Struggle and Fulfillment/Faith, Authenticity and Morality:
Coleman, John A
The power of spiritual synthesis STRUGGLE AND FULFILLMENT Donald Evans Fortress Press, $7.95, 256 pp. FAITH AUTHENTICITY AND MORALITY Donald Evans Univ. of Toronto, $25, 298 pp. John A....
...The argument is subtle, scholarly, nuanced and, perhaps, hidden in a book that is so engaging...
...Struggle and Fulfillment exhibits in detail Evans's typology of eight basic attitude-virtues and vices...
...Evans's treatment of passion and apathy is especially rich -reminding one of Robert Solomon's recent brilliant book on the passions...
...I first read Struggle and Fulfillment last June...
...In both Faith, Authenticity and Morality and Struggle and Fulfillment Evans presupposes that religion is a basic set of attitudes (note, not beliefs) and morality is a set of virtues...
...He is throughout keenly aware of the dangers of self-deception and collective illusions...
...First, Evans contends that it is possible to do a new apologetics which discloses the reasonableness of religion by showing that certain attitudes which are necessary for human fulfillment logically entail religious convictions...
...of psycho-analytic theory and practice and the life of moral virtue...
...For Evans, the crucial arena for theology and theological ethics is to be found in theological anthropology...
...This is a variation, of course, of the Kantian argument which moves from respect for moral laws to the inference of a lawgiver...
...I thought that, concerning him at least, it was appropriate to speak, as so many of my Berkeley friends rather loosely do, about someone having an "aura...
...The argument in the book, as I see it, is two-fold...
...I mention all this because Evans's two books claim that authentic human and religious fulfillment can, should and sometimes does bring about a change in personality which shows itself in a tangible bodily aura...
...In his discussions of subjectivity and objectivity or neutrality vs...
...On the other hand, Christian faith has a moral criterion by which it can be judged...
...The result is a coherent, tightly argued book about foundations and apologetics in theology...
...Faith, Authenticity and Morality will occupy a permanent place in my library as a resource for thinking about theological ethics...
...The latter enjoys a real autonomy...
...Again, this was fitting since the book is fundamentally about integration: the integration of religion and morality...
...Faith, Authenticity and Morality deals with many issues in theology...
...The argument, however, aids rather than detracts from a struggle to find the "reasons" of the heart...
...Also of note is the realistic way Evans deals with human limits and finitude to avoid the excessive perfectionism to be found in most schemes of virtue and human fulfillment...
...Moreover, it presents some subtle and helpful distinctions about Christian ethics...
...His is no reductionism of the transcendent...
...Faith, Authenticity and Morality focuses primarily on an ethics of being (virtue, character, attitudes) rather than an ethics of doing (norm, situation, rules...
...of contemplation and engaged action for justice...
...Evans, however, grounds his argument in different human attitudes than Kant...
...one is almost always very certain about just what it is, precisely, he is talking about...
...Revelation about God always (perhaps primarily) includes revelation about the human, and talk about authentic human fulfillment entails a disclosure of God...
...Only the graced, the receptive ones, fully discern the authentic good...
...His synthesis is so rich and fertile that it raises further questions and invites deeper probing and research...
...The move is from attitude to conviction, not to proof for the existence of God...
...The second point of the argument relates to Evans's shift from his earlier "enlarged empiricism" (drawing on the work of Ian Ramsey and rooted in the tradition of linguistic analytic philosophy) to an existentialist epis-temology and stance...
...Later, in personal conversation, I was touched by his energetic presence and the evident concern he exhibited for social issues of justice and peace...
...value-laden presuppositions, he is nothing if not illuminating...
...I am grateful that, in this important philosophic shift, Evans retains the key virtue of linguistic philosophers, i.e...
...Perhaps the best way to understand Evans's synthesis and argument is to turn, first, to Faith, Authenticity and Morality, the more technical - philosophically and theologically-of the two books...
...He animated the truths he spoke about...
...Evans's argument here is complex...
...I suspect that with the publication of these two books Evans will begin to have many disciples among North American Christian ethicists...
...He deserves to...
...Their common ground and origin is "divine activity in authentically human individuals who are receptive...
...Based largely on earlier essays written during the last decade, it is, nonetheless, more than a mere assemblage...
...While generally laudatory, the reviewer's tone tended to trivialize the significance of the book by suggesting that it was primarily a modern-day manual of piety (it is that in the best sense of the term), a mere restatement of classic wisdom and distillation of the human potential movement literature...
...Moreover, he was visibly (not just in talk, talk, talk) a religious searcher, obviously adept from experience in contemplative techniques and deep prayer...
...It successfully illustrates the moral significance of the anthropological turn in theology found in such thinkers as Marcel, Buber, and Karl Rahner...
...While Struggle and Fulfillment and Faith, Authenticity arid Morality can each stand alone, they are also so deeply inter-related (issued within a year of each other), mutually illuminating and com-plementary in tone and argument that, together, they present a rounded whole: a synthesis, an argument and a summons...
...of the experienced pres-ence of God and the void...
...of personal therapeutic liberation and social engagement...
...He relates his own typology to the developmental scheme of Erik Erik-son...
...Evans's apologetics is no rationalism...
...Having discovered he had been writing a book in these separate essays, Evans went back to re-edit them, add postscripts and new chapters...
...Evans does more than list and relate the virtues...
...Upon finishing it, I was led to reread one of my favorite George Herbert poems, Aaron, with its evocation of symphonic bells, ringing in harmony in head and heart and groin...
...I found myself marveling at his illuminating discussions of God's transcendence and immanence, providence, divine grace and human freedom, political theology, moral norms and situations, the relation of Christian faith to morality and what it means to speak of God at work in history...
...Religion is not the foundation of human morality...
...John A. Coleman I first MET Donald Evans last April at a symposium on Christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame...
...The postscripts also serve as useful guides to the journey of a mind by indicating ways in which Evans has changed his mind from earlier positions and why, e.g...
...For him, the core of religion is to be found in lived attitudes rather than beliefs...
...On the one hand, "Christian faith . . . involves acceptance of a moral vocabulary...
...of moral and ascetical theology...
...This "heart" is different from that willful, self-initiated freedom which holds a legitimate, if subordinate, place...
...I was deeply impressed by his incisive analytic mind and his ability to cut through conceptual and linguistic muddles...
...I took extensive notes on both books...
...The basic life-struggle (in religion, in morality, in virtue and the spiritual life) is one between attitudes of basic trust and basic distrust...
...A delight to read, they deserve careful study...
...Struggle and Fulfillment will stay closer to me at home as a deeply human spirit book that not only enlightened but summoned me to prayer...
...While no summa theologiae, Faith, Authenticity and Morality is a synthetic work of great originality...
...Evans's change to the existentialist mode is justified by his conviction (and experience) that certain participatory attitudes or existential stances are necessary conditions for discerning the presence and activity of God in history...
...For the heart of human freedom (in Louis Dumont's helpful phraseology, the "encompassing" category of human freedom) is receptive freedom, responsive to God's initiative...
...Evans's treatment and illustration of the forms and uses of, and the relations between, different kinds of analogy may be the most concise original summary of this topic available anywhere...
...But morality, inasmuch as it entails unconditional demands, presupposes convictions concerning a cosmic grounding for the moral order...
...There is little of the merely evocative muddle in the man...
...from those found in his earlier, much regarded and influential, book in moral theology, The Logic of Self-Involvement...
...Non-believers may be living a split...
...Similarly, believers may live out attitudes which effectively deny God...
...Moreover, his extensive personal experience in therapy and meditative groups allows him to draw upon these rich resources to make his return to the classic discussion of virtues and vices novel, fresh, original, and supremely modern...
...The genius of Struggle and Fulfillment is that it is a contemporary spiritual classic-well-written and easily understandable- which, nevertheless, contains a controlled theological argument...
...I was irritated in mid-summer by a brief notice of Struggle and Fulfillment carried in The National Catholic Reporter...
...Moreover, authentic Christian faith (as a lived set of attitudes and virtues) illumines morality...
...Evans calls his method in apologetics an anthropological-logical approach...
...His phenomenological method penetrates and discloses the realities of virtue and sin...
...Their convictions belie genuinely religious attitudes...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 11
