Contemplating an Ethic of Supernal Good

Changing the world requires a shift in vision.

Years ago when I was writing a book on mythology (which I was never to complete), I came across Bill Moyer’s introduction to Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. He recounts something Campbell wrote after the first moon landing. “The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view,” he wrote after the astronauts touched the moon, “seemed to have removed man from the center­­­—and the center seemed so important. Spiritually, however, the center is where sight is. Stand on a height and view the horizon. Stand on the moon and view the whole earth rising—even, by way of television, in your parlor.”

The idea of the center being where sight is came to shape much of my thinking not only about God and spirituality but about ethics and right relationships. Where are we granted vision? Where are we allowed to truly see, to be Emerson’s transparent eyeball? Where are we granted the opportunity and the ability to receive? Is it alone, or within community or culture, or within the belly of the divine?

Is sight individual, or deeply ecological?

Western culture is enamored of the individual. We are a culture of rights. We live in a society of rights-based ethics, ensuring that people are allowed to live in comfort with one another. The reason we have social rules and laws is so that groups of very different people can play nicely together. Laws are an agreed upon set of constructs that we accept in order to get along with each other. Rights-based ethics hope to preserve individual integrity and autonomy, and that’s a good thing.

But for ethics to become great, they cannot merely teach us to make nice and get along. To be great, ethics have to move society not towards mere comfort, but deep-seated satisfaction: Aristotle’s eudaimonia.

In order to do that, however, we have to change our center of vision. We have to shift our focus away from the individual toward the whole. We need to acquire a more holistic view of human needs and desires. And I don’t mean that individual rights or comforts should be sacrificed for the good of the majority: I am not that utilitarian. But rather than accepting an ethic that provides comfort for the individual by preserving some set of individual rights, perhaps we should consider an ethic that promotes eudaimonia for the individual through a strengthened social network, through a healthy organism that is fed from the top-down as well as from the bottom-up.

In Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr writes, “Average morality presupposes complacency tempered by a little cynicism, or resignation qualified by moderate expectations of good. Intense anticipation of supernal good must result in a transformation of ethics.”

This idea of “intense anticipation of supernal good” moved me. Perhaps it’s naïve. Perhaps it’s overly optimistic. But I would rather hope for supernal good and orient my daily relationships around that hope, however foolish, and be oft-disappointed than to orient my life and relationships around a presupposition of mediocre good and still be oft-disappointed. If I choose to live my life in a way that not only protects individual rights but encourages your journey toward deep satisfaction and happiness, that in and of itself will build my character. That in and of itself will change how I interpret life. That in and of itself fulfills me. If ethics are viewed holistically as a spiritual endeavor, then merely striving for the perfect ethic is a journey toward God.

Ethics cannot be about protecting what is good for me. It cannot even be about what is good for you from my point of view. It must be about what is good for me, and you, and us, even when—perhaps especially when—those things conflict.

The center is where sight is. If we see only moderate good, we will build relationships around moderate good. If we see supernal good, we will transform the way we live to manifest it.

Changing the world requires a shift of vision. Instead of presupposing that ethics do nothing but preserve autonomy in a society of people with different cosmologies, agendas, and values, perhaps I should consider that ethics can create satisfaction and deep joy. If I choose to see my relationships with others as participating in the unfolding of God (as I do), it stands to reason that I should see ethics not merely as a mechanism to preserve rights and adequate relations. Ethics should create better relationships. Ethics should presuppose “supernal good”, not mediocre good. I should strive in my relationships toward completion, and demand of myself a continual reorientation of my sight towards the center—toward this culture that is my blood, toward the community that sustains me, toward the metanetwork of relationships that make up a piece of this idea that I call “God”. If, as a culture, we could redirect our ethic to presuppose an intense anticipation of supernal good, if nothing else will suffice, then we would all see, in its brilliant light, the true face of God.

I hope to write, within the next few days, about hope in God. I think it will tie in nicely with what I’ve said here.

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