Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian Ethics

by Archibald B. D. Alexander

But before endeavouring to determine the distinctively Christian ideal, as presented in the teaching of Jesus and interpreted by the growing Christian consciousness of mankind, it may be well to review briefly some of the main theories of life which are pressing their claims upon our attention to-day. Many of these modern views have arisen as a reaction against traditional religion. From the seventeenth century onwards, and especially during the nineteenth, there has been a growing disposition to call in question the Christian conception of life. The antagonism reveals itself not only in a distrust of all forms of religion, but also in a craving for wider culture. The old certitudes fail to satisfy men who have acquired new habits of reflection, and there is a disinclination to accept a scheme of life which seems to narrow human interests and exclude such departments as science, art, and politics. One reason of this change is to be found in the wonderful advance of science during the last century. Men's minds, withdrawn {100} from primary, and fixed upon secondary causes, have refused to believe that the order of nature can be disturbed by supernatural intervention. Whether the modern antipathy to Christianity is justified is not the question at present before us. We may see in the movements of our day not so much a proof that the old faith is false, as an indication that if Christianity is to regain its power a radical re-statement of its truths, and a more comprehensive application of its principles to life as a whole must be undertaken.

In the endeavour to find an all-embracing ideal of life two possibilities present themselves, arising from two different ways of viewing man. Human life is in one aspect receptive; in another, active. It may be regarded as dependent upon nature for its maintenance, or as a creative power whose function is not merely to receive what nature supplies, but to re-shape nature's materials and create a new spiritual world. Receptivity and activity are inseparable, and form together the harmonious rhythm of life.

But there has ever been a tendency to emphasise one or other of these aspects. The question has constantly arisen, Which is the more important for life—what we receive or what we create? Accordingly two contrasted conceptions of life have appeared—a naturalistic and an idealistic. Under the first we understand those theories which place man in the realm of sense and explain life by material conditions; under the second we group such systems as give to life an independent creative power.

I

NATURALISTIC TENDENCY

1. Naturalism has usually taken three forms, an idyllic or poetic, a philosophic, and a scientific, of which Rousseau, Feuerbach, and Haeckel may be chosen as representatives.

(1) According to Rousseau, man is really a part of nature, {101} and only as he conforms to her laws and finds his satisfaction in what she gives can he be truly happy. Nature is the mother of us all, and only as we allow her spirit to pervade and nourish our being do we really live. The watchword, 'back to nature' may be said to have given the first impulse to the later call of the 'simple life,' which has arisen as a protest against the luxury, ostentation, and artificiality of modern times.

(2) The philosophical form of naturalism, as expounded by Feuerbach, inveighs against an idealistic interpretation of life. The author of The Essence of Christianity started as a disciple of Hegel, but soon reversed the Hegelian principle, and pronounced the spiritual world to be a fiction of the mind. Man belongs essentially to the earth, and is governed by his senses. Self-interest is his only motive, and egoism his sole law of life. It was only what might be expected, that the ultimate consequences of this philosophy of the senses should be drawn by a disciple of Feuerbach, Max Stirner,[1] in whose work, The Individual and His Property, the virtues of egoism are extolled, and contempt is poured upon all disinterestedness and altruism.

(3) The latest form of naturalism is the scientific or monistic, as represented by Haeckel. It may be described as scientific in so far as its author professes to deduce the moral life from biological principles. In the chapter[2] devoted to Ethics in his work, The Riddle of the Universe, his pronouncements upon morality are not scientifically derived, but simply dogmatically assumed. The underlying principle of monism is that the universe is a unity in which no distinction exists between the material and the spiritual. In this world as we know it there reigns only one kind of law, the invariable law of nature. The so-called spiritual life of man is not an independent realm having its own rights and aims; it belongs wholly to nature. The moral world is a province of the physical, and the key to all the departments of reality is to be found in science {102} alone. The doctrine of evolution is brought into the service of monism, and the attempt is made to prove that in the very process of biological development human thought, moral sentiment, and social instincts have been evolved. With a curious sacrifice of consistency, Haeckel does not agree with Feuerbach in exalting egoism to the place of supremacy in the moral life. He recognises two kinds of duty—duty to self and duty to society. The social sense once created is permanent, and rises to ever-fresh developments. But benevolence, like every other obligation, is, according to evolutionary monism, a product evolved from the battle of existence. Traced to its source, it has its spring in the physical organism, and is but an enlargement of the ego.[3]

The monistic naturalism of Haeckel offers no high ideal to life. Its Ethics is but a glorified egoism. Its dictates never rise above the impulses derived from nature. But not religion only with its kingdom of God, nor morality only with its imperatives, nor art with its power of idealising the world of nature, but even science itself, with its claim to unify and organise facts, proves that man stands apart from, and is higher than, the material world. The very existence of such activities in the invisible realm renders vain every attempt to reduce the spiritual to the natural, and to make truth, goodness and beauty mere outgrowths of nature.