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

by P. V. N. Myers

It was undoubtedly this character of the new ideal which caused it, in the primal age of Christianity, to make such strong appeal to the common people, to the despised and lowly, to the broken and humble in spirit, in the aristocratically graded society of the ancient world.

Creation of specific types through modifications of the general ideal

The Christian ideal of excellence has fulfilled itself in many ways; that is, different types have arisen through the shifting in rank of the virtues constituting the ideal, through the incorporation of pagan elements, through racial influence, and through the reaction upon the ideal of the changing intellectual, political, and economic environment.

Generally these specific forms of the ideal have been created by an exaggerated enthusiasm for one or another particular virtue of the standard, which has caused this special virtue so to overshadow all the others, save the indispensable one of correct belief, as to bring into existence a distinctive Christian type. Thus through the exaltation of the virtue of chastity there arose in the early Church the ascetic type of excellence, which for several centuries inspired unbounded moral enthusiasm and drew away into the desert and into the seclusion of the cloister great multitudes of both men and women; later, through the reaction upon the Church of the pagan and barbarian world it had nominally converted, and through the incorporation into the ideal of a number of heathen virtues, there came into existence a composite type of character—a combination of the virtues of the saint and the virtues of the hero—known as the chivalric ideal, which colored the events of European history from the ninth to the fourteenth century; and still later, through the suppression of some of the distinctive virtues of the Roman Catholic type of excellence and a fresh emphasis laid upon others, there was created the Protestant type of moral character, which has given a special cast to the theological morality of a large section of modern Christendom.

Limitations and defects of the ideal

That we may better be prepared to follow intelligently the various phases of the moral history of the Christian centuries, to the tracing of which the remaining chapters of this volume will be devoted, there is need that to the brief description we have now given of the chief virtues making up the ideal which was to give guidance to the moral life of the European peoples, we add a word concerning its limitations and defects, since these negative qualities of the ideal have exercised an influence scarcely less decisive than its positive qualities in making the history of the Christian world what it has been—a history, on the whole, of inspiring moral progress, yet a history of moral losses as well as of moral gains.

The first limitation of the ideal which we notice is its practical exclusion of those civic, patriotic duties and virtues which had been so highly esteemed by both the Greeks and the Romans. Man was henceforth to be the citizen of no earthly city, but of a heavenly city whose builder and maker is God. We can easily understand how this new conception of life, which transferred all its chief interests to another world, which substituted the Church—symbolized in accordance with the modes of thought of the time as “the city of God”—for the ancient city state as the object of moral enthusiasm and self-devotion, should leave no place for those civic, military, and heroic virtues that had constituted the very soul of the morality of classical antiquity.

A second limitation of the ideal is its neglect of the intellectual virtues, which by the Greeks had been assigned such a high place in their ethical standard.[637] The slighting of this important domain of ethics by Christian theology arose naturally from its exaltation of faith above reason, and from its assumption that in the revealed word the Church was already in possession of all knowledge really essential to man’s welfare and salvation.[638]

But the chief defect of the ideal, the lamentable historical consequences of which we shall witness later, is, as we have already pointed out, in its making the acceptance of all the articles of a given creed an indispensable virtue. In assigning orthodox belief this place in the ideal of moral goodness, theological ethics has marred Christian morality by fostering the faults of intolerance and intellectual insincerity. This dogma inspired in the Church, as soon as it became powerful, a persecuting spirit, and made Christianity for centuries something altogether alien to its real genius and spirit—one of the most intolerant of the world’s religions. At the same time this dogma, by making religious unbelief and nonconformity a sin so heinous as to be worthy of death by the most exquisite torture, and of everlasting punishment in the hereafter, discouraged intellectual veracity and open-mindedness, and fostered the vice of insincere conformity, which, more than any other fault, has marred Church morality from the end of the early age of the martyrs to the present day.

Conclusion