In "Divine Holiness and the Axiology of Theism," Leigh Vicens criticizes the account of God's reasons for action offered in my Divine Holiness and Divine Action. She argues that my account has implications that are incompatible with Christian witness regarding the goodness of our being in union with God, but that it can be corrected simply by holding that it is only sin from which God has reason to keep distance. In this response, I show that Vicens mistaken about the implications of my view regarding the goodness of being in intimate relationship with God and that her view, unlike my own, lacks an explanation of why God has reason to respond to sin by keeping distance from it.

Abstract What follows for morality if orthodox Christianity is true? More specifically, what conclusions we should draw from the Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation, on which Christ is both fully human and fully divine and is ‘like us in all respects except for sin’? A couple of desiderata for moral theory should be drawn from the Chalcedonian understanding: first, because Christ’s being like us in all ways but sin includes Christ’s being like us with respect to normative features, Christ is under the moral law in the same way that the rest of us are; and second, because we are to take Christ’s exhibiting both a divine and a human nature to be marvellous and astonishing, we should prefer a moral theory on which being human places one under the moral law but being divine does not. These desiderata give some support to a natural law understanding of the moral law.

The view that human law can be analyzed in terms of commands was subjected to devastating criticism by H.L.A. Hart in his 1961 The Concept of Law. Two objections that Hart levels against the command theory of law also make serious trouble for divine command theory. Divine command theorists would do well to jettison command as the central concept of their moral theory, and, following Hart's lead, instead appeal to the concept of a rule. Such a successor view-divine legislation theory-has the attractions of divine command theory without the unacceptable limitations of command theories that Hart identifies.

Terence Cuneo & Jada Twedt Strabbing, Samuel Fleischacker, Jonathan Rutledge & Jordan Wessling, and Sameer Yadav have generously engaged with the accounts of divine holiness and its implications offered in my Divine Holiness and Divine Action (2021), criticizing its arguments and in some cases offering attractive alternative accounts. Here I respond to some of their criticisms.

This article is a précis of Mark C. Murphy’s Divine Holiness and Divine Action (Oxford University Press, 2021), which offers an account of God’s holiness and of the difference this view of God’s holiness should make to our understanding of divine action.

Introduction Fashion and beauty work are a part of identity that is shaped around normative, idealised, and often gendered bodies, and this has been the subject of much academic and popular attention. While much research focusses on fashion and beauty work as a way to highlight socially desirable traits or trends, it is important to note that fashion is equally important as a tool for the concealment of a visibly stigmatised identity. For people diagnosed with a visibly disfiguring illness, fashion and makeup practices became a way to either reinforce or negotiate stigma. In particular, writing by people diagnosed with Hansen’s disease in 1930s Japan reveals the way in which fashion—in the form of clothing issued by the institution—could reinforce the stigma of their condition, whereas clothing from home, and the use of makeup, allowed for concealment of some of the visible markers of their condition. So associated is the notion of stigma with the condition of Hansen’s disease that “leprosy” or “leper” are used as pejoratives in some languages, to indicate conditions or behaviour out of line with social norms. Yet, it is only relatively recently that stigma and Hansen’s disease have been the subject of academic attention. Since Zachary Gussow’s ground-breaking 1989 work, Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health, however, Hansen’s disease stigma has been extensively studied, with much of the recent scholarship focused on visible stigma and social reintegration. That is to say, much of the attention is focussed on stigma reduction, and creating policies and awareness to decrease stigma by third parties. Few studies have focussed on the way stigma, in the case of Hansen’s disease, has been either reinforced or resisted by the people suffering from Hansen’s disease. Stigma, as “degrading marks that are affixed to particular bodies, people, conditions and places within humiliating social interactions”, serves to mark bodies as abnormal or inferior (Tyler, 8). In the words of Erving Goffman from his classic study on stigma, the term refers to a “spoiled identity,” and limited social participation (Goffman, Stigma 11-15). More recently, in her ground-breaking book Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, Imogen Tyler argued that stigma is both socially produced and negotiated, and that just as stigma can be leveraged to control unruly bodies, so too can it be a mode of resistance for those who are living with a stigmatised condition such as Hansen’s disease, an illness that was feared because prior to the discovery of Promin in 1943 the disease was incurable. The physical signs of illness, such as deformity of the limbs and loss of hair, made this stigma unmistakable. When sufferers were subject to quarantine, fashion was used to further mark their bodies: patients in public institutions were issued standard garments that identified them as belonging to an institution. At the same time, private clothing and makeup allowed sufferers to use fashion to conceal their stigmatised condition, to fashion liminal identities that in Goffman’s terms are not yet discredited, but “discreditable”, with their stigmatised condition hidden but social exclusion eminent should their diagnosis become clear to those around them (Goffman, Stigma 16). In the works I discuss below, we can see how clothing and makeup function to both reinforce and resist stigma in the case of writers with Hansen’s disease in Japan. This article explores the way in which illness intersected with beauty, fashion, stigma, and identity in the early years of the public institutions. First, I examine how changes in beauty marked sufferers as ill, and how that marked the sufferer as excluded from society. Makeup becomes a way to mask the visible signs of illness and inhabit a liminal space between health and marked by illness. Second, I discuss clothing as part of the process of institutionalisation to examine how clothing further demarcated sufferers. For many people admitted to a public institution, the issuance of standard clothing was another form of social death. The uniform clothing and marks of illness all reinforced patient bodies as abnormal. At the same time, even as their bodies were abject, I argue here that fashion, clothing and makeup could also allow them to inhabit a liminal space, separate from sufferers with advanced physical disfigurement, and allowed them to maintain an affective connection to society. Beauty, Making Up, and Masking Stigma While the study of physical, visible stigma and its intersections with issues of identity and social control have been the subject of renewed attention in recent years, few scholars have explored the way in which makeup is part of a masking, or resistance, of stigmatised conditions. While there is some scholarship that focusses on beauty work as biopolitics, such work often focusses on contemporary, voluntary beauty work, such as cosmetic surgery or makeup (Miller; Elfving-Hwang). At the same time, recently scholars have begun to examine the ways in which ableist standards of beauty and fashion mark physical difference as abnormal, or threatening (Davidson, 1-2). In the case of Hansen’s disease sufferers, facial changes as a manifestation of a stigmatised illness were for many writers a powerful symbol of their isolation from society. Makeup and fashion within the institution became a way for sufferers to resist the stigma associated with their disease. The application of makeup was a performance that signified inclusion in society, and its neglect was symbolic of social exclusion. This is clear in writing by women diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. For example, Hayashi Yukiko (1909-1993), in 1939, wrote that the disease first manifested on her face, in the form of a small red spot under her left eye. She wrote that she used powder to cover it, suspecting what it was. The use of makeup allowed her to continue her job at the post office until, despite her use of makeup, her co-worker noticed it (Hayashi, in Uchida, Seto no Akebono 143). After her subsequent diagnosis, she quit her job and went into isolation at home. Writing of her experience of this time, she again mentions makeup: Untouched since I got sickThe makeup case gathers dustOn the corner of the shelf病みてよりふれぬがままの化粧箱ほこり積りて棚隅にあり (Uchida, Hagi no satojima 61) A second poet, Seto Senshū, expresses similar feelings of hopelessness through an evocation of makeup: The powder that has not touchedMy hands for years Comes out of the jar with a dry rustle年久しく手にふれざりし白粉のかはきて瓶にかさと音立つ (Abe 72) For both of these authors, being quarantined because of their illness meant being cut off from society, and the discontinuance of makeup application became symbolic of social exclusion, an acknowledgement of the fact that fashion as a mode of concealment is no longer necessary. For many sufferers, an early sign of the illness was a loss of eyebrows. This was in part because Hansen's disease affects the nerve endings and the skin, the illness often manifested on the face of sufferers, and marked them as targets for discrimination or loss of social status. As eyebrows were an early sign of the illness, they were a point of concern for patients. Laura Miller and Higuchi Kiyoyuki have pointed to the importance of eyebrows in beauty work in Japan dating back to the Heian period (Miller, 141; Higuchi 81-84). Eyebrows, their shape, and the cosmetics used upon them, then, are important symbols of beauty. In Hansen’s disease literature, then, references to eyebrows and makeup are often indicators of the progress of the disease and how the illness specifically impacts the identity of women. Hayashi Yukiko wrote of her eyebrows: Every morning, every morningThe cloth with which I wipe my faceComes away with my eyebrow hairMy heart sinks朝な朝な我が顔拭ふ手拭に眉毛つき来て心が沈む Difficult to see my motherGaze anxiously at my faceI look down我が顔を気づかはしげに見る母のまみは見難く面ふせにけり (Uchida 61-62) In these poems, Hayashi’s changing appearance is tied to what it means to fashion gendered beauty in Japanese society. To have eyebrows altered in a way that is recognisable as “diseased” is a significant, traumatic impairment. This trauma is made more acute by the fact that the gaze of people is now directed at her with anxiety or fear, a response to her visibly altered body. Imogen Tyler has referred to similar phenomenon as “the stigmatising gaze”, a recognition of “stigmata on the bodies” that can no longer be masked (Tyler 12). This stigma of the illness and the gaze of those around them was particularly heavy on women. Even within the sanatorium, male patients sometimes remarked on the stigmatised beauty of the female patients. Ishikawa Kō (1906-1930), a poet who lived in Kyūshū Sanatorium, hints at the futility of makeup to hide the signs of the illness: In the waiting room in the morningWith sadness, seeing the woman patient, eyes downcastEyebrows pencilled inうつむきし女患者の書き眉をかなしく見たり朝の控所に (Kawamura and Uchida 9) Here, women pencil in their eyebrows to become invisible to the stigmatising gaze, to escape notice as being disfigured even in the hospital. They use makeup to escape the gaze of others rather than attract it, as is clear in the downcast eyes. While more women write about beauty work more than men, it was not only women applying makeup or aware of the gaze of those around them. The men also used makeup to disguise the disfigurement they suffered from their illness. Hōjō Tamio (1914-1937), one of the most famous authors of literature about his experience of illness and quarantine in the Tokyo district hospital, Tama Zenshō-en, writes of protagonist Oda’s process of institutionalisation in his most famous novella, Inochi no shoya (Life’s First Night). Describing Oda’s approach to the sanatorium, Hōjō writes: One eyebrow had thinned because of his illness, and Oda had pencilled it in. When the [local village] men came up next to him, they suddenly ceased to chatter, and as they passed by, they looked with eyes full of cu

Richard Swinburne argues that God is a ‘best-acting’ agent, relying upon the thesis that an all-knowing, all-powerful being will be fully motivated to act in accordance with the norms of morality. In God’s Own Ethics, I reject the view that such norms apply to God, offering an alternative account of the norms of divine action. Swinburne offers multiple criticisms of that alternative account: (a) that its claims about divine intention of evil are inconsistent; (b) that it makes obviously false claims about the motivations of a perfect being; (c) that it undermines the prospects of probabilistic arguments for God’s existence; and (d) that it fits poorly with the view that creaturely perfection is analogous to divine perfection. Swinburne’s criticisms are, however, unconvincing: (a) Swinburne does not notice the importance of my appeal to the distinction between intending an evil and making use of an evil; (b) Swinburne’s appeals to intuition about the motivations of a perfect being are out of place in this dialectical context; (c) it does not itself call into question a certain account of the divine nature that such an account rules out a class of arguments for God’s existence; and (d) Swinburne’s appeal to Thomistic analogy does not reckon with the crucial distinction between those features that are ascribed to God literally (if analogically) and those that are ascribed to God metaphorically. Swinburne’s criticisms of my view are thus unconvincing, though some of them do call our attention to issues that require closer examination.

The aim of this chapter is to downgrade the plausibility of the two standard frameworks for understanding divine action: the morality framework and the love framework. The morality framework holds that God necessarily acts in accordance with a set of universal moral standards. The love framework holds that God necessarily exhibits to their maximum the desires constitutive of love. Against the morality framework, there is very strong basis to think that God does not necessarily have reasons to adhere to the norms of morality that bind us, and only if God were to have such reasons could such norms necessarily apply to God. Against the love framework, the view of God as necessarily maximally loving is at odds with the norms for perfection in love, relies on a false view about the way that our desires give us reasons, and founders when confronted with the difficulty of specifying an intrinsic maximum for being loving.

According to traditional Christian doctrine that there are two possible final destinations for humans: Heaven or Hell. With respect to Heaven, the holiness framework understands entrance of humans into union with God in Heaven to be an act of gracious contingent love bestowed by God, limited by the extent to which that human exhibits the imperfection that make even more intimate union unfitting. Everlasting heavenly life, on this view, is a continual perfecting of the human in a way that makes even closer union with God more fitting, which in turn makes further transformation toward perfection possible. With respect to Hell, the holiness framework makes intelligible why universalism could be false: persons who are confirmed in sin have settled themselves on evil, and thus are not only unfit for intimate union with God—their unfitness is so extreme as to preclude God’s appropriately even acting so as to aid effectively in their transformation. Holiness considerations can also be invoked to explain the falsity of annihilationism.

It is plain from Scripture that we should think that there is some sense in which God exhibits humility. We thus need a conception of humility that is compatible with its being a feature exhibited by God. The most promising such conception is that of a disposition not to invoke reasons of status when deciding whether to act for the sake of other worthwhile ends. Such reasons of status are ascribed to God in the holiness framework. God is humble insofar as God has not stood on God’s status by refraining from creating at all; or, having created, by leaving us entirely to our own devices and not revealing Godself to us; or, even if revealed to us, refraining from becoming incarnate as one of us. It is a further positive feature of the holiness framework that it enables us to illuminate God’s nearly unthinkable humility.

This chapter explores how exclusive acceptance of the holiness framework transforms how we approach perennial problems of creation, evil, and divine hiddenness. Because creation is an intimate relationship between God and other things, and all such other things are limited in goodness, the holiness framework entails that God has standing reasons not to create at all. The problem of evil, under the holiness framework, is not about evil’s justification, but just about God’s having to be intimately related to it, given its existence—the holiness framework entails that God has motivation not to be intimately related to what is evil, but God has to be intimately related to it, given its existence and God’s intimate relationship to all that exists. And as being known by is an intimate relationship, God would have reason to remain hidden rather than known by us limited, imperfect persons. God’s willingness to be intimately related to this world is against the reasons given by divine holiness, and is accounted for only through the reasons of love for us that God graciously, contingently acts upon.

The only framework necessarily characterizing divine action is the holiness framework, on which divine action responds appropriately to God’s own perfection by being motivated to keep what is deficient, defective, and in any way limited at a distance from God. Such a framework makes intelligible our response to God as holy and fits well within our ordinary practical thought about ways in which some actions, things, and relationships can be beneath one. It can also be situated in any theory of reasons for action that has a place for expressive reasons, and is extremely useful in offering an interpretation of divine action in Scripture. The appeal to the holiness framework as the only necessary framework for divine action does not entail that God does not act on reasons of love for creatures; rather, it entails only that God acts on such reasons contingently, if at all.

Holiness is the attribute most emphatically ascribed to God in Scripture. But there has been little attention devoted to characterizing and considering the entailments of divine holiness. This book defends an account of holiness indebted to Rudolf Otto’s description of the experience of the holy as that of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. God’s being holy consists in God’s being someone with whom intimate union is both extremely desirable for us and yet something for which we—and indeed any limited beings—are unfit. This notion of divine holiness is useful for addressing disputed theological questions regarding divine action. In contrast to standard accounts of divine action that begin with assumptions regarding God’s moral perfection or God’s maximal love, the appeal to divine holiness supports a rival framework for explaining and predicting divine action—the holiness framework—according to which God is motivated to act in ways that are a response to God’s own value by keeping distance from that which is deficient, defective, or in any way limited in goodness. The book exhibits the fruitfulness of a reorientation from the morality and love frameworks to the holiness framework by showing how such a reorientation suggests distinct approaches to perennial problems of divine action regarding creation, incarnation, atonement, and salvation. From the treatment of these perennial problems, a general theme regarding divine action emerges: that God’s interaction with the world exhibits a radical sort of humility.