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Imperfect, Perfect (All’s Well, Shakespeare)

Imperfect, Perfect (All’s Well, Shakespeare)

Last updated on: November 5, 2019 at 4:22 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Imperfect, Perfect (All’s Well, Shakespeare) 2019-11-05T16:22:47-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Nobody’s perfect.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.*

That is obvious enough to be a Christian doctrine that most people who are not Christians think this true and even take a false comfort from the truth. The comfort is false, because while when we are miserable we are glad of the company we ought not to be.

We quickly realize that one cannot remove the guilt merely by compounding it by being glad that all are friends are in an equally bad place. We might not be lonely in our moral imperfection, but our thirst for improvement is not quenched if nobody else has water.

A few daring sorts will suggest that there is no perfection to obtain. What of this? An easy retort is the sheer uselessness of the advice: if we long for some ought, then telling us we ought not to do so is self-reverentially incoherent at worst and fatuous at best. Thirst would be no more comfortable if we became convinced there never was water and never will be. Telling us our thirst is the “way it is” and so “we should get over it” doesn’t slake our moral longings.

If objective morality, right and wrong apart from our feelings, exists, then moral perfection would appear possible. Is morality objective? Few if any have claimed to live up to the moral standards human think they have discovered.

Given what we know about morality, hardly anyone’s perfect.

Since some atheists and almost all theists agree that morality is objective, perhaps we could simply posit this for present purposes, but we do not even need to do so for “nobody’s perfect” to still carry a sting.

Why?

Morality is, at the very least, a personal sense of what we ought to do over what we actually do. That sense may not be universally applicable, though the UN thinks it can give humanity a universal declaration of human rights, but this is the sense we have as individuals. I am (often) unsatisfied with my choices (morally) and wish I had done differently. Perhaps one reasonable examination, I change my mind and decide I ought to do something else.*

This is true even in small ways.

What to do with conscience that says: “You should have tipped the server more.”? Doesn’t it lead to a better us if we heed this inner voice or (at the very least) examine what conscience says? In addition, almost nobody sane lives only by the “ought” he or she creates. Surely prudence, living sensibly with moral care, means that we will most often comply with the “ought” imposed on us by the broader society, if only to maximize pleasure and minimize pain!

If a person gets to end of a day, a work week, or life and is discontent thinking he should have done other than he did, then this is not good or happy. Nobody lives up to their own standards, or his particular socitie and we all know what goes wrong if we start forgiving ourselves and our friends (our political cronies) too easily.

That has no worked out well in history.

Shakespeare gives us a Helen who is not Helen of Troy (to whom she is compared). Helen of Troy did what she ought not to have done. She was not merely imperfect, but made imperfection her lifestyle. She choice is over ought. Shakespeare’s Christian Helen is as we aspire to be: gentle, merciful, passionate, full of love. She never gives up hope of something better for those she loves and herself. Why?

All’s well that ends well yet, Though time seem so adverse, and means unfit.—I do beseech you, whither is he gone?**

Where has he gone? Where is he going? There is hope in Helen for mercy, grace, and love. God help us, but this is the hope of a good end, ultimately in the City of God.

Nobody’s perfect, yet.

————————————-

*Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well 4.3.

**Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

***Shakespeare, All’s Well That End’s Well 5.1.

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