<i>On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics</i> by D. StephenLong (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024), xiii + 303 pp.

D. Stephen Long has given us a “big book,” one that fulfills the promise of its ambitious title, On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics. Despite coming in under 300 pages and focusing its attention on two largely-forgotten nineteenth-century figures, the book teaches us wide-ranging lessons about what we are doing when we attempt to do “ethics,” whether in a philosophical or theological key. It is not a mere historical study, but it does demonstrate that both moral philosophers and theologians ought to be more attentive to the history of what we do. Long invites us to see these broad disciplinary challenges by looking intently at the work of two Cambridge professors who both held the Knightbridge Chair, F.D. Maurice and Henry Sidgwick. The Chair dates from 1683; originally a chair of “moral theology and casuistical divinity,” Sidgwick reduced the title simply to “moral philosophy” (3). Sidgwick “professionalized” the teaching of ethics, forming societies of “experts” and aiming at “scientific precision” (12). Part 1 gives us a 100-page tour through Sidgwick's ethics, with Rawls and Anscombe as the chief respondents. Long's reading is tight, dense, and often exciting; one gets a sense of the ambitions and decisiveness of Sidgwick's project that is certainly lost if one simply peruses Sidgwick's lumbering text. The overriding point of the reading is to show Sidgwick's attempt to construct an “independent” ethics, a true “science” of human action, that would not depend on any other discipline—and especially not on theology. Sidgwick's ultimate articulation of a utilitarianism is less important than the ways he gets there and the reasons why—and this point is reinforced by the use of Rawls’ work. Rawls is no utilitarian but, like Sidgwick, he seeks a pure ethics unconnected to any other discipline or any account of the good. Anscombe is the demolition of both of these attempts at “modern moral philosophy,” most especially in her rejection of the very binaries that they require. In his conclusion to this first part, Long summarizes five key characteristics of post-Sidgwickian ethics (124). This list is precise, but the most important elements are two: an erroneous action theory and a marginalizing of any objective account of a good human life. The action theory is predicated on bifurcating voluntary action into a mechanical sequence of mental thoughts followed by execution, providing a third-person, impartial-spectator account of action that supposedly can be precisely (“scientifically”) judged. Theory can thus be separated from practice and character. Such theory also detaches from any particular account of the good. Instead, an ethics of “the right” allows a (political) liberal and (economic) market neutrality about competing accounts of the good life, while still supposedly maintaining a difference between right and wrong. The most important contrast between Sidgwick and Maurice is the latter's focus on “life rather than method or system” (159). Whereas “Sidgwick sought to narrow the domain for ethics,” “Maurice widened it as far as possible” (171). By widening the domain, Maurice not only develops a capacious appreciation for all that is human, but even more importantly illuminates how God's own agency is at work in and through all that is human. Long quotes Maurice's self-understanding as a theologian: “not to build, but to dig, to show that economics and politics … must have a ground beneath themselves, that society is not to be made anew by arrangements of ours, but is to be regenerated by finding the law and ground of its order, and harmony, the only secret of its existence, in God” (167). This foundation, “the Kingdon of God-Church ideal,” is present in all of life, and leads to “a cooperative social morality” that, among other things, led Maurice to argue in favor of the abolition of slavery and against emerging competition-based industrial capitalism. This is an ethics of “perfection”—albeit a perfection that is ultimately received from God, in a recognition of the “gifted agency” of both oneself and all others. Maurice examines life as it is with a faith that God can be found at work in it. He thus rejects imposing either religious or secular systems for the teaching and learning of ethics. As Long proceeds through the exposition of Maurice's work in the subsequent three chapters, he walks a fine line. In part because of his refusal to impose any sort of moral system on life, Maurice's social morality is of his time. He ends up appearing as only moderately progressive by the standards of his age—for example, he is more encouraging of women's achievement than most, and yet still ends up espousing “paternalism” (186). Similarly, Maurice opposes a sort of colonialism that attempts to impose “Englishness” on the variety of cultures, instead of seeking “to discover Wisdom in every culture and nation” (181)—and yet does not call into question the enterprise of colonialism. Long, somewhat torturously, attempts either to concede his failures or to show that he was not as bad as some of his students and successors, returning again and again to Maurice's clear rejection of any competitive economics as terra firma. What seems to me underexplored are two related questions: (1) To what extent are Maurice's views rooted in his (almost systematic?!) configuration of the social world into “domestic,” “national,” and “universal” spheres, which must be ordered and interlinked, but not confused? Long lauds Maurice for insisting that the universal (Kingdom of God) is superior to and must never be reduced to any particular “national” culture, but Maurice also seems to hold the converse—that all national cultures somehow manifest in distinct and even sacred ways the agency of God. This of course undergirds Maurice's clear-headed appreciation for other cultures, but at the same time leads him to revere and defend much about his own culture. (2) And to what extent is this defense of distinct national and domestic cultures a basis for his rejection of capitalism? Maurice's distaste for capitalism may be seen as a “conservative” one, in its disruption of the priority of the family and the nation as genuinely common goods. Both questions point toward a deeper one: without more precision, how does one identify erroneous practical judgments in one's own “life”? These questions are unresolved. Yet their lack of resolution may be due to Long's movement toward a clearer target in his final two chapters: “reactionary” and anti-modern (or “post-liberal”) forms of Christianity. In these chapters, which develop Maurice's generous account of the infused virtues of faith, hope, and love, operative in all genuinely human agency, there is far less need to apologize for Maurice's social judgments. Instead, he offers a theologically superior form of Thomism. In Maurice, Protestants have their Henri de Lubac, an expansive and generous Christian humanism, over against “an illiberal politics that cannot provide an ethics for people to live together in pluralist societies in solidarity or communion” (249). Long's criticisms of the politics of anti-modern Thomists are set up by the long, intricate debate about the acquired and infused virtues. While demonstrating his careful reading of all these interlocutors, Long suggests that none fully resolve this issue, in large part because they are mistakenly looking for the “precision” of “solving a problem through the use of analytic skills” when instead they need “an aesthetic that seeks to inhabit a mystery” (229). More specifically, they need the direct appeals to Chalcedonian Christology, used by both Aquinas and Maurice, to allow for an unconfused yet non-competitive relation of divine and human agency. Even in this inadequate summary, one sees the breadth and import of Long's arguments. But for whom are the arguments made? We might think about this crucial question in terms of three audiences. The first is moral philosophers. He begins his book by talking about the difficulties he encounters when someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” One answer he gives is “I teach ethics,” which is met positively. But he finds how ethics “became an academic discipline … problematic” (1). However, his other answer—“I teach theology”—is often met in the opposite fashion, with negativity and suspicion, especially by other academics. Long's desire to problematize the more socially-desirable answer is his message to moral philosophy: the first part of the book, in its use of figures like Rawls, Anscombe, and Cavell, seeks to display the philosophical inadequacy of Sidgwick's non-theological, professionalized approach to ethics—and offers the theological Maurice as an intellectually attractive alternative (who is more progressive on social issues than Sidgwick, to boot!). Yet this robust endorsement of theology might evoke some suspicion. Thus, the second audience for the book are Thomists, perhaps mostly Catholic moral philosophers and theologians. This audience may nod along with the critique of Sidgwick's ethics divorced from a substantive notion of the good—as if Long is going to agree with their top-down Thomistic metaphysics or their nostalgia for Christendom. He most certainly does not. The culminating chapters of the book vindicate Maurice as the true and better Thomist Christian. The concluding chapter tells a cautionary tale of how “retrieving Aquinas can lead to an unfortunate reactionary politics,” one that Maurice (and MacIntyre) provide an alternative to. In regards to this audience, an intriguing and under-developed theme throughout the book is the consistent opposition to the use of coercive authority on religious matters; Maurice's opposition to religious tests for professorships is of a piece with Long's critique of Catholic attempts to exercise such authority. Long and Maurice do not oppose this because they want a privatized, relativized religion; rather, it is because of the very truths about God's agency that such strategies are wrong. However, the funny thing about the book is that its title and topic, “Christian ethics,” is not a descriptor to which either of these two audiences will be responsive. Instead, the book's home—and Long's own home—is in the project Stanley Hauerwas once dubbed “Christian ethics in America.” His work can be seen as a next stage in the story that, in the postwar era, centered on figures like Ramsey, Gustafson, and Hauerwas himself. Indeed, Maurice is the exemplar of H. Richard Niebuhr's preferred model of “Christ transforming culture” (152), and can sound a lot like an English version of the founder of that American tradition, Social Gospeller Walter Rauschenbusch. By going back behind the twentieth-century figures to retrieve Maurice, Long is effecting something like a Protestant ressourcement. His book stands alongside projects like those of Jennifer Herdt or Oliver O'Donovan, seeking to recover and renarrate a Protestant humanism that owes a good deal to Aquinas, but does not take the path of a full-scale rejection of an evil named “modernity.” As such, it does appear analogous to the narrow path traced by the Catholic ressourcement figures whose work was vindicated by Vatican II and the subsequent (ressourcement) papacies of John Paul, Benedict, and Francis. That vindication remains sadly and interminably contested in Roman Catholicism; nevertheless, the achievements of the councils and the popes stand as monuments that will not be overturned. Long and the Protestants, on the other hand, face the further challenge of lacking such ecclesially-erected landmarks to answer to their battling constituencies: chaotic Christian nationalists and secularizing progressives. It is for those constituencies that Long's book is the most urgent, especially its initial claims that “philosophy is an indispensable source for moral theology” (9) and that all of life is “theological”—that is, supernaturally-infused and ultimately a matter of receiving gifts from a Trinitarian God. It is to this interest in “life” that Long returns in his conclusion. Admitting that the answer to what he does has turned out to be “complicated,” he then cuts through some of these complications with a direct and simple appeal to what matters. He rightly notes that, when asked “what do you want out of life?” people do not seek “impartiality and universality” but instead “the freedom to live a good life in cooperation with others” (278). Long continues: “We know how to go on from there,” even though “we will disagree over what we mean by that expression” (278). From there, we should turn to questions of what individuals have faith in, what they hope for, and what they love. And Christians should do so not with recourse to authority to defeat “incorrect” answers, but with the trust that in all human lives God's agency is at work, gifting others and then gifting us through them. In looking back to find Maurice, Long's “big book” does a great service in pointing the intellectual way to this deeply theological and human path forward.