3. Christian political Ethics – future Directions
3.1. Compassion as moral sense
Both the spontaneous and the reflective attitude of compassion entail the sense of attentiveness towards someone whose moral integrity is threatened or damaged by physical, psychic, or moral harm.[7] Compassion is an emotional response that ideally translates into the motivation to action. A theological ethics of compassion takes up the biblical concept of rahamim: it connects suffering with the embodied pain in the womb (which is the etymological root of the Hebrew term),[8] linking compassion to the sense of pain, namely the menstrual cycle but also to the phase of giving birth. The biblical understanding of compassion is not ‘private’ in the modern sense; rather, it is tied to the political-theological narrative of the compassionate God aiming at liberation and transformation of social injustice.
Politically speaking, compassion is therefore the sense of solidarity with the anawim of societies. It demands of us to speak out without fear (what Foucault called parrhesia or fearless speech),[9] and there by witness against injustice; it imposes upon us the obligation to resist complicity in the harming of others, and to seek the transformation of injustice to justice.
As Nussbaum rightly states, no perception, no cognition, no memory and no action is possible without an accompanying emotion – but as important, the opposite is also true: moral emotions entail evaluations, and as such they inform reason – reason and emotions are dialectically correlated. However spontaneous compassion may seem to be, it is therefore a crucial source of and fornormative obligations, a source that is intertwined with moral reasons, not independent of it.
3.2. Compassion for Justice
Kasper, Metz, and Nussbaum all agree that compassion must be related to the political sphere of justice. Kasper relates mercy mostly to legal justice both within the Catholic Church, namely the Canon Law; for him, justice is incomplete unless it is coupled with mercy. Nussbaum rightly states that justice, understood as the principle norm that governs a polity, cannot itself deal with the gap between the norm and the faciticity of social realities; for her, a range of political emotions, acquired through the practices of a ‘poetic spirit’, is necessary as justice’s complement. Aesthetics, as well as social values and virtues, however, are a double-edged sword: the ‘habits of the heart’ or dispositions are not only social virtues but also social vices: shame, disgust, and indifference are the negative political emotions that inhibit people from responding to the demands of justice. Without a critical approach to these social values and vices, the turn to (political) emotions is highly problematic, as we know from the history of mass ideologies.[10] Metz, indebted to critical theory, shifts the perspective to the impact injustice and unjust structures have on people and groups. In fact, Kasper and Metz speak of two rather different constellations, because in Kasper’s view, (legal) justice may itself cause suffering and injustice for those who transgress the (ecclesial) norms and therefore requires mercy as a corrective, whereas Metz advocates for the victims of harm and social, economic, or political-legal injustice; in contrast to Nussbaum, his political theology not only questions the emotional responses of citizens but the very norms of a political order insofar as they allow the harms to happen or do nothing to correct them respectively.
Compassion as part of a political ethics, especially in its constructive form of solidarity, is rooted in the moral sense of attending to the lacking support for the anawim’s wellbeing and freedom. It departs from the proportional understanding of justice, the Roman ‘suum cuique’ (“to each their own”) if that definition is taken as a criterion for rights; instead, it prioritizes the transformative justice that keeps awake the memory of the pain and outrage about injustice and, supported by the moral emotion of compassion, disposes moral agents to take steps towards transforming injustice to justice.
The political ethics based on compassion and oriented towards justice is a critical ethics: it is not so much interested in promoting political love (of one’s nation or, for that matter, one’s church) but critiques real-life injustices that exist in any social reality and political order. Compassion does not smooth the relation between a given political order and the citizenry; quite to the contrary, compassion, in its connection to the pain in the womb, is akin to outrage: it disrupts states of injustice, and it may therefore be expressed in outcries of anger and rage about the suffering of others. Confronted with the current global political order of killing and the multifold faces of injustice, Christians are called to throw as much sand into its operation as possible. In their active and advocatory solidarity with the anawim, they will uphold the hope for another future, the New that will come towards those who suffer(the German word Zukunft means: that what comes towards one).
Compassion and mercy both play a part in any political ethics. Compassion is necessary, in part, as Martha Nussbaum rightly states, to overcome the ‘othering’ of others and give respect a concrete face, but it must also translate into transformative solidarity and the struggle for recognition and justice for the victims of harm and injustice; mercy is necessary with respect to peace-building and reconciliation. Both dimensions of God’s love urge us to acknowledge the suffering of anyone by attending to it, remembering it, mourning it – and transforming it.
The ethics of compassion that I envision here is closely linked to an ethics of recognition and responsibility, complementing the goal of mutual recognition with the analysis of factual asymmetries, attending to the different positions of power and different capabilities of agency and responsibilities people may have. But, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminded us, for the one who responds responsibly, the asymmetry between her and the other is reversed: the other who pleads for help is, paradoxically, morally in command; in responding, the moral agent places herself at the other’s service. As domination is the specter of asymmetrical relations, attentive responsiveness is the moral spirit of compassionate recognition.
Because of the reality of structural injustice and structures of violence, compassion must become political and social – it must become solidarity. Solidarity means to speak with others as well as for others, and to speak out publically.[11] As part of a political ethics, it transforms the cultural and structural amnesia and indifference into cultural and political remembrance and witnessing.[12] The agents of political solidarity, in civil, social, and religious movements alike, will critique any act, practice, structure, or order of injustice, and they will critique the politics of indifference as a politics of immorality and strive to transform injustice into justice. The Christian political ethics of recognition and responsibility is a political ethics of remembrance and witnessing, connecting the present compassionate, neighborly love both with Jesus’ teachings in the past and with the eschatological hope of divine justice.
The political ethics of compassion asks to whom we are neighbors before asking who they are. Neighbors are people close to those in need. Taken beyond the ‘vicinity’ of one’s local political space, one’s polis or nation, neighborly love can only be spelled out as global solidarity, while still being anchored in local practices. Solidarity mediates between what Ricœur called one’s “aiming at a good life with others in just institutions”, and the undeniable obligation to attend to the suffering of others. Morality is a demand to include in one’s striving for a good life the others’ suffering, especially when it stems from injustices; compassion enables us, as Nussbaum rightly says, to give the ‘damaged life’ of those who suffer priority or preference. It determines the global vision of the good life for all as the goal to strive for – as solidarity with any individual whose life is damaged, aiming at their liberation and empowerment. As a political commitment or, in other words, compassion for justice, this can only be realized in a movement that entails the critique of injustice and the solidarity with the anawim of our global order.
Finally, the theological concept of compassion for justice is not only an ethical concept – it does indeed go beyond the political dimension. Justice is the core concept of any prophetic ethics – and as such it is eschatological – maintaining the vision of salvation as the hope for transformative justice. Christian theology reminds us of the hope we must justify (1 Peter 3:15), i.e. the hope our faith represents. God’s compassion is theology’s justification of hope. It is not the last word but indeed the first word that God speaks in view of suffering, while the last word may well be God’s mercy, the forgiveness of sins. Theology may – and perhaps must – express in its own language the grief, the lament, and the question of theodicy. Theology’s language is dialogical, upholding communication with God in the debths of suffering. Faith addresses God in tears, in words, and in the borderzone of speech and silence. Similar to Nussbaum’s poetic spirit, but rooted in personal and historical, not aesthetic experiences, theology is primarily expressed in narratives, prayers, psalms, and poems. In the words of German poet Paul Celan, poems speak in the cause of the other, and perhaps, in the cause of the wholly Other.[13] The poetic political theology will indeed insist on speaking in the cause of the other, and maintain its connection to the ‘wholly Other’.
The gospel of John is the core reference for a Christian ethics of remembrance and compassion with and towards the anawim. If we are, however, as Pope Francis claimed in his speech at Lampedusa in 2013, indifferent towards the anawim of our time; if we have lost our moral sense and get all too accustomed to the valleys of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) and the landscapes of screams (Nelly Sachs) – if we are alienated from our human capability to moral agency, then theology must become prophetic in a different sense. The gospel of Matthew repeats the prophetic theology of the downfall: those who do not give to those who are hungry may not be saved. Those who do not host the anawim may not be saved. Those who do not fight for justice may not be saved. Without this anticipated judgment, we may well continue to love our country and be, at the same time, indifferent when the poor starve, migrants die, innocent people are killed by our very state, or millions of people are abandoned in prisons. Without a theology of judgment that is the other side of the compassion for justice, we may well uphold the international legal and political order that kills, daily, thousands of people. Those, however, who do share their bread and their homes with those in needare the witnesses of faith, they are the hope for those who have no hope. According to the gospel of Matthew, they are the blessed ones. The biblical tradition informs, among other things, our moral formation, and it inspires us to imagine the world that may come.
4. Conclusion
Witnessing can only happen in concrete locations, here and now. These are the index words of the Christian political ethics of compassion. There is no love of God other than through the love of one’s neighbor. As a prophetic ethics, Christian political ethics must be an ethics that appeals to the necessary – and possible – transformation of injustice to justice. As a theology, it is a poetic political theology, a theology of lament and hope, of remembrance – it is the witnessing of God’s compassion for justice and mercy. It requires the memory of the Jesuanic ethics and the critical reflection of the theological tradition of Christianity. It requires giving attention and priority to the anawim in each society and institution, including Christian institutions. And it requires the prophetic imagination of what may be possible, insisting on the motto of the World Social Forum, another world is possible.
The justice-loving God is not indifferent to the persons inflicting harm on others, and hence we cannot remember Abel without remembering Cain. The Pope’s recitals of the tradition: “Adam, where are you?” and “Where is your brother?” point to Cain’s refused responsibility. They point to the indifference that resists compassion, the loss of the embodied sense of morality: the inability to weep and mourn in view of the valleys of dry bones. ““Who among us has wept for these things, and things like this?” Francis asks in view of the drowning refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, and adds: “We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of ‘suffering with’: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!”[14] God’s compassion does not mean indifference towards injustice, but it does mean, as Kasper insists, the hope for mercy and forgiveness, the gift of ever-new beginnings. Both elements of God’s love, compassion and mercy, are the truth of the Christian faith, the hope that needs to be justified. God’s truth begins with pain and indignation about those who suffer and who are denied responsibility and solidarity; this God is not merely committed to human freedom but to liberation; God’s truth entails the distinction between those who do and those who do not respond responsibly. Finally, however, God’s truth is the truth of ever-new beginnings. Anchored in compassion and solidarity with the victims of injustice, compassion ethics remembers, too, the end of Ezekiel’s vision: the valleys of dry bones, the islands of death, the borders, the seas, the deserts and the cities of death – they can be transformed into valleys of new life.
[7] H. Haker, Vulnerable Agency: A conceptual and contextual analysis, in J. Rothschild and M. Petrusek (eds), Dignity and conflict: contemporary interfaith dialogue on the value and vulnerability of human life, Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 2017, forthcoming.
[8] R. von Scoralick, (ed): Das Drama der Barmherzigkeit Gottes. Studien zur biblischen Gottesrede und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte in Judentum und Christentum, Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2000.
[9] M. Foucault: Foucault, Fearless Speech, edited J. Pearson, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.
[10] Elias Canetti: Masse und Macht, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2006 (1960).
[11] Axel Honneth suggests that the struggle for recognition is mostly led by the ‘undignified’ groups. Dietmar Mieth has, however, distinguished between what he called con-solidarity (solidarity among group members such as the social anawim) and pro-solidarity (the advocacy of others for the anawim’s quest). Compassion ethics resists this complacency on the part of those who can in fact respond to injustice. Cf. A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995.
[12] Benjamin’s term “Eingedenken” that is lost in Metz’ term of remembering or dangerous memory is closer to the Hebrew term zakor, which does not only refer to events of the past. Cf. Y.H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Meaning, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983.
[13] “But the poem does speak! It remains mindful of its dates, but – it speaks, to be sure, it speaks only in its own, in its own, individual cause. But I think – and this thought can scarcely come as a surprise to you – I think that it has always belonged to the expectations of the poem, in precisely this manner to speak in the cause of the strange – no, I can no longer use this word – in precisely this manner to speak in the cause of an Other – who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other.” Cf. P. Celan, ‘The Meridian’, in Chicago Review:Anthology of Contemporary Literature in German issue no. 29/3, 36.
[14] Pope Francis, Homily on Lampedusa, 8. July 2013, Vatican Radio: http://en.radiovaticana.va/storico/2013/07/08/pope_on_lampedusa_%E2%80%9Cthe_globalization_of_indifference%E2%80%9D/en1-708541.