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

by P. V. N. Myers

I. Religious Ideas and Theological Dogmas molding the Ideal

The doctrine of a moral law supernaturally revealed

Among the doctrines of Christian theology freighted heavily with ethical consequences was that of a moral law supernaturally promulgated. This was essentially an Oriental conception, a heritage of Christianity from the Hebrew past, and a conception quite alien in general to the manner of thinking of the Greeks and Romans, with whom morality, as we have seen, was a civic and secular and human thing, an expression of man’s essential nature, that is, an outcome of the human reason and conscience.

This doctrine exercised an immense influence upon the moral evolution in the Western world. First, it displaced naturalism with supernaturalism in ethics. The whole history of morals records no revolution more momentous than this. Second, it made rigid large sections of the moral code and thus tended to impart for an historical epoch a certain immobility to the religious-ethical side of European civilization.

The teaching of the unity of God and of his universal fatherhood

Another idea found in this body of religious doctrines, an idea rich in ethical consequences, was the conception of God as one and as the Universal Father. We have seen that the great defect in primitive morality was the limited range of the moral feelings. The circle of moral obligation was bounded by the clan, the tribe, the city. This resulted in large part from the notion that each kin group had an origin and ancestry different from that of every other. One group thought themselves to be the offspring of Zeus; another proclaimed themselves to be the descendants of Heracles; and still another believed themselves to be the children of Mars. So long as this view of men’s origin and descent prevailed there could arise no conception of their spiritual relationship and ethical oneness. Tacitus merely expressed the common opinion of the ancient world when he declared absurd the doctrine that all men are brothers.

But from the doctrine of the common fatherhood of God there arises naturally the conception of the essential brotherhood of men. The apostle’s declaration, “We are the offspring of God,”[624]—phrasing the teachings of the Master in terms understood by the men to whom he spoke,—announced the opening of a new era in the moral development of the race. The proclamation of this practically new thought[625] meant, at once in ethical theory and sooner or later in actual practice, the widening of the narrow class and race circle of moral obligation to include all tribes and peoples.

The doctrine of a future life of rewards and punishments

Greco-Roman morality was influenced but slightly by a belief in a life after death. The vision of the other world was in general too indistinct for it to exert any decided influence upon the conduct of men.[626] The conception of Hades, though it did undergo with the lapse of time a process of moralization, was never so far ethicalized as to have a positive moral value.

But by Christianity the other world was lifted into such prominence as it had had in the life and thought of no people of antiquity except the Egyptians, and immortality was declared to be the destiny of every human soul. With the classical peoples it was the city which had been conceived as eternal. This transference of immortality from the city to the individual had vast import for morality.[627] What contributed to render it of such ethical importance was the fact that the after life was conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. A heaven of ineffable and everlasting bliss and a hell of unutterable and everlasting torment were laid open to the eyes of men, and became the tremendous sanctions of the new moral code promulgated by Christianity. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this teaching upon the moral life of the European peoples, especially during the medieval centuries of faith. To make this life transitory, vain, and worthless, and life in another world the only real life, is to cause the transvaluation of all moral values, and to change fundamentally conceptions of what is rational and right in conduct.

The teaching of the sanctity of human life

Springing naturally from the foregoing conceptions of man’s origin and eternal destiny is the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of human life. In no respect do Christian teachings contrast more sharply with pagan conceptions than in this regard. In the Greco-Roman view value did not attach to man as man. To the Greek way of thinking it was the Greek freeman alone who possessed the full capacity for virtue and the rights of manhood. In the common Roman view only the Roman citizen was regarded as dowered with the full faculties and rights of a human being. The slave was looked upon and treated as belonging to an inferior order of existence.

The Christian doctrine of man’s divine sonship and of his eternal destiny gave infinite worth to every human life, and, investing man as man with an inviolable sanctity, worked effectively in widening the range of the moral sympathies and in bringing within the scope of the moral law all classes and conditions of men. It checked infanticide, which in the pre-Christian world had been very generally practiced without the least moral scruple; it suppressed the gladiatorial games in which the lives of men were placed on a level with those of the wild beasts with which they fought; it helped to make suicide, which the Romans looked upon as a noble mode of departure from life, a crime; and contributed to mitigate the lot of the slave and finally to help lift him into freedom.

The dogma of the fall of man and hereditary guilt

The view of man’s moral nature taught by the Founder of Christianity was simple and natural. It is embodied in the parable of the prodigal son. Man may go wrong, but he has ever the capacity, and, when he comes to himself, the desire, to return to the right way.

In direct opposition to this view of man’s nature and deepest preferences as being essentially good, we find elaborated in early Christian theology the dogma that the first man, though created upright, fell through disobedience and transmitted to all his descendants a nature wholly evil and a total incapacity for doing good or even desiring the good. And not only was man thus attainted by the primal disobedience, but all nature became accursed.

This dogma of the fall of man is one of the most influential conceptions in the moral domain ever entertained by the human mind. It was the germ from which was developed the larger part of Christian theological ethics.[628] For out of the dogma of ancestral sin and total depravity sprang naturally and logically the doctrines of the atonement, imputed righteousness, and salvation through faith. The moral history of the Christian centuries we shall find to be largely the history of the influence of this doctrine upon men’s conceptions of their religious obligations and duties. As with the passage of time and the incoming of evolutionary science the belief in this teaching decays, we shall find men’s idea of what constitutes duty in the religious sphere undergoing a great change, and shall see acts, observances, and states of mind once regarded as supremely virtuous and indispensable to salvation now looked upon as morally indifferent or even positively wrong.

The doctrine of the sacredness of the Sabbath

Christianity inherited from Judaism the belief in the sacred character of the Sabbath day. This belief created one of the most important of the religious duties of the Christian. It determined how one seventh of all his time should be spent. The history of the observance of this Sabbath as holy time, and the changed moral value attached to such observance as times and beliefs have changed, forms a chapter of the greatest suggestiveness to the student of the evolution of morals, since this chapter epitomizes and repeats the entire history of ceremonial or ritual morality.

The personality of the Prophet of Nazareth[629]

But far more influential than all these inherited Jewish beliefs and doctrines of speculative theology in molding the moral ideal of Christianity, in all that renders it superior to the moral ideals of the other great religions of the world, as well as in all that it possesses of permanent ethical value for humanity, has been the simple appealing story of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Nazareth.[630] Those elements of the ideal which are based on speculative theological doctrines have changed as these doctrines have changed with the world’s advance in general intelligence and with the deepening and clarifying of the moral consciousness of men; while those elements derived from that wonderful personality, from that life of unbounded tenderness and love and self-forgetting service, have been given an ever higher and more dominant place in the world’s ideal of goodness. In the eloquent words of the historian Lecky: “It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice; and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in Christian life.”[631]