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Devotion and Well-Being: A Platonic Personalist Perfectionist Account

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Rest in him, and restfulness will be yours.

– Augustine of Hippo

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Notes

  1. See Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, 2nd Revised Edition, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/>, (1920), II-II, question 81, article 1.

  2. Thomas Aquinas: Basic Philosophical Writing: From the Summa Theologiae and the Principles of Nature, trans. Steven Baldner (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2018), p. 146.

  3. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 44.

  4. 4. For discussion, see e.g. Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Gwen Bradford, “Perfectionism,” in Guy Fletcher, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-being (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 124-134, and Hud Hudson, Fallenness and Flourishing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

  5. Whether the charge of over-strenuousness really applies to Aquinas’s perfectionism, it does apply to recent versions of perfectionism developed in an Aristotelian vein. Hurka (op. cit.), for example, claims that our capacity for practical rationality is perfected to the extent that we engage in activities that are difficult, at least in the sense of holding in mind and requiring mastery of a lot of precise elements all at once. So understood, perfectionism in the philosopher’s sense starts to look like perfectionism in the workaholic’s sense—a kind of obsession with hard work and achievement.

  6. In Book 4 of the Republic, Socrates says of that the just man that he “puts himself in order, becomes his own friend, and harmonizes the three elements [of the soul] together, just as if they were literally the three defining notes of an octave.” A Plato Reader: Eight Essential Dialogues, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012), p. 394.

  7. A common objection to Hurka-style perfectionism is that affections play no role in well-being (see Bradford, op. cit.). Platonic perfectionism is not subject to this objection.

  8. There are various rival construals of the constitutive norm of belief, it should be noted. See Andrew Chignell, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/ethics-belief/>). That there is a constitutive norm of belief is what matters most for my purposes.

  9. Hudson (op. cit.) proposes the category ‘human person’, for similar reasons.

  10. Op. cit., p. 28.

  11. The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: Motivation and Spirituality in Personality (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

  12. Op. cit., p. 115.

  13. Ibid., p. 44. On religion’s unique ability to provide “global meaning,” i.e. the harmonization of one’s beliefs, goals, and emotions, see also Crystal Park, “Religion and Meaning,” in Raymond Paloutzian & Crystal Park, eds., Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), 357-379, and Fraser Watts, Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). As Watts puts it: “Within religious meaning making, everything coheres” (p. 99).

  14. Matthew Shea has proposed a version of perfectionism that appeals to the human “social capacity” alongside the other essential capacities. See “The Quality of Life is Not Strained: Disability, Human Nature, Well-Being, and Relationships,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2019): 333-366.

  15. The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015), p. 25.

  16. Confessions, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), Book IV.18.

  17. It will be observed that loving the eternal God above all else does not by itself assuage grief over the death of beloved fellow humans. Death still breaks human bonds of love. Thus it would seem that once we have put intermediate final values back into the picture, devotion to God can no longer serve as the full antidote to despair. Now, the conviction that God has overcome death is no small part of Christian reflection on the human good. The crucial question is what psychological relationship holds between this conviction, on the one hand, and the posture of devotion, on the other. Perhaps there are simply two separate ingredients in the antidote to despair: adoration and hope. But I think it plausible that adoration can produce hope on its own, insofar as God’s goodness itself is the ground of hope. To adoringly behold God’s goodness is to know that, in Julian of Norwich’s famous words, “all shall be well.”

  18. Stuart Townend, & Keith Getty, “In Christ Alone” (<https://www.stuarttownend.co.uk/song/in-christ-alone/>, 2001).

  19. Atonement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 347, 340.

  20. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 42.

  21. “The Uniqueness of Persons,” Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2001), 401-423.

  22. The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy (Leyland: 10Publishing, 2012).

  23. Here I am indebted to discussions of these topics in Eleanore Stump (op. cit.) and John Cottingham, “Meaningful Life,” in Paul Moser & Michael McFall, The Wisdom of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 175-196.

  24. Qtd. in Eleanore Stump, op cit., p. 190.

  25. “Affective Perfectionism: Community with God without Common Measure,” in Natalie Brender & Larry Krasnoff, ed., New Essays on the History of Autonomy: A Collection Honoring JB Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30-60.

  26. Qtd. in Jennifer Herdt, op. cit., p. 42.

  27. It may very well turn out, then, that God is above us on a metaphysical hierarchy. Have I not relied on a hierarchical justification of the aptness of God as a devotional object? I have not, for it is not God’s hierarchical primacy that makes God devotion-apt (at least, as far as I have said here), but God’s sourcehood primacy.

  28. Op. cit., p. 343.

  29. G. R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 196.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on and conversations about earlier drafts of this paper, I would like to thank Joel Chopp, C. Stephen Evans, Geoffrey Fulkerson, John Hare, Christina Bieber Lake, Tim O’Connor, Jon Thompson, Gijsbert van den Brink, Dan Watts, Matthew Wiley, and an anonymous referee for this journal. This project was made possible through the support of the Henry Center for Theological Understanding, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Woodward, P. Devotion and Well-Being: A Platonic Personalist Perfectionist Account. J Value Inquiry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09896-4

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