Anglo-Catholicism & the Common Good
By Elisabeth Rain Kincaid, JD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Ethics and Moral Theology, Nashotah House
My argument for this paper is that the Anglo-Catholic understanding of the common good is a commitment to create the conditions in which human flourishing is possible because we and others are being formed into people who are capable of entering into friendship with God and friendship with others. This commitment extends to all but contains a special emphasis—a preferential option—for the poor.
Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, describes the natural law as underdetermining what we need for full human flourishing. Rather, in order to overcome “those defects and imperfections which are in us living single and solely by ourselves” and in order to create a life “fit for the dignity of man,” we turn to communion and fellowship with others. (1) The rule which governs this community must direct us to the fullness of flourishing, and is measured by the standard of the common good—a commitment to ensuring that all can participate in these gifts. We also create a rule to govern this community—one which orients us to work together. This rule is necessary because we cannot of our own, given our sinful nature, direct ourselves to the fullness of flourishing. The measure of this rule is the common good—the flourishing which all should enjoy.
In his discussion of Hooker in his famous essay, “The Anglican Spirit”, Michael Ramsay provides several key hermeneutical principles for reading Hooker which are important for understanding the richness of his conception of the common good. First, Hooker argues that what we believe and what we understand is structured by how we worship. (2) Thus, it is only through our worship—our particular engagement with God—that we can come to grasp the good of the whole community. Thus, one might argue, our desire to feed the hungry is grounded in our own hunger and thirst for the spiritual food of the Eucharist. Our care for the physically ill stems from our own helplessness as we encounter our own spiritual illness through the corporate and individual confession. Secondly, and relatedly, God’s word isn’t given to us in an intellectual or theoretical vacuum, but rather through our creaturely situatedness—both our nature and our community. Ramsey argues that this awareness of God coming to us in our creaturely situatedness contributes to an Anglican, and especially an Anglo-Catholic, emphasis on the importance of the incarnation for structuring our theology. We begin with God’s self-emptying entrance into the world and only then turn outward to go into the world the same way in which God did. This gives us a second step in determining the common good: we begin to understand the common good through worship and then go and seek to apply it contextually—to see what God is doing in the specific communities around us and where he is present. Just as Jesus came to us in a specific body and time and place and culture, the common good is always understood and analyzed particularly. However, this emphasis on particularity does not mean a full surrender of the universal aspects shared by the demands of our common human nature. Thus, the rule which directs us is derived from the tradition of the whole church, although conditioned by the needs of the specific community which we face. Read with these key hermeneutical tools, we can see in Hooker a fundamental incarnational orientation to the common good, in the direction from the worshipping community out into the world.
If one were to draw this approach, it would resemble an ellipse. This transformation for friendship with God and others begins in the liturgy—in the encounter with Christ through his presence in the proclamation of the word and the Eucharistic transformation at the altar. Our own flourishing—our own development in holiness—leads us to seek the flourishing and eventually the holiness of all around us. From becoming Christ’s friend, we become more like our friend and then take that friendship to those whom Christ befriended. Therefore, we are carried out the church door into the streets to be among those whom Christ himself sought: the poor and the dispossessed. In our encounter with Christ through the face of the poor, we are transformed ever more into his likeness. This further transformation always redirects us back into the church, where we see him even more clearly in the liturgy and most of all in the Eucharist. Of course, the plural pronoun “we” is key here. This is not a path that each of us takes on individually, but a path we must walk as a parish community. This is what we are sent out to do with the benediction at the end of a Eucharist, and we are always sent out together.
In other words, Anglo-Catholic commitment to the common good is always Christological: we encounter Christ in the liturgy, are transformed to be more Christ-like through that encounter and as we grow in the virtues, and then go where Christ went—first to the poor and the sick. And as we encounter Christ in the poor, we become more like Christ and seek him ever more fervently in his temple.
Through friendship with God, we and others can enjoy true flourishing and true development in the virtues as we are transformed both inside and out. We begin to display joy in our actions of loving others—not only consistently performing the task but actually taking joy in the operations. We become more capable of living in peace with those who are different from us and even unified with them through agape. This peace isn’t something we force, by our own will, but rather something that stems from our love for God as “the greatest good above all” and overflows into the lives of our friends around us when “we are united in what is good for each other.” While this friendship with God means that we enjoy friendships with even those who are different, it also expands the horizons of who might be our friends. “Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asks Jesus in Luke, and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. As we see that the potential for friendship with others through friendship with God is greater than we imagined, we also begin to become aware of where the good is lacking in the lives of others. We become capable of showing mercy to others and, like the Good Samaritan, actually work to alleviate the suffering of others even before they are truly our friends.
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(1) Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 87.
(2) Michael Ramsey, “The Anglican Spirit” in The Anglican Spirit, ed. Dennis Coleman (Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 1991) 19.