A God most Particular: Aspects of Incarnation in Butler’s Morality

Abstract

Abstract Butler’s moral philosophy is a blend of English common sense and pastoral sensitivity, interleaved with elements from the long natural law tradition and (even more significantly, though not so overtly) with a conviction that the death of Jesus was a redemptive action by an omnipresent God. This theological determinant of his thought is rarely placed in the centre, either by Butler himself or by his expositors and critics, but it is crucial. For Butler the supreme and decisive instance of a moral action (’instance’ is too weak, as we shall see), the volitional event that ought to condition and shape the whole of our moral analysis, already exists in history; in (paradoxically) the death of a man, a man with divine ramifications. This is why morality and moral philosophy are so important. What we might call the ’moral relationship to reality’ is, if not fundamental in human life, at least very nearly so, and at any rate inescapable: in engaging in it we are, humanly speaking, being conducted as far as we might ever conceive ourselves being conducted into the unfathomed mysteries of existence.