Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

Theological thought is faced with a problem in ethics which presents the greatest difficulties. It is the problem of Free Will.

Is man who perceives, judges, has volition and acts, a free being inwardly? Can he, guided only by his own reasonable thoughts and conclusions, determined entirely by his own inner impulses and uninfluenced by outer circumstances, choose one or the other of two conflicting possibilities? When he has to make a decision, is he always like Hercules at the cross-roads who has to make up his mind alone as to which path he shall take, whether he is to follow quiet, modest virtue, or alluring, voluptuous vice? Does he do evil because he willed to do so and not otherwise, although it was in his power to avoid it? Does he decide for the good, because after due investigation and consideration he recognized it as preferable, though he might have rejected it? Or is man always subject to coercion from which at no time and no place he can escape? Are all his actions determined by the law of Nature which regulates every one of his movements just as mechanically as the course of the stars or the fall of a body to our earth when its support is removed? Is he an automaton, set going by cosmic forces, who possesses the doubtful privilege consciously to be able to follow the turning of his wheels, the action of his levers, rods and indicators and to listen to their humming and knocking without being allowed to interfere in their movements or to change the least thing in their functions or work? Is he fettered by the chain of causes which have existed eternally and continue to act immutably to all eternity?

Theological thought is condemned to find an answer to the question of freedom or determinism, as it is the necessary condition for the essential concepts of the theological doctrine of Morality, that is, the concept of responsibility and those consequent upon this, namely, sin, reward and punishment. For the true believer God is the source of Morality. He Himself is Morality. What He ordains is good in itself and cannot be otherwise, for there is no room for evil in His nature, since if He could be conceived to do evil, it would by the very fact of His doing it become good. A man, to be moral, must approximate to the nature of God as nearly as it is granted to mortals to do. The moral law is revealed by God's mercy to give man a light which shows him the right path and lights him on his way. Thanks to Him the poor mortal is relieved of the incertitude due to his limited mental powers and is endowed with the priceless possession of a certain precept which he need only obey in order to be sure of salvation.

However, granted the correctness of this assumption, it is not comprehensible how evil came into the world. It contradicts all attributes with which faith has endowed the deity. It cannot appear without God's knowledge, for He is omniscient and nothing is hidden from Him. It cannot occur against His will, for He is omnipotent and nothing resists His bidding. But least of all can it rage with His knowledge and consent, for He is infinitely good and therefore does not permit his creatures to fall victims to evil. But experience teaches us that evil has a permanent place in human life, and this forces one to the conclusion that either God is hard and cruel, and therefore not infinitely good and not Morality itself, or that He has no knowledge of evil and therefore is not omniscient, but, on the contrary, blind as well as stupid, or that He sees the evil but cannot prevent it, and therefore is not omnipotent and must recognize the existence of higher powers than Himself against whom He is impotent.

These terrifying conclusions have not escaped the notice of the devout, and they have always made the most desperate efforts to evade them. Some have chosen the easiest way out of the difficulty; they close their eyes before the yawning abyss, fold their hands devoutly and invent pious phrases about the inscrutable ways of Providence and its infinite wisdom, which the weak intelligence of mortals cannot grasp. Others take infinite pains; in the sweat of their brow they with difficulty evolve tortuous and hypocritical explanations, which in reality explain nothing, but in a mind which lends itself willingly to them give rise to the illusion that the contradiction has been solved. Perhaps the most astounding piece of work accomplished by this miserable juggling, or this delusion of self by means of an exuberant flow of words, is presented in the four volumes of the "Théodicée," by which Leibnitz made himself a laughing-stock. Mazdeism has invented an alluring but at the same time risky expedient. It lightly assumes that two principles obtain in the universe, a good one and a bad one, the creator and the destroyer, the merciful God and the cruel demon, Ormuzd and Ahriman. In this way everything is easy to understand. Good is the work of radiant Ormuzd, evil the deed of dark Ahriman. The two fight together with very nearly equal forces, but this doctrine reveals the comforting prospect of a distant future in which Ormuzd shall finally triumph over Ahriman, and fills the trembling believer with elation at the thought that after æons of the tragic struggle between good and evil, at the end of the world the curtain will fall on the victory of good. By this victory Mazdeism, which claims to be monotheistic, rescues its single god, although the introduction of a second principle of very nearly equal power, which holds the one god in check for an immeasurable period of time, brings this system perilously close to polytheism.

To the purer monotheism of Christianity there is indeed something repugnant in the assumption of a second, opposite principle of almost equal power, but yet it has admitted the existence of the devil, who is undoubtedly reminiscent of Ahriman. Only he lacks the independence of the Mazdean demon. He is not on a footing of equality with God, but is subject to Him as is every creature. He is not strong enough to oppose God and can only do evil because God allows it. But why does He allow it? Why does He tolerate the devil? Why can the latter proceed with his evil work with God's consent? To this theology gives a crafty answer which Goethe has clothed in the glorious beauty of inimitable poetry. God has assigned to the devil the task of tempting man with all the arts of seduction in order to give him the opportunity of testing and developing his moral strength in resistance, of purging himself, of attaining purity and salvation by his own efforts. In short, he exists in order to give man a sort of Swedish gymnastics in virtue. The struggle is not quite fair, for the devil is held by a halter and is pulled up if he gets too big an advantage, and man is always assisted by redeeming mercy, a hand being stretched out to him from the clouds which sets him on his feet as often as he stumbles. But theology is not bound by rules of sport. That is how the picture of the universe is presented in "Faust." But he who painted it is the same Goethe who on another occasion angrily complains: "You allow man to become guilty—and then leave him to his suffering." Does the divinity allow man to fall a victim to evil without turning it aside from him? Does he only try him in order mercifully to rescue him at the moment when he is about to succumb? Goethe does not answer this question without ambiguity. That is not his business either. He may contradict himself. He is a poet who is allowed to express contradictory views. He is not a theologian whose duty it is, by means of a definite dogma, to support those who totter in doubt.

All these attempts to reconcile the attributes of the deity with the fact that there is evil in the world which continually leads man into danger, emanate from the explicit or tacit assumption that man possesses Free Will. For if his will is not free and he does evil, then he does it because he must and because he cannot do otherwise. But this must can only come from the deity who is almighty; it is the deity who condemns man, who forces him to do evil. Man therefore does evil as God's tool without volition; therefore, as a matter of fact, it is God Himself who does evil. But if God is capable of doing evil He is not Morality itself, or every distinction between good and evil is destroyed, and we must recognize what seems evil to us to be just as moral as what seems good, because the one is as much the work of God as the other. But if this is admitted, and it is logically impossible not to admit it, then the whole foundation of transcendental, that is, of theological, ethics breaks down. The latter is therefore forced, on pain of suicide, to maintain that man has Free Will.

But with this assertion theological ethics by no means disarms all the objections which threaten its life. Renouvier's book on Free Will is probably the most thorough and exhaustive work on this subject which has been treated by thousands of thinkers and not a few babblers since the time of the ancient Greeks, and he describes it as follows: "Will is free and spontaneous if Reason cannot foretell its untrammelled action at any time other than that at which it actually takes place." Renouvier makes no limitation and no reservation. He does not say, "if human reason cannot foretell its action," and this omission of the particularizing adjective is not carelessness or a mistake on his part, it is duly considered; for the prudent dialectician knows very well that he would ruin his theory of Free Will if he only maintained that human reason alone should be able to foretell its action. There are many happenings which human reason cannot foretell, and which nevertheless obey immutable laws and take place according to absolutely fixed rules without the exercise of any inner freedom or authority on the part of the individual. If human reason cannot foretell these happenings, it is not because no external force of the universe determines them and they are entirely spontaneous, but simply because the laws controlling them are unknown. Therefore the impossibility of foretelling them is no proof of their freedom, it is only a proof of the ignorance of the human mind. There was a time when no human intellect could foretell the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse. Was that because the heavenly bodies act freely and are eclipsed only at their own spontaneous desire, when and how they please? No, because man had not discovered and comprehended their movements. To this very day we are unable to foretell the weather on a particular day next year, or the result of the next harvest, or an earthquake. Does this prove the freedom, the absolute independence of these occurrences? No; it only proves the inadequacy of our knowledge. Renouvier therefore would achieve nothing for his theory of Free Will, if only human understanding were to be unable to foretell the actions of the Will. That is why he does not say "human reason," but simply "Reason." The essence of Free Will is that its actions altogether shall be incapable of being foreseen; it is not in its nature to act in accordance with some predetermination which must necessarily reckon with outer circumstances and given forces; and the impossibility of foretelling its actions exists not only for human Reason but for every Reason—for Reason in general.

For every Reason and therefore for the divine Reason as well. And now theological ethics must find a way out of this dilemma: either God does not foresee the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of his omniscience, that is, of one of His essential attributes; or God foresees the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of the Freedom of the Will, the essence of which, according to Renouvier, lies in the fact that it cannot be foreseen. For this impossibility of being foreseen is indeed the quality by which Free Will stands or falls. Let us realize the significance of this concept. Nothing can be foreseen which will not with certainty occur. But whatever at some future time will become a reality, must even now be virtually a reality for an omniscient Reason not bound by the human categories of time and space, since for this Reason neither proximity nor distance exists, but everything is on one plane, and there is no future or past, but everything is present. So if the divine Reason foresees now how the free Will of man will act in the future, that is equivalent to saying that this free Will is forced to act in the particular way which God foresees and not otherwise. Therefore the Will is not free but, on the contrary, strictly bound. It is obliged to make the event foreseen by God a fact, as God can only foresee what must certainly come to pass, and a foreseen event that does not happen would mean a mistake, a false assumption, of which one cannot believe God capable without denying Him. This apparent free Will is coercion at sight. As its action is foreseen by God, the Will is subject to the law of fate, but a period of delay is granted. Every movement of the supposedly free Will becomes a part of the order of the universe which has been unalterably laid down from eternity, and which the human Will cannot upset without burying God in the ruins. Man may imagine that his Will is free. But that is self-deception, and he can only indulge in it because what God sees clearly is hidden from him, namely, the goal towards which, though he does not realize it, he is inevitably led along strictly defined paths by the iron hand of fate.

It would be unjust towards theology to say that it has never seen the incompatibility of Free Will with divine omniscience. This has not escaped its notice, but it has attempted by the use of familiar formulæ to get out of the difficulty. In his book De libero Arbitrio Saint Augustine stoutly maintains that the human Will is free, but he tries to rescue the attributes of the deity by reserving to it the right or the power to intervene by its mercy in the actions of the Will, if in its freedom it comes to a decision which endangers the salvation of the soul. Saint Thomas Aquinas takes good care not to differ in opinion from the Bishop of Hippo. The reformers, Calvin, Luther and Bishop Jansen, too, were better logicians than the patristic writers, and unhesitatingly denied the freedom of the Will, but they did not notice that they made God responsible for all the misdeeds of man, lacking freedom and acting with God's foreknowledge and at His behest. The Council of Trent scorned all these contradictions and unintelligible points, and declared with infallible authority that man's Will is free and that at the same time God is omniscient. The Catholic Church at the time was in some countries still in a position to meet Reason, if it raised objections, with an unanswerable argument: the stake.