History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

I. Circumstances and Ideas which molded and motived Morality

A homogeneous population and a comparatively static civilization

Egypt was the China of the ancient Mediterranean world. Like the Chinese, the Egyptians were a comparatively unmixed people. During the historic period no new elements of importance were incorporated with the native population. Again, like the civilization of China, that of Egypt throughout a great part of the historic age was singularly static. After having made wonderful advance in early times the Egyptians ceased to make further noteworthy progress.

Both these fundamental facts of Egyptian history had great significance for Egyptian morals; for since when races mingle their blood they mingle also their moralities, it is a matter of supreme importance to the moral life of a people whether on the one hand it has, as the centuries have passed, undergone a change in physical type through the incorporation of new racial elements, or on the other hand has preserved unchanged its racial type and physical characteristics.

Equally important for the moral ideal is it whether the civilization of which it forms one element is progressive or unprogressive; for changes in the moral standard are largely dependent on changes in the other elements of civilization. Where the intellectual life and the religious ideas remain unmodified, and where all political, social, and industrial institutions remain essentially unchanged, we need not look for fundamental changes in ethical ideas and convictions. How the history of conscience in ancient Egypt illustrates these truths we shall see a little further on.

The teaching that immortality is conditioned on righteousness

We have seen how potent an influence the notion of a life beyond the tomb exercised upon the conduct of the members of the primitive kinship group, giving birth to some of the noblest virtues of their simple code of morals. Now this idea of continued existence after death dominated the life of no other civilized people of antiquity so completely as it dominated the life of the Egyptians; and probably in the case of no other people ancient or modern has the belief exerted so profound an influence upon conduct. This was so for the reason that the conception was here early moralized and represented the blessed life in the hereafter as dependent upon rightdoing in the present life. No soul that had done evil was admitted to the bark of the ferryman at the Egyptian Styx. In this discrimination we find “the earliest traces in the history of man of an ethical test at the close of life.”[69]

The ethical qualities of the sun-god Ra

It is the sun-god Ra who in the remotest times is most intimately associated with these moral requirements for participation in the felicities of the celestial hereafter. The latest reading and analysis of the texts of the Pyramid Age has thrown new light upon the relations of the rival divinities Ra and Osiris to the development of the moral consciousness in ancient Egypt. In his latest work Professor Breasted says: “The later rapid growth of ethical teaching in the Osiris faith and the assumption of the rôle of judge by Osiris is not yet discernible in the Pyramid Age, and the development which made these elements so prominent in the Middle Kingdom took place in the obscure period after the development of the Pyramid Age. Contrary to the conclusions generally accepted at present, it was the sun-god ... who was the earliest champion of moral worthiness and the great judge in the hereafter.”[70]

The conception of Ra as the righteous judge, as the father and protector of the reigning Pharaoh, and as the guardian divinity of the Egyptian state, influenced profoundly the moral development in prefeudal Egypt, and was seemingly the inspiration of the great social reform movement which marked the history of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties. In the words of Professor Breasted, “The moral obligations emerging in the Solar theology thus wrought the earliest social regeneration and won the earliest battle for social justice of which we know anything in history.”[71]

Religious dualism

In our introductory chapter we spoke of the influence of physical environment upon the moral life of a people. The history of the formation of the ethical type of ancient Egypt affords an excellent illustration of this; for it was probably out of the striking physical dualism of the Egyptian lands—the antagonism between the life-giving Nile and the ever-encroaching desert—that grew Egyptian religious dualism, embodied in the myth of the struggle between Osiris and Set.[72] At first the tale was a pure nature myth reflecting simply the conflict between two physical elements; but as the moral consciousness of the people who recited the story deepened, there was gradually read into it an ethical meaning. The conflict was now conceived as a mighty struggle between the powers of good and evil, between the beneficent Osiris (and his son and avenger, Horus) and the malignant Set.[73]

This world philosophy reacted powerfully upon Egyptian morality, keeping as it did in the foreground of the moral consciousness the truth that the moral life is a battle against evil. “The triumph of right over wrong ... is the burden of nine tenths of the Egyptian texts which have come down to us.”[74]

The Osirian myth in its special development

Acted upon by the moral feelings, the Osirian myth underwent a special development. It came to represent not simply the eternal opposition between good and evil, but the whole moral order of the present and the future world. It told of the beneficent life of Osiris as king of Egypt, his death and resurrection, and of his office as king and judge in the realms of the dead.

After having been given this rich moral content, the myth reacted powerfully upon the moral consciousness and became a chief agency in the formation of the moral character of the Egyptian race. Osiris, as reflected in the Osirian myth, became the incarnation of the ethical ideal. It is a great advantage to morality when the ideal of goodness is thus embodied in a divine exemplar. Osiris held some such relation to the moral life of ancient Egypt as Christ holds to the moral life of the Christian world.