One must say the same thing in reverse or negatively. Knowledge of the good is the self-knowledge in which we see that in our reflection on the good which precedes decision we are not ourselves judges and are in no position, through a choice of this or that act preceding our decision, to pronounce judgment on ourselves or to bring about our own determination for salvation or perdition. The image of Hercules at the crossroads which often forms a model even for Christian morality is a pagan image for a pagan thing. It presupposes that man possesses a standard for the goodness of the commanded good and the badness of its opposite. The application of this standard is then the business that occupies the moment of reflection. But how in the world can we acquire such a standard if the goodness to be measured is that of unconditioned truth? Like Hercules at the crossroads we could obviously consider, measure, compare, and choose only if it were not a matter of the unconditioned truth of the good but of the conditioned truth which we have power to establish as such. If, however, it is a matter of the unconditioned truth of the good in what man does, then man is precisely not Hercules. When the good reveals itself in his conduct, whether it be good or bad, he knows that he himself has not measured and chosen but instead he has been measured and either chosen or rejected, that his existence has been placed and weighed on the scales. He then knows that he is not at all his own judge of virtue and vice but has found his judge in the good. How could he ever dream, then, of occupying a superior throne from which he might recognize and choose the good as the good? How could he ever reach such an exalted place? The worth and point of the ethical reflection that precedes decision cannot be the pagan and irreverent illusion of a free choice on the basis of “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” [Gen. 3:5], but rather a readiness to recognize the good in what is absolutely commanded us in the choice that takes place in our act, no matter what the choice may be or how the act may be qualified by it. |
The righteousness that may be seen in our decision is that of a court against which there can be no appeal. Before we obey or disobey we are in no position to test the rightness of the claim made upon us, or the value of the good, or the obligatory character of the command. When Paul in Philippians 1:10 tells Christians that they must “approve what is excellent,” he certainly does not mean that they must first test what is divinely commanded and recognize it as such. In the New Testament sense to “approve” here means to set aside all irresponsible possibilities and to resolve on responsible action—action responsible to a court which must be acknowledged without test—whose goodness cannot be decided by man. Where there is room for testing the command, where an ethics of being can be pursued in some sense, the good, the command, the claim is undoubtedly present already but it is not recognized as such, its unconditioned nature is not perceived, nor is it realized that Romans 9:20 is applicable here: “But who are you, a man, to answer back to God?” In face of the good that is told to us [cf. Mic. 6:8] we have no recourse to a higher good that is not told to us but that we tell ourselves and whose superiority is obviously our own. The good that is told to us is the good itself, his good, not that of our own choice and not the excellence of a standard at our own disposal, even though finally our own excellence reveals itself in our decision and act. |
For this reason there is no possibility of putting off the decisive decision to the next but one moment, of interposing a neutral moment in which we can busy ourselves appealing from the given command to one that is not given, using the standard that is ready to hand, and thus acting as our own judges of good and evil and masters of our own eternal destiny. This will not do. There is no point in such activity. It can only show that we do not yet know that the good has no lord over it—least of all ourselves—but is its own lord; that we do not yet know that the very next moment will bring to us the claim that judges us and should find us, not dreaming as Hercules at the crossroads dreams, but watchful. The content of the present moment should be that we prepare ourselves to come before our judge with our actions. Prepared or not, dreaming or watchful, we will come before our judge with our actions. The one thing that we can meaningfully do on our own is to come before him watchful. This is the light or shadow which the revelation of the command always casts in advance on the present moment: the cry: “Watch—that the evil times do not suddenly come upon you”1—the time when as those we are—with what we do we fall into the hands of the living God [cf. Heb. 10:31]. In its own way the present moment is itself decision, action, and therefore the revelation of the good. But we may add at once that it is so as a prophecy of the one who comes, who is even at the doors, and hence the cry: “Watch. Watch and pray” [Mark 14:38, cf. Eph. 6:18]. The judge comes ineluctably, and then our whole pose of being Hercules with a free choice has been just a pose. What will be revealed will not be our own but God’s predestination.
2
Thus the truth of the good is the truth by which we are measured as we act, the verdict toward which we go. The point of ethical reflection is that we become aware of our responsibility to this superior court so that the very next moment we act in awareness of this responsibility, not having chosen and grasped the good—how could we, that would be foolish effrontery—but in awareness that we are making a response with our act; in awareness of the absolute givenness of the command, over or behind which there stands no higher general truth to which we can look apart from the command, or appeal beyond the given command, but the command which is itself the truth, the truth of the good. |
All this—we are simply analyzing—implies also that the truth of the good is always a concrete individual command, just as concrete as our existence will be the very next moment, or as our action—there is no resisting this—will be concretely and individually this action. So concrete and individual is also the command in which our action will find its judge. If we take seriously the positive givenness of the command against which there is no appeal, then it cannot be just a rule, an empty form, to which we must give content by our action, so that the form of the action stands under the command and its content under our caprice. This idea seems to be unavoidable wherever the court which we obey or disobey in our moral decision, whether it be the moral law, or the idea of the good, or the more or less categorical imperative understood in Kant’s or some other sense, or the will of God, or our own conscience—wherever this court is thought of as something that is indefinite in content, wherever it is made into a purely formal concept whose truth has first to be investigated. On this view the idea of a necessary and obligatory form of the will is what is described as the revelation of the command and its definition and content—which are moral decision—arise on the basis of free choice controlled by the concept. On this view we mysteriously acquire from somewhere the knowledge that the doing of the good stands under an unconditionally valid rule and must always have the form corresponding to this rule, but assuming this rule to determine what the good is, what we should do is our own affair, and