Love, Death, and the Church
The Question Behind Success
A few years ago, my old High School changed its school motto. ‘Honour, Serve and Obey’ being no longer reflective of 21st century values, it was reimagined ‘Success. Together.’ (with commas likewise relegated to the last century). My first thought on learning this was to wonder what students and teachers hoped to succeed in, then to speculate on whether the answer was to be different for each student, and finally to ask how they proposed to attain all their varied ends ‘together.’ If the aim of ‘giving every student the opportunity to succeed’ is now what sets the direction of the school, I couldn’t help but feel they were embarking on a rather difficult course, made more challenging by the fair possibility that the navigator might see his job as best left to the varied determinations of individual seaman and passengers, some of whom thought they were on a pleasure cruise through the Mediterranean, while others were making for the South Pole.
I suspect that most people with an interest in the school did not share my wonder at what the new motto meant. ‘Success’ is one of those words of modern parlance that is ever under-defined and yet always perfectly explicable to its users. It is what Ivan Illich would call a key term: a word which provides a concourse into a whole way of life through its host of applications and implications which are never interrogated by its users. It is assumed by all to be thoroughly understood, and thus veils far more than it reveals.
We all want success. We want it for ourselves; we want it for our children. That is entirely uncontroversial, insofar as success just means attaining something one has worked towards, or some such generic state of fulfilment. It thus reflects the fundamentally teleological shape of all human action (and indeed of all being), wherein whatever we do is explicable in terms of its purpose or telos. And yet, if ‘success’ is our key term of choice for expressing teleology, this also suggests that the teleology of 21st century life is peculiarly underdetermined. For it remains to be clarified in each and every case just what the successful person has done to be so qualified. What, indeed, would we have ourselves and our children succeed in doing? We can of course answer this question, but we then show ourselves to have the order of explanation backwards. Where the telos ought to explain the action, we instead have the action explaining the telos.
‘Success’ is a placeholder concept, the meaning of which must first be fixed, at least by context if not by definition, if it is to be comprehensible. To speak meaningfully of success, we must already grasp, at least implicitly, what we mean to be succeeding in. That is not in itself a strike against the term—context is always imperative to the comprehensibility of language and use in context is a very natural way to learn the meaning of any word. Fair and good, until we try to make ‘success’ the north star to which we set our course and choose endeavors. If we find this happening, we must consider whether something or someone else is in fact setting course for us.
My most charitable interpretation of the new school motto is that it reflects the need of the school—which has for a long time been the only large high school in the region—to be an educational home to an array of students of varying needs and backgrounds: some of whom will finish up in tenth grade and get a job, some of whom will complete apprenticeships and go into trades, others of whom will move to the city to go to college, and still others who have special needs and require unique forms of educational support. In such a school it is hard to hold out one definition of ‘success’, and perhaps appropriate that that they shouldn’t try to.
But, two more cynical readings follow quickly on the heels of that one. Firstly, that the appeal to ‘success’ is precisely a way of avoiding the hard task of naming what a good education has in common for all of these students. And secondly, that it is a sign that the grading outcome and job pathway system has finally and completely displaced the goods it is supposed to be a mere means for attaining. The success of good grades, or of graduating, or of matriculating into further education, are themselves placeholders—ways of making measurable and concrete the goods we actually care about, such as learning (one hopes), or earning potential. This is education, and indeed life, fully subject to the logic of technique a la Jacque Ellul, as the technical processes we employ come to set the ends for us rather than we setting the ends to which they are employed. However truly the aim of the school might be attend to the particularities of each student, there is in fact nothing very personal about ‘success’ within such a system. The most rebellious (or perhaps wisest) of the students also recognise there is nothing particularly satisfying about it; that they are being led through mere simulations of achievement through the safe environment of school, while the risks and satisfactions of the ‘real world’ are being denied them until they pass through the probation of the fake. If only they knew that the financial goals and promotional ladder and secure retirement of the real world were no less fake.
But here I wish to change tack and, instead of plunging into an Ellulian analysis of technological determinism, consider the relationship which a teleology of success bears to another feature of modern life: what Ephraim Radner has called the ‘Great Transition’. The teleology of success, I propose, with its underdetermined yet overly managed milestones, calculated to fit neatly within the career of the student or the lifetime of the human being, owes a great deal to how we relate to our own deaths.
Morality and Genealogy
Succeed: from Old French ‘succeder’ / Latin ‘succedere’: to come close after
It is a very curious feature of our term ‘success’ that it derives from the same root word from whence we also receive ‘succession’. I will stake out no claims about the history of this divergence of the two branches from the common root, although I am sure such a history would be fascinating. For the two branches issue out from succeed at distinctly odd angles; which oddness, I will go on to argue, is best illuminated in their distinct relationships to mortality.
In A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality and the Shape of Human Life, Ephraim Radner presents mortality as not simply the solid fact that we all die, but as a character given to human life by both birth and death, and the ‘arc of life’ that runs between them. Indeed, because that arc begins with birth, with our each being begotten of a man and woman, the shape of mortal life is necessarily genealogical. We do not come into and leave the world as perfectly discrete and separate entities; rather, we make our entrance upon a generation that has come before us, and we exit leaving a generation to come after us. In Radner’s view, this aspect of human life should not be dismissed as a consequence of the Fall, which is yet to be overcome, but should also be understood as reflecting our standing in the world as creatures. Our Creator has gifted us the ‘skins’ we are born in and which we bear through life as our only protection against the eruption of death, whether from within or without. This very contingency and fragility of our lives throws us upon the mercy of our God in faith.
Or so it ought to throw us, if it were not for the ‘Great Transition’ which has occurred in almost all parts of the world within the last couple of centuries. The Great Transition is Radner’s term for the disappearance of death from the fabric of ordinary life. Prior to the Great Transition, death was ‘all around, all the time’ (25). But because of the reduction of child mortality and the longer life spans we enjoy, death is no longer a felt presence in societies that have undergone this transition. This has the consequence, on the one hand, of hiding death from view, and on the other, of making death a ‘surd’ experience, an absurd and inexplicable rupture in the fabric of life.
The context of the Great Transition helps us to understand the displacement of succession by success. Success names the telos of human life when mortality is ignored, when we reorient our life’s arc around goals that can fit neatly within it, as if death posed no real challenge to human purposes.
A teleology of succession, by contrast, must be ever willing to admit the threat of futility. For succession is about persons, and it is persons who die. These days we are most likely to think of succession when we do our ‘succession planning’ and write up our wills, but this can give us a false impression that succession is largely about the handing on of assets or about the continuation of certain functions performed. For succession is most fundamentally what occurs when one person succeeds another. It is the passing on of a mantle from one generation to the next, the cloak of personal duty and authority which can only be worn by a particular person who has been designated to inherit it—designated within a family, of course, but also within a firm, or a club, or perhaps a kingdom.
Because succession depends upon persons and not on a system or technique to be optimised, it contends with the risk of failure. As any lawyer can tell you, the best way to undertake estate planning is not to have the most comprehensively written will, full of fine-grained conditions and an answer to every contingency. It is far better to grant authority to a person whom you trust, who knows you and understands your wishes. Thus, when we broaden our concept of succession beyond the immediate point of exchange, we can see how much depends upon the persons involved. A father who badly manages his estate in his lifetime, or who does not train up his son to be ready to manage it in his turn, ruins his son’s prospects well before the event of succession arrives. Likewise, a son who inherits much, but who squanders his inheritance in prodigality and unfulfilled duties, can destroy his father’s works well after the father’s death.
Running throughout the genealogical pattern of succession is the fragile thread of futility. Humanly speaking, the fear that hangs over all our lives is that our name and our works may be at any point swallowed up by death and fortune. Perhaps the archetypal form of this fear is the fear of burying one’s own children. Although succession is not limited to the family line, the family inheritance is the basic expression of it, from which all other forms of succession derive their sense by way of analogy. Children, as the constitutive parts of the next generation, are the sine qua non of succession. Thus, the ending of a family line carries the full symbolic force of failed succession: we there arrive at a genealogical dead end.
And yet, death is not merely the enemy of succession. It is also the cause of it: for it is good for you to have a successor precisely because you will die. Those who go to their labours with a care for the succeeding generation must be those who look death in the face and admit, not only that man is mortal, but that I, a man, am mortal. With this admission, I acknowledge that I will, one day—maybe soon, maybe decades hence—leave a space behind me to be occupied by another. That there is no question but that I will one day be forced to lay down my tools and all my worldly goods, and that the only question still left to me to answer is whether and in what way they will be taken up by one who comes after me.
We must answer this question of succession, realising that if we do not then our deaths will amount to a repudiation of our life’s work. You yourself must be swallowed up in death, but would you really have your works swallowed up with you? Is there not something good in them that makes it desirable that they outlive you? To answer that there is something requires you to turn your attention to the question of succession. To answer that there is nothing is to admit that they are nothing, and that you are worse than nothing, and to receive your death as a verdict on your sins.
As Josef Pieper argues in Death and Immortality, death itself issues a judgement on one’s life, even before we face the final judgement as a distinct event. In what is perhaps the most puzzling part of his closely argued book, Pieper claims that while death come to us from outside of us, and thus acts upon us against our wills, it is at the same time always freely embraced when it so comes:
On the one hand the falling itself (into death), as well as the time of falling, is decreed and not within the power of man; but on the other hand the direction of the fall is open, can be corrected up to the last moment, and is left to the freedom of man.
This is so, I take it, because what man ‘falls’ into is the summary judgement of his whole life. His life is thus ‘summed up’ in his manner of dying, such that the free decision of death, according to Pieper, is one in which ‘the man “chooses for eternity the attitude which he desires in truth”’, in an affirmation or repudiation of the life he has lived up to that moment.
The challenge of living after the Great Transition is that we must still go about the whole arc of our lives with that summary event of death in view, even as death has been rendered less visible by it. For the Great Transition has not altered human nature, and we are no less mortal than we were before it happened. Out of recognition of the nature God has given us, we must reject the modern teleology of success with its forced frame of a single lifetime and its vainly constructed measures of achievement. Instead, taking as given that we are mortal creatures, thus genealogical creatures, we must live an answer to the question: what will I leave behind me, and to whom?
Labor of Love
When the pattern of succession is rent and the genealogical nature of human life all but disappears, those who stand in the place of successors are left in a difficult position. To begin with, we must choose to chart our course through a context in which what heritage we have received is oriented towards success; we have thus in a certain paradoxical sense to move at cross-purposes with the generations we are immediately succeeding. Once we have come to terms with that task, we then face the challenge of discerning what such a life involves in the absence of a clear pattern being provided to us. I will here try to move in the direction of answering these dilemmas.
To answer the first problem, it is worth understanding just what dangers our success-oriented societies feel they have avoided by exchanging succession for success. Our modern teleology of success takes its high moral ground from the fact that it has relieved the rising generation from the real constraints that accompany the duties of succession. No longer is the elder son restricted in his life ambitious to taking over the family farm or trade or business. No longer is the younger son limited in his own ambitions by his unequal share in the family wealth. Each is equally free to do whatever he likes, so long as he makes good on the ‘opportunities’ offered him and continues the family tradition of upward social mobility.
The very legitimate concern we might have with patterns of succession is that the preceding generation imposes upon the succeeding generation an unhealthy influence. Under the guise of prioritising the common good over the good of the individual, the younger generation is in fact made to conform to the personal preferences and projects of those they are succeeding, irrespective of whether those projects are worth continuing at all.
There is a real danger of exercising a kind of intergenerational tyranny through succession. Out of terror that my works will come to nothing in my death, I might seek to bind others to the task of securing them for the sake of my own pride. This is the grasp of the ‘dead hand’ that Mr. Casaubon, the aging scholar of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, tries to stretch over the life of his young wife:
She could understand well enough now why her husband had come to cling to her as possibly the only hope left that his labours would ever take a shape in which they could be given to the world. At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even her aloof from any close knowledge of what he was doing, but gradually the terrible stringency of human need—the prospect of a too speedy death.
Readers of Middlemarch will know that the tyranny of Mr. Casaubon consists in more than just his wish that Dorothea would continue his scholarship, and that, like most tyrannical forms of succession planning, he exercises his power beyond death by tying up the bequest of his estate in conditions. Succession is indeed tyrannical if not tempered by humility, which above all else means giving over what you have to another in an act of trust in her love and discretion, and without seeking to secure her subjugation to your wishes by grasping at control beyond the grave. It is ultimately the evident absence of her husband’s trust in her which brings Dorothea to disavow any duties to complete her husband’s lifelong labors:
The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgement whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness which is a supreme use. But now her judgement, instead of being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the embittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion.
Such is the fate of succession’s ‘dead hand’: rebellion. This is the accepted wisdom of our age, and we do well to heed it.
And yet, the modern aversion to succession goes further than the fear of tyranny. For we also harbour a deep fear of inauthenticity. It appears to us that the individual personality of the successor must stretch and squeeze itself into the space left to him by the one he succeeds. Insofar as he cannot achieve this state of conformity, he lives in constant dissonance with his community and assigned duties. Insofar as he does conform, he lives in the cognitive dissonance of inauthenticity, suppressing that which makes him truly ‘himself’. This offends our liberal instincts.
But in taking such offence, I think we misunderstand the very goods we aim at when we elevate the individual. Human agency is more inventive than we might suppose, and human personality is far more interesting than can be satisfactorily expressed by, say, a choice of profession. The material of personality is what we do with the circumstances we are given — for inasmuch as our choices do affect our future circumstances, there is still no such thing as a choice made absolutely prior to and uninformed by circumstances.
Indeed, the advice to take personality as the basis of choice has left many an undeveloped youth flailing about in life, wondering why they have failed to identify the ‘passion’ which is supposed to give them direction, and sending themselves off on journeys of self-discovery instead of resolving at some form or other of work or study which will at least have the advantage of establishing them on a path to the wisdom they presently lack.
It is this fear of inauthenticity that I think we must strive to free ourselves from. The lesson of our genealogical nature is that we always stand in the shadow of what has come before us, even when we try not to, and even when everything seems to conspire to interrupt transmission.
We are most often tempted to acknowledge this fact of nature when we wish to lay blame on the generations preceding us for the wrongs we inherit, but their corollary responsibility for the goods we inherit is just as strong. For generations who are now grappling with what we have (or haven’t) inherited, it is easy to lay blame on those who came before us and accuse them of failing to face their own mortality. But I must insist that we who stand to succeed them had best look to our own mortality as well. To confess what we owe to our predecessors, and to accept our inevitable submission to their influence, is also a confession of mortality. A single human lifespan is entirely insufficient to the task of beginning anything from scratch, and thus in submitting to the duty of succession the younger generation joins the older generation in their humility.
We can now start to see a path through the second problem and begin to discover what it looks like to aim at succession afresh. Humility has already presented itself as necessary for succession. Faithfulness and love, too, as we have seen outlined by the murky will of Mr. Casaubon, and we can very easily add hope, that most timely of virtues under the shadow of death. But the greatest of these is love, as the Apostle Paul tells us, so let us try to understand how this is true in the task of succession.
Here is my claim: Insofar as love characterises what a person does in pursuit of success, it is only accidentally characteristic of it; insofar as a person undertakes his works under the frame of succession, he must have love as his essential characteristic.
Death, as we have seen, brings one’s works into judgement. What succession reveals is that one’s works are not merely the things one has made, but include the people one has formed—the people for whom our works are done, and without whom they must otherwise be rendered futile.
The one being succeeded must know his life’s work as not done for his own sake, but as done in love for those who succeed him. If he does not, he will never be able to bear to hand them over in full to another, because another person cannot take them up for him, whereas she can continue his legacy for others. At the same time, he must also live with a special care for the very persons God places in in his care as successors—whether in his business, his profession, his family, his church, his neighbourhood, his local club. His life’s labours are both for them and dependent upon them. In love, he must try to prepare them to succeed him.
The good successor, meanwhile, accepts her duties with respect and deference to the spirit of the one she succeeds and the human tradition she inherits. Along with that loving respect, she will need forbearance. For part of her task will be to endeavour to cover a multitude of sins through her labours with an inheritance that will inevitably be flawed.
The consequence of all this is to bind together the generations of the new human family which is the church—within which alone such love is possible—into the continuation of the project entrusted to it by God. Where the teleology of success positions the family home as a mere base of operations for the separate endeavors of individuals (including those of the children within it), the teleology of succession re-situates the home and all the work that must go into it as the very lively center of that project. And at the same time, it does not exclude the celibate and the childless, who are born into the same genealogical project, and are called to locate their own vocations within it. In the full arc of a human life, we will each take our turn in the receiving and the giving of gifts, and thereby participate in the labor of love which is life in our mortal bodies. In God’s mercy may we not only come to know the love that succession demands, but may we also enjoy the love that it builds.
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers…
Image: The Thistlethwayte Family (1758), Thomas Hudson (1701-1779), oil on canvas.
