and alkalies with a free use
of potassium iodide to check the sclerosis will be indicated.
 CIRRHOSIS IN THE DOG.

In the dog, cirrhosis is much more common than in the larger

animals, in connection with idle pampered habits, the frequency of
diseased heart and consequent disturbance of the circulation, and
the presence of parasites in the liver or biliary ducts. Bacteria
intoxication and infection are also common.
Lesions. The liver is at first tumefied, with hard consistency and
rounded edges, and a deep brownish red color, but this is modified
by the grayish fibroid hyperplasia which is especially abundant in
and around the vaginal sheaths of the capsule of Glisson. In cases
arising from diseased right heart or lungs the induration is rather
concentrated around the hepatic veins. The contraction and
shrinking of the fibroid hyperplasia as the disease advances causes
the projection of the hepatic tissue in minute rounded elevations
which give a peculiar uneven appearance to the surface of the organ.
The fibroid growth gives a remarkable hardness to the liver which
resists even the edge of a knife. The hepatic cells are the seat of fatty
and pigmentary degeneration. Inflammation and tumefaction of the
kidneys, and ascites are common features of the malady.
Symptoms. The general symptoms are as in parenchymatous
hepatitis with a more tardy development. There are impaired or
irregular appetite, dullness, sluggishness, in an obese animal short-
windedness or palpitations on slight exertion, symptoms of disease
of the heart, lungs or digestive organs, a spasmodic cough,
constipation followed by relaxation of the bowels, nausea and
vomiting. As the disease advances tenderness of the loins, the
passage of brownish or reddish, albuminous urine, the formation of
ascites and of gastro-intestinal catarrh may be noticed. Icterus may
be entirely absent, but, with a flaccid abdomen, enlarged liver and
spleen may be detected.
 Treatment. The indications are to first combat the causes.
Irregularities in the heart’s action may be met by digitalis or
strophanthus; gastro-intestinal catarrh by a carefully regulated diet,
with mineral acids and bitters; portal congestion by a free use of
water and other diluents and by saline laxatives; intestinal
fermentations by antiferments (salol, naphthol) and toxic matters in
the blood by alkaline diuretics. For the liver hyperplasia, potassium
iodide may be freely used. Blisters to the right side will occasionally
prove useful. The ascitic fluid must be drawn off when it
accumulates. A diet of milk, bread and milk, buttermilk and mush, or
one in which albuminoid elements are in minimum amount and the
action of which is laxative is to be preferred. Out door exercise is
desirable.
 CHRONIC ATROPHY OF THE LIVER.
Chronic Atrophy: In old horses: in right and spigelian lobes; others show
hypertrophy. In ruminants, omnivora and carnivora: in areas compressed by
tumors or parasites. Perihepatitis. Sclerosis. Remedy causes if possible. Fatty
Degeneration: Oil globules in liver cells, pathological when they destroy the
protoplasm. In ducks and geese on forced feeding. Causes: poisoning by
phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, lead, phenol, iodoform, alcohol; excess of fat in
food, spoiled fodders, colchicum autumnale, yellow lupins, bacteria, hemorrhages,
inflammations, tumors, parasites; improved meat producing breeds, old animals,
hot stables. Lesions: liver enlarged, pale, yellow, bloodless, knife in cutting is
smeared with fat, oily stain on paper, liver cells enlarged, protoplasm replaced by
fat or oil; may be circumscribed. Symptoms: obesity, over-fed in fats and starches,
of fattening breed, kept in confinement, in hot moist environment, if fed certain
poisons, with costiveness and indigestion, no endurance, short winded, slight
icterus, scanty urine, little urea, later, emaciation, palpation of enlarged liver.
Treatment: send to butcher, pampered horses, cows from swill stable, a run at
grass, with shade trees, a poor pasture, salines, cholagogues, mineral acids, bitters,
iron with alkalies, currying, massage, douches.
Acute yellow atrophy has been referred to under parenchymatous
hepatitis but a chronic atrophy is also met with in all domestic
animals.
In old horses it affects, by preference the right and spigelian lobes,
the portal circulation of which is less direct because of the veins of
supply leaving the parent trunk at right angles (Leblanc), and
because these lobes are more exposed to compression by solid
accumulations in the double colon (Kitt). In such cases a
compensatory hypertrophy of the left and middle lobes is often
observed.
In ruminants the lesion is often circumscribed to the areas that
have undergone compression by tumors or parasites (echinococcus,
actinomycosis), and there may be compensatory increase elsewhere
in the organ.
In swine, dogs and cats the same conditions are operative. In all
alike perihepatitis may be a causative factor, and sclerosis (cirrhosis),
with contraction of the fibrous hyperplasia may also operate.
 Symptoms are very obscure and treatment unsatisfactory unless
the active causes can be recognized and arrested.
HEPATIC STEATOSIS. FATTY LIVER. FATTY
DEGENERATION.
The presence of oil globules in the liver cells is normal and
physiological, the liver acting to a certain extent as a store-house for
fat. This is always a marked feature, in healthy animals on high
rations, and taking little or no work, but so long as the protoplasm
and nuclei of the cells retain the normal characters and functions the
condition is not a morbid one. It may, however, become excessive,
with great enlargement of the liver, and with the substitution of fatty
granules for the protoplasm of the cells as in ducks and geese
subjected to forced feeding, and the condition becomes a distinctly
pathological one.
In true fatty degeneration the protoplasm of the hepatic cells is
destroyed and replaced by fatty granules, the resulting condition
being a permanent destruction of the cell for physiological uses.
Causes. The liver cells undergo fatty degeneration under the action
of certain poisons like phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, lead, phenol,
iodoform and alcohol. According to Neyraud oxide of antimony is
given daily to fattening geese to hasten the development of fatty liver.
An excess of fatty elements in the food leads to the same result as
shown first by Majendie in dogs, in which not only did the liver
undergo this degeneration but the sebaceous glands of the skin
secreted an excess of volatile fatty acids.
The cryptogams and their products on musty fodders determine a
gastro-enteritis in herbivora, accompanied by fatty degeneration of
the liver.
Colchicum Autumnale, and poisonous yellow lupin both determine
this degeneration.
The products of a number of pathogenic bacteria have a similar
effect. This has been noticed in the cat with bacillus pyocyaneus
(Charrin), the cholera spirillum, pyæmic and septicæmic infection,
contagious pneumonia of the horse, strangles, and ulcerative
endocarditis. It has been long noticed to be a complication of
pulmonary tuberculosis, the result in this as in other affections of the
lungs having been attributed to lessened oxidation in the tissues. It
occurs also in hæmorrhages, ruptures and inflammations of the liver
and in passive congestions of the organ, the impairment of the
normal functions (in the altered conditions of nutrition, or under the
influence of poisons,) proving an important factor in the process. The
same remark may apply to the fatty degeneration which complicates
most other liver diseases, cirrhosis, catarrh of the bile ducts,
distomatosis, echinococcus, carcinoma, and epithelioma.
Certain other factors must be taken into account. The inherited
disposition to the production of fat which characterizes the improved
breeds of butcher animals, and particular individuals of all breeds,
mature age which predisposes to the deposit of fat in internal organs,
old age which lessens the vitality of the cells, and hot, damp climates
or stables, all operate more or less in determining the fatty change.
Lesions. In fatty degeneration the liver is enlarged, pale, bloodless,
yellowish, its cut surface exudes an oily fluid which smears the knife,
and it is so light that it floats on water. If scraped and the material
drawn across a sheet of paper it forms a transparent oily stain. Under
the microscope the liver cells are seen to be enlarged and to have
their protoplasm and nuclei replaced by fat or oil. If due to
obstruction in the heart or lungs the degeneration is greatest toward
the centre of the acinus, if due to an infectious disease it is usually
greatest towards its periphery. In infectious diseases too the liver is
not pale yellow, but usually of a deep brownish or yellowish red. The
degeneration may be local or general. McFadyean found a
circumscribed lesion in an ox’s liver, of a bright ochreous color, and
the cells completely transformed into fat cells, while the rest of the
liver was sound. In the dog fatty areas, up to an inch in diameter, are
not uncommon. The swollen cells pressing on the adjacent vessels,
account for the bloodless condition, and favor the degenerative
process.
Neyraud records a fatty liver of 28 ℔s. weight from the horse, and
Kitt one of 10 ℔s. from the pig.
Symptoms. Like as in most chronic liver diseases the indications
are uncertain. The conditions may, however, suggest fatty
degeneration; if the patient is very obese; if it has had an abundant
food, rich in hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, and little exercise; if it
has received in food or water continuous doses of phosphorus,
arsenic or antimony; if it has lived in a hot moist climate or stable; if
there has been a tendency to costiveness and indigestion; if the
patient is weak, easily fatigued and short-winded; if there is a slightly
yellowish red tinge of the conjunctiva and if the urine is scanty and
contains little urea. If the disease is more advanced and the animal
emaciated, it may be possible in the smaller animals at least to
manipulate the liver to make out its increase, its smooth surface, and
its absence of tenderness.
Treatment. When met with in meat producing animals the best
resort is to turn these over to the butcher. When in an animal which
is mainly valuable for breeding purposes, or in horses or carnivora,
something may be done to check the progress of the malady, and
maintain at least the present condition. The value of this will of
course depend on how far the disease has already progressed. Cows
that have spent a winter in a hot swill stable are of little use
afterward for breeding or dairy uses and advanced cases of fatty
degeneration in the horse or dog hold out little hope of a satisfactory
issue. For cases in the earlier stages, nothing can be better than a run
at grass, where there is opportunity for shelter from the noonday
sun. If the pasture is short and the animal has to exercise to secure a
living, so much the better. If kept indoors the patient should have a
clean, roomy airy box stall, with a moderate allowance of easily
digested food, and laxatives and cholagogues daily such as Glauber
salts, aloes, calomel, podophyllin or cream of tartar. Mineral acids,
especially nitro-muriatic acid, and bitters may also be given. The
preparations of iron are sometimes useful in maintaining the tone of
the digestive organs and counteracting anæmia but they must be
conjoined with diuretic doses of bicarbonate of soda.
There is great advantage in stimulating the skin, and active
brushing, currying, hand-rubbing, and even cold douches may be
resorted to.
 AMYLOID DEGENERATION OF THE LIVER.
Degeneration of basement substance of connective tissue, swollen, transparent,
homogeneous, colored mahogany brown by iodide. In wasting diseases, tubercle,
cancer, malaria, dysentery, leukæmia, suppuration, ulceration, pleurisy,
pericarditis, peritonitis, chronic catarrh, broncho-pneumonia, orchitis, biliary
calculi, nephritis. Chronic. Lesions: Affected part swollen, sinks in water,
bloodless, clear, smooth, homogeneous, yellowish or reddish gray, under
compound solution of iodine becomes mahogany brown, under sulphuric acid dark
violet. Extends from vessel walls to adjacent connective tissue. Symptoms: Of
wasting diseases, but not diagnostic. Treatment: Unsatisfactory, directed to
causative disease.
This is a condition in which the basement substance of the
connective tissue, and especially of the walls of the vessels, becomes
swollen and composed of a transparent, homogeneous substance,
albuminous in character, and which stains of a deep mahogany
brown on the application of a solution of iodine. The degeneration is
usually associated with severe wasting diseases, in the human being
with tuberculosis, syphilis, malignant tumors, malarial infection,
dysentery, leukæmia, and chronic suppuration or ulceration,
especially of the bones.
In the lower animals (horse, dog, ox, sheep, rabbit, poultry) it has
been seen to attend or follow on similar cachectic conditions. In the
horse it has been seen in connection with the effusions of pleurisy,
pericarditis and peritonitis (Rabe), in chronic bronchial catarrh
(Fischkin), in chronic broncho-pneumonia, and dilated right heart
(Trasbot), in orchitis, phlebitis and cachectic states (Caparini), and
in calculous obstruction of the biliary duct (Burgoin). In cattle it has
accompanied chronic nephritis (Brückmüller), tuberculosis,
leukæmia, etc. In lambs kept in confined stables, though well feed on
oats (Werner). In long standing suppurations and in animals fed on
distillery swill it has been observed.
It may last for months or years, and predispose to other disorders,
functional and structural. It does not, however, interrupt secretion as
bile continues to be formed.
 Lesions. The affected part of the liver is enlarged, the entire organ
in the horse may amount to 32 lbs. It is smooth and even, though
thick and rounded at its inferior border, yet occasionally on the
posterior aspect there may be hyperplasia and a rough irregular
surface. The diseased liver is heavy and sinks in water, unlike the
fatty liver. In the horse it is soft and friable or even pasty whereas in
man it is firm and resistant. The cut surface is bloodless, smooth,
clear, homogeneous and grayish, yellowish or reddish gray. When
treated with a solution of iodine and potassium iodide it changes to a
deep mahogany brown; if dilute sulphuric acid is then used it
changes to a deep violet, almost black color. If the iodine solution is
brushed over the smooth cut surface the mahogany color of the
amyloid stands out in marked contrast with the bright yellow of the
healthy hepatic tissue. The amyloid commences in the walls of the
smallest arteries, in the media and intermediary layers of the intima,
and thickens the walls so as to obstruct their lumen more or less
completely and render the part comparatively exsanguine. It may
extend to the connective tissue of the organ, but it is not certain that
the hepatic cells are involved in the process. The cells are, however,
pressed upon by the diseased vessels and stroma and undergo
consequent fatty degeneration. The amyloid may be confined to but a
small part of the liver or to its smaller blood-vessels or it may extend
to the whole. In fowls it is always in multiple centres (Leisering). It
may be found in other important organs, kidneys, spleen, lymphatic
glands, intestinal mucosa, etc.
Symptoms are not diagnostic. If with an old standing, exhausting
disease, paresis, weakness, emaciation and unfitness for work, there
is loss of appetite, dryness of the mouth, congestion of the rectal
mucosa, yellowish, whitish, or dark tarry fæces, and a slightly
brownish or yellowish tinge of the visible mucous membranes
(Rexante) it may be suspected. In fowls Leisering noticed, weakness,
lameness, ruffling of the feathers and attacks of vertigo. Icterus,
ascites and tenderness over the region of the liver may all be absent.
In the absence of ascites, tympany, or an excess of fat in the smaller
animals, manipulation may detect the considerable enlargement of
the liver, and the characteristic smoothness, of its surface. In other
cases some indication may, at times, be had from the increased area
of dullness on percussion.
 Treatment is essentially unsatisfactory even if a correct diagnosis
can be made. The most hopeful course would be to correct the
debilitating disease in which the amyloid seems to have originated.
Diseased bones, ulcers, chronic suppurations, and catarrhs may be
done away with, and at least any further advance of the degeneration
arrested. Open air exercise and a green or otherwise laxative diet
would be indicated. The amyloid in lambs fed on oats was corrected
by a change of diet (Werner). As medication the alteratives,
potassium iodide and potassium arseniate have been mainly resorted
to. Bitters and iron may also be of use to build up the strength. The
latter should be given with potassium bicarbonate.
 BLACK PIGMENTATION OF THE HEPATIC
CELLS. BROWN ATROPHY.
In horse. With melanoma and atrophy, or without, pigment granules fill hepatic
cells, liver becomes brown or black. In calves. In sheep. Apart from melanosis, the
real cause unknown.
The accumulation of granules of black pigment in the hepatic cells
has been noticed in old and worn out horses (Louis Blanc, Cadeac,
Bruckmüller), in calves (Degive, Cadeac), and in sheep
(Siedamgrotzky, Barrier). In horses it has been found in connection
with atrophy, or in other cases, with melanotic tumors in other parts.
In atrophic cases the liver is small, puckered, brown and dull, with a
leathery appearance on section, and with the hepatic cells charged
with pigment granules so that each acinus has a stellate appearance
from the radiating lines of cells. This constitutes brown atrophy.
The second form which may be called melanotic liver, is not
associated with atrophy, but is characterized by the crowding of the
hepatic cells with black pigment granules, which fill up the
protoplasm and crowd the still pale nucleus to one side. The affected
portions become of a deep black.
In calves the pigmentation may be confined to the superficial
portion of the liver (Degive).
In sheep pigmentation may be in the peripheral cells only of the
acinus (Cadeac) but is about equally distributed on the surface, and
throughout the interior of the liver, and may extend to the stroma of
the gland (Siedamgrotzky).
Apart from the general causes of melanosis, benignant or
malignant, no definite reason for this pigmentation has been
assigned. The development of melanæmia and tissue pigmentation in
man from malarious microörganisms suggests that other germs and
their products may have a similar effect in the lower animals but
nothing certain is known as to the true cause.
Apart from melanosis, it is not known that this pigmentation of the
hepatic cells is of any essential pathological importance. It is
important however for the veterinarian to be acquainted with the
condition, that he may intelligently deal with such lesions whether
seen in ordinary post mortem examinations, or in the course of meat
inspection.
 DILATATION OF THE GALL BLADDER AND
BILE DUCTS.
Causes: obstruction of common bile duct, distoma, round worms, tæmiæ, gall
stones, encrustations, inflammations, tumors, cicatrices, hydatids. Congenital
absence. Ducts stand out on liver. Symptoms of colic, icterus, bile poisoning,
marasmus. Treat the causative conditions.
This may occur in all our domestic animals except solipeds in
which latter there is no gall bladder.
Causes. Any serious obstruction to the discharge of the bile into
the duodenum may cause it. The presence of trematodes, nematodes,
or even tæniæ in the ducts, gall stones, incrustations, occlusion of the
ducts by inflammatory swelling, tumors of the liver or adjacent parts,
echinococcus, cysticercus, or cicatrices may be cited. Cadeac
mentions a case of congenital atresia of the bile duct in the calf.
Vigney records a case in the cow in which the greatly dilated gall
bladder formed a hernial mass in the epigastric region which was,
however, easily reduced by manipulation.
In all such cases the distended bile ducts stand out as white
branching lines on the back of the liver converging toward the portal
fissure. The walls of the ducts may be attenuated or thickened and it
is alleged calcified. They are usually lined by a deposit of cretaceous
consistency precipitated from the retained bile. The contents of the
distended ducts and bladder are variable. They may have the color
(yellow, green) and consistency of bile; they may be thick, dense and
albuminous; they may be thin and serous from inflammatory or
dropsical exudation; they may be granular, or purulent.
Though there is no gall bladder, in the soliped, a similar condition
of the biliary ducts may be produced in the same way.
According to the degree of obstruction there may be more or less
acute symptoms of biliary colic, icterus, marasmus, poisoning by bile
acids, etc.
Treatment must be directed toward the removal of the special
cause of dilatation.
 DOUBLE GALL-BLADDER.
As a congenital formation the gall bladder is sometimes divided
into two at its fundus, and in other cases the division extends
throughout, forming two complete sacs. This has been found in the
sheep, cat, ox (Gurlt, Goubaux) and pig (Goubaux). Such a
redundancy does not interfere with normal functions.