The Taste for the Other/Comparative Religious Ethics
Hindery, Roderick
Moral education, moral mechanics TIE TASTE FOR THE OTHER Gilbert Meilaender Eerdmans, $6.95, paper, 245 pp. COMPARATIVE RELIGIOUS ETHICS David Little and Sumner B. Twiss Harper & Row, $10.95,...
...However, here where religion and morality meet, God is to be loved as the Good not as the Commander...
...In a short concluding segment, the authors explain why the study was confined to definitions and method...
...In building relationships with each other, people attempt to image divine self-giving love...
...motivation, and role models...
...Within the second half of the volume, Little and Twiss single out three particular religious traditions (Navajo, Christianity—as concretized in the Gospel by Matthew—and Theravada Buddhism) in order to test out the applicability of the categories which they devised in the first half of the book...
...I, for one, would have preferred more development or clarification of such concepts as: the distinction between custom and law...
...Those unacquainted with analytical philosophy may have difficulty...
...COMPARATIVE RELIGIOUS ETHICS David Little and Sumner B. Twiss Harper & Row, $10.95, 266 pp...
...Even if one escapes hell, one may need to voluntarily be cleansed in purgatory, an integral and curative part of the sanctification process, before entering into eternal community with God...
...While Meilaender has concerned himself with Lewis's own preoccupation with moral education rather than with the ,epistemological problem behind moral knowledge, in Comparative Religious Ethics David Little and Sumner Twiss have focused on the latter question especially...
...Finally, they present and schematize practical justification ("an activity that involves the giving of authorizing reasons for the performance of an action" p. 96) as part of their new method of doing comparative religious ethics...
...Roderick Hindery The Taste for the Other could actually serve as a title for both of these books...
...and their concern to avoid imposing pre-defined categories on existing traditions...
...As his strongest and most enduring ethical theme, Lewis proposes moral education, the development of appropriate emotional responses through exposure to virtuous/exemplar persons in the human community...
...1 February 1980: 61...
...Likewise, those who prefer a more holistic approach such as uncovering a particular ethos or complex of factors responsible for energizing moral behavior in a given religious tradition may be uncomfortable with an apparently cold, analytical philosophical technique which may succeed in partly clarifying the language while underemphasizing the substance of a religious heritage...
...Each concerns itself with ethics, how persons relate to each other or the Other (God...
...He reveals a normative ethic of character, flexible and non-utilitarian, Aristotelian in structure...
...Students of comparative religious ethics will be encouraged by their remarks about further cross-cultural studies of rational processes...
...As for morality ("men transmitting manhood to men") Lewis contends that moral knowledge is objective and can be known...
...In identifying the task of morality as finding a solution to the problem of human cooperation, Little and Twiss Commonweal: 60 focus on "other-regardingness" as the prism through which religious traditions refract their particular ethics...
...It is when this "other-regardingness''/"taste for the other" is accentuated in human fellowship that the true community of persons, delineated by Lewis and assumed by Little and Twiss, is realized...
...Pride, the great sin of existing for oneself (not others), leads one to hell, the ultimate retreat into the self and / February 1980: 59 the denial of community...
...Marriage, moreover, makes eros faithful...
...Human love, when expressed as eros, personalizes the sexual appetite...
...Other human relationships, an "inner ring" or exclusive group, can either foster or inhibit true love in community...
...However, the approach that each author takes differs significantly...
...Gilbert Meilaender analyzes the social and ethical thought of C. S. Lewis...
...On the other hand, community can be threatened...
...Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and college teachers will most likely be able to handle the authors' logical and meticulous preoccupation with the redefinition of terminology...
...Subsequently these notions are translated into moral, legal, and religious action guides...
...Moreover, some may be uneasy with the authors' use of contemporary Western analytical tools rather than making an effort to bring to the surface the inherent instruments which may lie within the traditions themselves...
...He acknowledges human freedom, but humanity is more than freedom, for persons are sinful and in need of assuming the creaturely posture of receptivity before their Creator...
...The resultant community, necessarily diverse and hierarchical in structure, created by human love (i.e., need-love and gift-love) is transformed by sharing in the divine gift-love of God Himself.' 'He who loses his life will save it," as Lewis is fond of quoting...
...their rationale for choosing the three paradigmatic traditions...
...Turning to the mechanics of morality, as it were, the authors explain their reconstructed definitions of the terms "morality," "law," and "religion...
...the difference between validation and vindication...
...Even animals, Lewis maintains, share in the life of the human community and are in need of liberation...
...Through diagrams, the writers attempt to show their interdependence...
...Meilaender has provided the reader with a smoothly reworked dissertation, presenting a balanced assessment of Lewis's social and ethical views, faulting him for his frequent obscurities, inadequacies, and oversights while praising him as a creative apologist- and explicator of the Christian tradition...
...Lewis sees persons caught up in the affirming-negating dialectic of life's "Great Dance...
...They must obey the Tao ("the concrete reality in which to participate is to be< truly human,") which contains the fundamental truths about human nature...
...Also, there may be those who question the choice of Theravada Buddhism over Mahayana Buddhism for the latter concerns a far greater number of people than the former...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 2
