Katherine Karam McCray

Disability theologians Shane Clifton and Hans Reinders describe Christian virtue ethics as largely antagonistic toward disability. This is a product of Aristotle’s tax­onomy of human capacities, wherein autonomy, individual agency, and independence form the ontological requirements of being human. Such requirements place persons experiencing extended states of dependency outside expectations of human flourishment, constructing eudaimonia in such a way that excludes complex bodies. Responding to Clifton and Reinders, this essay argues for pluralizing the perception of Christian virtue ethics to include Eastern constructions of agency. By incorporating Eastern Christian figures into virtue discourse, I argue that Maximus the Confessor provides an alternative Aristotelianism, which reformulates human function around two forms of value, direct and mediated. I argue that mediated agency forms a latent social model of disability that reorients the classical construction of moral agency around social and material facilitation, allowing for greater disability-positive representation in Christian virtue ethics.