beyond a doubt in the most ancient formulary for the defrocking of an unworthy
bishop: Sic spiritualis benedictionis et delibationis mysticae gratiae, quantum in nobis est, te privamus, ut perdas sacrificandi et benedicendi et officium et effectum (Thus of the spiritual blessing and portion of divine grace, insofar as it is in us, we deprive
you, that you may lose the power of sacrificing and the power of blessing and
your officium and your effectum) (ibid., 79). Officium and effectus are distinct but somehow indistinguishably connected, in such a way that their biunity constitutes
the effectiveness of the liturgical action from which the bishop is now excluded.
10. Let us reflect on the paradoxical circular structure that appears in these ex-
amples and the implications that it may have for the conception of human action
and ethics. Action is divided into two elements, the first of which, ministerium
(or officium in the strict sense), defines only the instrumental being and action of the priest and, as such, is presented in terms of humility and imperfection ( fragili
officio . . . humilitatis nostrae ministerio). The second, which actualizes and perfects the first, is divine in nature; moreover, it is, so to speak, inscribed and contained in
the first, in such a way that the correct fulfillment of the priestly function neces-
sarily and automatically implies the actualization of the effectus (one will recognize here the duality of opus operantis and opus operatum by which the scholastics will define the liturgical mystery).
The divine effectus is determined by the human minister and the human min-
ister by the divine effectus. Their effective unity is officium-effectum. This means, however, that officium institutes a circular relation between being and praxis, by which the priest’s being defines his praxis and his praxis, in turn, defines his being. In officium ontology and praxis become undecidable: the priest has to be what he
is and is what he has to be.
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What is at stake in Ambrose’s strategy is clear at this point: it was a matter of
singling out—beyond the principles of ancient ethics and nonetheless in conti-
nuity with it—a concept with which to think and define the action of the priest
and of the Church in its totality.
If the problem of the early Church was that of reconciling a spiritual dignity
(the possession of charismas) with the carrying out of a juridical- bureaucratic
function and the celebration of the divine mysterium as the fulfillment of a
human ministerium, the Ciceronian concept of officium, which did not designate an absolute ethical principle so much as rather a “duty in a situation” (according
to the formula that Durand takes up from Isidore: proprius vel congruus actus
uniuscuiusque personae secundum mores et leges civitatis vel instituta professionis; Durand, bk. 2, 14), furnished a coherent model to allow these two aspects to
coincide to the greatest possible degree.
What results from this is, as we have seen, a paradoxical ethical paradigm,
in which the connection between the subject and his action is broken and, at
the same time, reconstituted on another level: an act that consists entirely in its
irreducible effectiveness and whose effects are nonetheless not truly imputable to
the subject who brings them into being.
11. In a passage from the De lingua latina Varro distinguishes three modalities
of human acting, which “on account of their similarity are erroneously confused
by those who think that they are only one thing”: agere, facere, gerere: For a person can make [ facere] something and not act [ agere] it, as a poet makes
[ facit] a play and does not act it [ agere also means “to recite”], and on the other hand the actor acts [ agit] it and does not make it, and so a play is made [ fit]
by the poet, not acted, and is acted [ agitur] by the actor, not made. On the
other hand, the imperator [the magistrate invested with supreme power] in
that he is said to carry on [ gerere] affairs, in this neither makes [ facit] nor acts
[ agit] but carries on [ gerit], that is, assumes and supports [ sustinet], a meaning transferred from those who carry burdens [ onera gerunt], because they support
them. (Varro, 6.77.245)
The distinction between facere and agere derives, in the last analysis, from Aristotle, who in a celebrated passage from the Nicomachean Ethics opposes them
in this way: “doing [ praxis] and making [ poiēsis] are generically different, since making aims at an end distinct from the act of making, whereas in doing the
end cannot be other than the act itself: doing well [ eupraxia] is in itself the end”
(1140b4–5). What is new and typically Roman, by contrast, is the identification
of a third type of human action: gerere.
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Gerere, which originally meant “to carry,” means in political-juridical language
“to govern, administer, carry out an office” ( rem publicam gerere, gerere magistra-
tum, honores, imperium). With an analogous semantic evolution, the verb sustinere also acquires the political meaning of “assuming an office” ( munus sustinere in
re publica). While for Aristotle the paradigm of political action is praxis, gerere designates, then, the specifically Roman concept of the activity of the one who
is invested with a public function of governance. The imperator, the magistrate
invested with an imperium, neither acts nor produces; his action is not defined,
like doing or making, by an external result (the work), nor does it have its end
in itself: it is defined by its very exercise, by the magistrate’s assuming and fulfilling a function or an office. In this sense Varro can say that the magistrate “assumes
and supports” ( sustinet) his action: inverting the effective circle between munus and exercise, between ministerium and effectus, the action here coincides with the effectuation of a function that is itself to be defined. Gerere is, in this sense, the paradigm of officium.
א In the last sentence of the passage cited, the most authoritative manuscript of the De lingua latina (Laurentian LI, 10) does not have onera gerunt, but honera gerunt. While sustinere can also be said of weights ( onera), gerere is never used with onera, while the expression gerere honores is common. The scribe who copied the manuscript in the eleventh century did not know the classical sense of gerere in relation to honores and substituted for this term the more banal onera, forgetting to cancel the h. Emending onera to honores, the passage would read: “a meaning transferred from those who exercise public functions, because they
assume and support them,” which gives what is certainly a better sense.
12. The nature of office and its gerere is strikingly illuminated if one puts it
in relation with the sphere of command, that is, with the action proper to the
imperator.
Let us reflect on the entirely special nature of the command, which is not
properly an act (for this reason Varro can say that the one who commands
“neither does nor acts” but assumes and supports; 6.77.245) but has sense only
insofar as it takes as its object and assumes onto itself the action of another
(who is assumed to have to obey, that is, to execute the command). It is in this
sense that, as Magdelain has noted (34–42), the imperative defines the proper
verbal mood of law ( ius esto, emptor esto, piaculum dato, sacer esto, exta porrici-
unto, paricidas esto), insofar as the decree of the norm, otherwise void in itself, always has as its object the behavior or action of an individual external to it.
But precise
ly for this reason, it is not easy to define from the semantic point
of view the meaning of the imperative, which in Indo-European languages
coincides morphologically with the verbal root. There is in fact no substantial
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difference between the action expressed on the constative level (“he walks”)
and the same action carried out in the execution of an order (“walk!”). And
moreover, the goal of an action carried out in order to execute an order is not
only that which results from the nature of the act, but it is (or claims to be)
also and above all the execution of the order. (For this reason—at least up until
the Nuremberg trials—it was maintained that someone who was following an
order was not to be held responsible for the consequences of his act.)
Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the
ontology of office that we have sought to define. Both the one who executes an
order and the one who carries out a liturgical act neither simply are nor simply
act, but are determined in their being by their acting and vice versa. The official—
like the officiant—is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being
of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be, which defines the
ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here.
א The peculiar structure of officium is reflected in canonist circles in the discussions between those who consider office as an objective matter and those who consider it as a
subjective matter. According to the former, office as an institutional reality ( ministerium, dignitas, honor) is something like an objective element, defined by a normative scheme of behavior and substantiated in a titulus and a beneficium (an economic profit). For the latter, by contrast, it is essentially munus, an activity carried out by a subject in the exercise of a function (cf. Vitale, 101).
It is sufficient, however, to consider the terms of the dispute with greater attentiveness to establish that in reality it is a question of two aspects of the same phenomenon. Certainly the canonistic tradition seems to emphasize the priority of the subjective element
of the exercise of office ( officium datur principaliter non propter dignitatem, sed propter exercitium; ibid., 98). But the fact that the two elements represent two poles of one single system, in terms of which they are founded and defined in turn, becomes clear, beyond the
terminological oscillations, in the very close correlation that the texts establish between the objective element and the subjective element of officium. Thus, according to Panor-mitanus, the prelacy is a position ( honor), which is however conferred not for the sake of honor but for the service that it implies ( non datur propter honorem, sed propter onus).
Precisely for this reason, honor is nevertheless due to the prelate ( in consequentia prae-lato debetur honor; ibid.), and in the decretal that regulates the ceremony of ordination, under the heading de sacra unctione, one reads that caput inungitur propter auctoritatem et dignitatem, et munus propter ministerium et officium (ibid., 132).
When modern canonists, in order to reconcile the two positions, conceive office as
a “subjective situation” or as a “competence-duty” that establishes for a certain subject
the legitimation (and correlative duty) to carry out certain acts in virtue of his position or function, they do nothing but confirm the circularity that we have seen to define
liturgical praxis.
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א One can now understand the pertinence of the concept of instrumental cause,
by means of which Aquinas explains the sacramental action. Just as the instrument by
definition acts only insofar as it is acted upon by the principal agent, so also the efficacy of the ministerial action derives not from the person of the minister but from the function and the office that he carries out. In this sense, in the words of Varro, the minister does not act but assumes and “supports” the action implied in his function.
From this perspective it is interesting to reflect on the concept of a “function,” which
seems to be closely connected to that of office ( officio fungi; munere, consulatu fingi). It has been rightly observed (Gasparri, 35) that “to function means to act as if one were another, in the capacity of someone’s alter ego, either an individual person or a community.
To have a function means not only to be competent to carry out acts for which others
carry the responsibility for the agent, but to act declaratively, openly as such.” The term function names the constitutive vicariousness of office. The analogy with the paradigm of instrumental cause in Aquinas, in which God acts by means of the one who exercises
the priestly function, is obvious.
Threshold
PERHAPS the most decisive influence that officium as the paradigm of priestly
praxis has exercised on Western ontology is the transformation of being into
having-to-be and the consequent introduction of duty into ethics as a funda-
mental concept.
Let us reflect on the striking circularity that we have seen to define officium.
The priest must carry out his office insofar as he is a priest and he is a priest inso-
far as he carries out his office. Being prescribes action, but action completely de-
fines being: “having-to-be” means this and nothing else. The priest is that being
whose being is immediately a carrying out and a service—a liturgy.
This insubstantiality of the priest, in which ontology and praxis, being and
having-to-be enter into an enduring threshold of indifference, is proven by the
doctrine of the character indelebile that confirms priestly ordination starting with Augustine. As the absolute impossibility of identifying any substantial content
for it shows, the character expresses nothing but a zero degree of liturgical ef-
fectiveness, which is attested as such even when the priest has been suspended
a divinis. This means that the priesthood, of which the character is the cipher, is not a real predicate but a pure signature, which manifests only the constitutive
excess of effectiveness over being.
Hence the tendentially vanishing quality of the subject whom the signa-
ture marks and constitutes. Since he has to be what he does and does what he
is, the subject of a liturgical act is not truly a subject (on the theological level
this is expressed in the thesis according to which his action, as opus operatum,
is done by another, namely Christ). In reality, whoever believes himself to have
to perform an act claims not to be, but to have to be. He claims, that is, to dis-
solve himself entirely into a liturgy. Action as liturgy, and the latter as a circular
relation between being and praxis, between being and having-to-be: this is the
disquieting inheritance that modernity, from the moment it put duty and office
at the center of its ethics and its politics, has more or less consciously accepted
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without the benefit of an inventory. It is toward this transformation of being
into having-to-be—and the ontological proximity between command and office
implied in it—that we must now orient our investigation.
4
The Two Ontologies;
or, How Duty Entered into Ethics
1. Anyone who goes through the pages of the Genealogy of Morals cannot fail
to notice a curious lacuna. The three essays into which Nietzsche divided
the book lay out, respectively, a critical genealogy of the opposition “good/evil,
good/bad”; of guilt and the bad conscience; and, finally, of ascetic ideals. It
lacks, however, a genealogy of perhaps the fundamental concept—at least start-
ing from Kant—of modern ethics: duty. It is certainly evoked in the second
essay, in connection with guilt, which is traced back to the notion of debt and to
the creditor-debtor relationship (the German term for guilt, Schuld, also means
“debt”). But Nietzsche is focused here above all on the connection between the
feeling of guilt, bad conscience, and remorse. That the importance of the con-
cept of duty naturally cannot be avoided is proven by the fragments that come
from the time of the drafting of the work, in which we read, for example: “The
problem: You must! An inclination that fails to give itself a foundation, similar in this to the sexual instinct, would not fall under the censure of the instincts, but
on the contrary would be their criterion of value and their judge” (Nietzsche,
265; cf. ibid., 151). And nonetheless, despite this and similar notes, a fourth essay
on duty was not included in the book.
There are generally good reasons for exclusions, and in this case they are
perfectly understandable. The fact is that Nietzsche’s teacher, Schopenhauer,
had dedicated a chapter to the genealogy of duty in his 1840 work Über die
Grundlage der Moral ( On the Basis of Morality). Here, under the heading “Von der imperativen Form der kantischen Ethik” (“On the Imperative Form of the
Kantian Ethics”), we read that “putting ethics in an imperative form as a doctrine of duties [ Pflicht], and thinking of the moral worth or worthlessness of human actions as the fulfillment or violation of duties, undeniably spring, together with the obligation [ Sollen], solely from theological morals, and accordingly from the Decalogue” (Schopenhauer, 123/56). According to Schopenhauer, the theological
imperative, which made sense only in view of a punishment or reward and could
not be separated from them, has been surreptitiously transferred by Kant into
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