Christianity has been concerned from the beginning with the questions of ethics: how to live well, how to be a good person, and how to live in right relationships with other people and with God. Particular circumstances in different Christian communities have led to different ways of dealing with such questions, and these varied responses to theological, political or pastoral issues have given rise to enduring moral traditions. The history of these traditions largely follows the major lines of division between and within Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism, though in recent times interest in particular traditions has spread across theological and ecclesial boundaries. Growing Protestant understanding of natural law ethics and a wider awareness of Orthodox spirituality among western Christians are examples of these ecumenical developments. Historic Christian moral traditions have also been influenced by the various forms of modern, pluralistic culture in which most Christians now live. This article will deal primarily with the older moral traditions and the cultural and ecclesial contexts where they first developed. That will take us from early Christianity to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is important to realise that the interactions between tradition and context are becoming increasingly complex as Christianity finds its place in a network of globalised cultural, political and economic systems.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE MORAL LIFE

Christianity emerged in a context that already had well-developed traditions of moral thought. The Hebrew prophets had proclaimed a divine standard of righteousness that the people and their rulers did not meet. Jewish wisdom literature contrasted the foolish ways of the young, the headstrong, and the wicked with the way of wisdom, in which the righteous follow God’s own pattern laid down at the creation of the world.

Christian ethical thinking in Asia has been contextually responsive and thus, given the diversity that constitutes the Asian context, necessarily multi-faceted. Yet, continuities can be discerned across the continuum of Christian ethical thinking that has emerged in various Asian contexts. This is because Christian ethical thinking in Asia, which is primarily reflected in its various contextual theologies, has consistently engaged two distinctive features of the Asian reality, namely Asia's multi-religiousness and poverty – the latter needing to be understood both in terms of economic deprivation and social discrimination. It has, so to speak, undertaken that ‘Double Baptism’ in ‘the Jordan of Asian multi-religiousness and the Calvary of Asian Poverty’, which the Sri Lankan Theologian Aloysius Pieris has famously described as being an essential characteristic of a truly contextual church in the Asian context. However, it needs to be pointed out that any ambitious project toward an overt generalisation of Asian Christian ethics runs the risk of contextual disembodiment or the eclipsing of identity-specificity. Therefore, it can be said that one of the tensions inherent in defining Asia concerns striking a balance between the politically necessitated construction of Asia as a unitary group and the concomitant dangers of oversimplification, stereotyping and homogenisation that have the potential to reify, constrain and denounce the complexity and diversity of Asian identity. It is with this recognition that this chapter seeks to provide specific examples of Christian ethics in the Asian context, focusing mainly on the Korean and Indian contexts, because Asian Christian attempts at Christian ethics can be discerned most pronouncedly in the different attempts made toward articulating contextually relevant theologies.

A virtue is a trait of character or intellect that is in some way praiseworthy, admirable or desirable. When we refer to somebody's virtues, what we usually have in mind are relatively stable and effective dispositions to act in particular ways, as opposed to inclinations that are easily lost, or that do not consistently lead to corresponding kinds of action. And so, for example, someone who has the virtue of generosity will consistently respond in generous ways in a variety of situations, including those in which generosity is difficult or costly, in contrast to someone who is moved by pity to one uncharacteristically generous act, or someone whose generous impulses are frequently overcome by desires for self-indulgence. Today, the virtues are normally understood to be morally praiseworthy traits of character, but this has not always been the case. For example, many ancient and medieval writers considered intelligence and wit to be virtues.

Probably every society has identified certain human characteristics as being especially praiseworthy and worth cultivating, while also identifying others as vices, which are morally corrupt, contemptible or otherwise undesirable. These traditions of virtues, in turn, have frequently given rise to systematic reflection on what it means to be virtuous. Virtue ethics, understood as a process of systematic, critical reflection on the virtues and related topics, is particularly likely to emerge in conditions of social change, when received traditions of the virtues undergo development and criticism. These observations apply to Christian societies as much as to any others.

The existence of an ecological crisis is increasingly recognised as one of the defining features of life in the late modern era. The precise parameters of the crisis are described in different ways, but most accounts include the following features:

(1) Modern humans are witnessing the first major extinction of species originated by human action and the first such mass extinction to occur in a time frame of decades rather than millennia. Scientists estimate the number of lost species as a consequence of human activity at around 10,000 per annum. Biodiversity is reduced by deforestation in both tropical and boreal regions, by the conversion of forests, savannah and wetlands into land for agricultural monocrops or domestic animal grazing; by industrialised deep-sea fishing; by the destruction of coral reefs; and by the increased use of pesticides and herbicides in modern agricultural systems.

(2) The earth is said to be undergoing radical changes in its climatic patterns caused by human activities, and in particular the burning of fossil fuels whose principal uses include space heating, transportation and electricity production. Growth in rice-paddy cultivation and beef-cattle ranching, major sources of methane, also contribute to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect. Evidence for global warming is said to include rising sea levels; rising global air temperatures; accelerating loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean, in Antarctica and Greenland, and on land-based glaciers most notably in the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas; the increasing number and ferocity of tropical storms; disturbances in the pattern of tropical monsoon rains; and related changes in ocean currents, which enhance the warming and cooling cycle of the Pacific El Niño effect.

(3)...

OLD TESTAMENT OR JEWISH/HEBREW BIBLE?

In the past thirty years there has been a move in British and North American scholarship to use the term ‘Hebrew Bible’ (less often, ‘Jewish Bible’ or ‘Jewish scriptures’) in place of ‘Old Testament’. The question affects ethics, as will be shown shortly. The reason for the move has been a wish to be sensitive to Judaism, and to avoid the impression, undoubtedly created in many people's minds by the term ‘Old Testament’, that the books designated by this name are inferior to or superseded by those known as the New Testament. In addition, there has been the feeling in some quarters that the Christian term ‘Old Testament’ is inappropriate in academia.

It is easier to be sympathetic to the reasons for the move than to feel that the underlying problem has been satisfactorily dealt with. The terms ‘Jewish Bible’ and ‘Jewish scriptures’ most naturally refer to texts held sacred by and used distinctively within Judaism. They are legitimate designations in that context. ‘Hebrew Bible’ is more problematic, because, on analogy with ‘English Bible’, it most naturally refers to the Bible in Hebrew, although few students who take courses in the ‘Hebrew Bible’ in universities and colleges actually read it in that language. There is the further problem that ‘Hebrew Bible’ and ‘Old Testament’ are not synonymous. For the majority of Christians for most of the history of the church, ‘Old Testament’ has not only designated the twenty-four books of the Bible in Hebrew, but has also included the thirteen to sixteen books that Protestants call the Apocrypha, but which are scripture for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

These opening lines of their Rule have guided the followers of Francis of Assisi for some 800 years. To ‘observe’ the Gospel can mean both looking at it carefully, as in ‘observing’ the stars, and carrying out what it asks, as in ‘observing’ a law or a principle. The Franciscan Rule thus requires those who profess it to pattern their lives according to the Gospel of Christ, putting its teachings into practice as members of a religious order of the Catholic Church.

The earliest draft of this Rule followed by Francis of Assisi and his brothers received its first approval in 1209. Since that time it has inspired many to become saints, just as it has spawned bitter controversies over its application in changing circumstances of Church and society. Bearing in its train this complex heritage, it continues to guide the lives of a multitude of the followers of Francis to this day. A thorough history and analysis of the Franciscan Rule and its influence through the centuries would require a long study indeed, and one that is highly desirable. Our purposes here are more modest, and of an introductory nature: to examine critical moments in the development of that Rule and its interpretation, from ‘a few words written down simply’ in 1209, through its several redactions, its formal approval in 1223, and its early interpretation by the brothers themselves and the papacy in the years immediately after the death of Francis.

St Francis was for centuries a saint widely revered, yet only by Roman Catholics. After the East–West split of 1054 within the Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches rarely engaged with those declared holy by Rome in the following centuries. After the fracture of the Church in the west at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Protestants included in their theological outlook a rejection of what they saw as the false claims for saints and their cults, along with the monastic system itself. A founder of a medieval religious order such as Francis therefore had little appeal for them. Even Anglicans, whose ecclesiastical position became eventually a mix of Catholic structures and reformist views, found a saint like Francis too associated with what they regarded as mawkish superstition and misdirected fervour. In any case, political events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stoked fears of ‘papism’, meaning there could be little attraction in any saint closely associated with loyalty to Rome.

All the more remarkable therefore was the marked change in the nineteenth century, a period that ended with St Francis being the medieval saint most admired by Anglicans and Protestants. Adopted in various guises as one of the most inspiring religious figures in Christian history, his emergence as an ecumenical icon was astonishing.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

The origin of this change can be found in the Romantic Movement. From the final years of the eighteenth century, the social and political pressures wrought by revolutionary ideology and the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, and also by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, saw a reaction that involved looking back in history for inspiration.

Brother Giles of Assisi was the first Franciscan to go as a missionary to the Muslims. He had become one of Francis's companions on 23 April 1208, joining soon after Bernard of Quintavalle. According to Thomas of Celano

In 1209, when the number of brothers had increased to eight, Francis sent them out in pairs. Bernard and Giles journeyed to Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrimage site in Galicia in the north-west of the Iberian peninsula, where the apostle James, son of Zebedee and brother of John, was reputed to be buried. Santiago, as the Iberians called him, had become a rallying cry of the Christian warriors who since the eleventh century had fought in the Reconquest, the struggle to reconquer and christianise the peninsula from the northern mountains southwards.

According to the Shorter Life of Giles, he returned to Assisi from Santiago and then went to the shrine of St Michael on Monte Gargano and that of St Nicholas at Bari. Leo adds:

The young Francis of Assisi, son of a prosperous merchant, dreamed of earning fame as an intrepid and chivalrous knight, whose deeds would be praised and celebrated at home and beyond the confines of his native Umbria, spreading to the neighbouring provinces. This aspiration survived his spell as a prisoner of war in Perugia after the battle of Collestrada in November 1202 when he may have witnessed horrific deeds. On his release, his interests, manner and spirit were noticeably different. The new restlessness and growing detachment could not be explained solely by a period of incarceration as a prisoner of war. Despite this enduring sense of disorientation, the hope of becoming a bold and fearless knight persisted and led Francis to join a nobleman of Assisi who was making preparations to depart for Apulia in southern Italy, where Walter of Brienne was leading the papal militia against Markwald of Anweiler, the seneschal of the German emperor. About 1204/5 Francis set out from home and travelled as far as the neighbouring city of Spoleto, where a dream about arms and their use caused him to discard his military ambitions and return home. On his journey back to Assisi he undoubtedly pondered the ruins of his military ambitions with his ardent desire to win renown and honour. The next stage in his life was far from clear.

INTRODUCTION

Gregory IX, a keen patron of the newly founded mendicant orders, increasingly resorted to them as instruments of papal authority, notably as Crusade preachers and as diplomatic envoys. And towards the end of his pontificate, these developments received an unexpected boost from the appearance of the Mongols (more commonly known as ‘Tartars’) on the horizons of the Latin world. The Mongols were engaged in a mission of world conquest that they believed to have been entrusted by heaven to the empire's founder, Chinggis Khan (d. 1227), and campaigns headed by his senior grandson, Batu, reduced the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe and the principalities of the Rus, and in 1241–2 devastated Poland, Moravia and Hungary. In the course of this first attack on Latin Christian territory, the mendicants suffered alongside other sections of the Catholic Church. Friars were among those massacred; and, according to the Franciscan guardian of Prague, the invaders had destroyed at least two of the Franciscan custodies in eastern Europe.

When Innocent IV convened the Council of Lyons (1245), the most recent – and the most accurate – intelligence concerning the Mongols had been provided by an émigré Russian ecclesiastic named Peter. It seems that Peter's responses to the questions put to him by the pope and the cardinals served as a framework around which at least one of the papal ambassadors to the Mongols would structure his own report; and certainly his statement that the Mongols received envoys favourably (benigne) and sent them back promptly must have encouraged the curia to enter into diplomatic relations with the newcomers.

Francis of Assisi expounded the mysteries of the Gospel in an attractive and persuasive manner. A good description of him was given by Thomas, archdeacon of Split, who was present at a sermon which Francis preached in the piazza at Bologna on 15 August 1222. His clothing and personal appearance were contrasted with the vigour and power of his words, which restored harmony and peace to a troubled and divided city. Dr Rosalind Brooke describes Francis as ‘a subtle, self-conscious, imaginative teacher’ who communicated the Gospel with a telling clarity. Words, symbols and gestures were deftly used to convey the teaching of Jesus Christ. Thomas of Celano remarks that Francis made a tongue of his whole body in the service of Christianity (1 Cel., 97). Francis's collection of letters is minuscule in comparison with the voluminous correspondence of Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), Bernard at Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Peter the Venerable (1092–1156). Apart from the Rule, his writings take the form of exhortations to observe the Gospel as fully as possible, while some letters deal with specific matters, such as the implementation of Honorius III's instruction Sane cum olim on 22 November 1219. There are two autographed texts: first, the letter to Brother Leo and secondly, the praises of God and a blessing upon the same friar. Copies of Francis's writings were treasured and distributed with his blessing. They circulated during his lifetime and not long after his death, forming the basis for the early manuscript tradition and the critical edition of his works.

Roughly a century after the approval of the Franciscan Rule by Honorius III, members of the order claimed that a pope was trying to destroy it. For an order previously so dependent on the papacy for protection, patronage and privileges, this was a remarkable volte-face. Blame for the alienation of affection is invariably directed at Pope John XXII (1316–34): several medieval Franciscan sources portray John as a heretic, and historians have followed suit in casting the pope as an enemy of the order, like William of Saint-Amour, a Parisian master of theology very critical of the theological basis for the pastoral role played by the mendicants. But to style John as the architect of an attack against Franciscans obscures the fact that the pope's actions were fundamentally reactions – responses to legal appeals and supplications from the friars themselves, who, as ever, looked to the papacy to solve their problems. John's reform of the Franciscan order was fitful, piecemeal and unplanned.

John XXII began his pontificate by honouring the order in canonising a friar, Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297). The canonisation bull, Sol oriens (April 1317), reveals the pope's benign disposition towards the Franciscans. John praised Louis's poverty: his moderate use of goods necessary for the exercise of the episcopal office, his love for the poor and his wearing a ‘shabby’ (vilis) habit in observance of the Rule. Poverty was praiseworthy and unproblematic: in no way was it a source of conflict or controversy. Before becoming pope, John had been associated with Louis's family, the Angevin rulers of Naples. He was elected on 7 August 1316, two years after the death of Clement V (1305–14).

The Third Order of St Francis developed from the lay penitential movement of the Middle Ages. As literacy spread and the religious needs of the faithful shifted, the general population began to seek ways to live the Gospel with greater intensity. These laity became known as penitents, because they had undergone dramatic conversion experiences. The way of penance was understood in the biblical sense as metánoia, a reversal of values and behaviour. In his Testament, Francis describes his life in terms of such a reversal: his earlier ‘life in sin’ among the townspeople of Assisi and his later ‘life of penance’. Penance was not about asceticismor repentance within the sacramental system; instead, it meant imitation of the way of the apostles, who shared their goods and identified with the poor Christ by caring for those in need.

When Francis ‘left the world’, he abandoned his reliance on the values subscribed to by society within the flourishing urban centres. While about 90 per cent of the people lived at or below subsistence level, the rising merchant class was beginning to challenge the dominance of the landholders. This world of accumulated wealth, ownership, power and prestige is the world Francis left. Instead, he sought an alternative world in a social system rooted in the Gospel and its concern for each person, especially the poor and outcast. Francis's efforts were reinforced by Assisi's Freedom Charter of 1210, which shifted power from the nobility back to the common folk.

Long before contemporary musicians, scientists, theologians and politicians lamented the toxic denigration of the environment, Francis of Assisi displayed a profound empathy for the created world. Not surprisingly, the Roman Catholic Church confirmed the unique rapport of Francis with creation by singling him out as the patron saint of ecology. While the popular image of Francis in nature is often that of a painfully pious, ornamental statue on a bird bath, an examination of his writings and biographies reveals him as the embodiment of Paul's most fervent hope for creation. He writes that all creation groans for the redemption of the children of God, for the material world has been unwillingly subjected to frustration, bondage and decay in the company of humanity. Nature will be set free only if and when humanity is freed in the flesh through the death and resurrection of Christ (Romans 8: 18–27). This chapter first and foremost considers Francis as a harbinger of this eschatological hope, a man whose evangelical conversion draws him into a compassionate, liberating relationship with animate and inanimate creatures alike. Indeed, Francis goes well beyond the Pauline understanding of creation as companion to propose a gendered model of familial equality and freedom in which men and women are joined in prayerful ministry by other creatures, who are all brothers and sisters under one Father in heaven. Following on Francis, we shall then examine the insights of later Franciscans into the nature and significance of creation, especially animals, in salvation history. The writings of Thomas of Celano, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and Angela of Foligno provide a compelling witness to the variegated Franciscan appreciation of creation.

On 27 October 1986 in the basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli John Paul II spoke to an audience gathered for the historic World Day of Prayer for Peace:

Was the pope correct in choosing Francis as the model of peace, reconciliation and fraternity? Have many contemporary devotees of Francis been right about him and the values celebrated in ‘the peace prayer’ attributed to him? Was Francis a forerunner of modern-day ecumenical and interfaith dialogue? Was his primary intent to be martyred – an objective left unfulfilled in his encounter with the sultan? Did he approve of the Crusades at the time of his visit to the sultan? The answers to these important questions have serious consequences for our understanding of Francis. If the last question is answered in the affirmative, for example, how does this affect our image of Francis as peaceful and compassionate? Is this a case of revisionist history and anachronistic thinking? The earliest report of this encounter comes from the writings of Jacques de Vitry in 1220:

What is clear is that Francis crossed the line between the Muslim forces and the crusaders in the autumn of 1219. Aspiring to convert the Muslims, he was able to preach, at least for a few days, to Sultan al-Malik-al-Kâmal, and he returned to the crusader camp safe and unharmed. There are controversies about this encounter. Why did Francis go to Egypt? What actually happened in the sultan's court? What were the later effects of this meeting on Francis's life and writings? Did he support or disapprove of the fifth Crusade that was taking place in 1219?

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND HERMENEUTICS

Francis of Assisi is one of the most popular and attractive saints of Christian history. And yet therein lies the challenge for those attempting to authentically understand him and the movement which gathered around him. In popular and scholarly treatments Francis and his spiritual achievement are often understood in isolation from the historical conditions and realities which gave rise to the man and the movement he inspired. Such works concentrate instead either on his heroic and saintly virtues of simplicity, humility and poverty or on his fate as an isolated victim of manipulative clerics intent on using his movement to advance their own ecclesial agenda. In either case concentration is fixed upon the man to the exclusion of the multi-faceted movement.

The reason for this is not simply our genuine fascination with il poverello. It is also closely tied to the fact that our understanding of him has either been drawn largely from the hagiographical sources of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, which viewed him through the lens of his canonisation as a saint in 1228; or, alternatively, from the personal reminiscences of his companions which reflected the polemical struggles raging within the order over its identity and its fidelity to the intentions of the founder.