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

by P. V. N. Myers

Throughout the Middle Ages, under the influence of the Church, the act of self-destruction was regarded with the greatest abhorrence,[647] and without that commingling of tenderness and pity which with us has come to temper the feeling of condemnation.

The great missionary propaganda as an expression of Christian altruism

But the new conscience found most characteristic expression not in its restraints and prohibitions but in its impulsions to altruistic activity and endeavor. In our account of the primitive ethical ideals of Greece and Rome we noticed how the virtue of altruism or self-abnegation for the common good was hidden under the guise of courage.[648] It was therefore no new virtue which Christianity brought into the world when it proclaimed the supreme moral excellence of self-renunciation for others. What it did was to widen the circle of those for whom the supreme sacrifice should be made, and to give the virtue fuller and richer content. It thus imparted fresh impulse to that altruistic movement which we have seen to characterize the last centuries of the civilization of Greco-Roman antiquity. The deepened ethical sentiment found various forms of expression, but the most important of these was the great missionary propaganda which, during the centuries from the sixth to the ninth, carried the new gospel to the pagan German tribes of Europe. Lecky regards this as the chief altruistic movement of the medieval period.

This conquest of the continent for Christianity was effected in large part by men whose fervid zeal for social service had been kindled in the quiet and holy atmosphere of the cloister.[649] The movement was inspired and maintained by that same spirit of self-devotion which animated the missionaries of the apostolic age of Christianity. The declaration of the first great apostle to the gentiles, St. Paul, that he would himself willingly be a castaway if thereby he might secure the salvation of others, could have been made by many a self-devoted monk-apostle who won a like crown of martyrdom. In the romance of Christian missions the monastic chronicles of Iona and Lindisfarne and St. Gall, and the tales of the labors and martyrdom of Saints Columba, Wilfrid, Boniface, and a great company of others will never cease to enthrall the imagination so long as the virtue of self-renunciation is esteemed and reverenced among men.

This great missionary movement which brought within the pale of the Church the northern peoples is of transcendent interest to the student of the history of morals, not merely because it is such a splendid exhibition of the altruistic spirit of Christianity, but also because the success of these medieval missions meant, besides the winning of the barbarians to a new religion, the winning of them to a new moral life; for to give a people a new religion is to give them also a new conscience.

Almsgiving and the founding of charitable institutions

The altruistic spirit of the new religion found a second expression in charity, in the sense of almsgiving to the poor and the wretched. This was not a new virtue any more than that of general benevolence. It was never, it is true, a prominent virtue with the Greeks and Romans, but it had always been given a place among the cardinal virtues by all the great ethical religions of the East. Judaism laid special stress upon the duty of open-handedness to the poor, while Buddhism made it a rudimentary virtue.[650] Christianity inherited from Judaism this attractive virtue and laid a fresh emphasis upon it. Since the incoming of Christianity the poor and the afflicted have been cared for in a spirit of compassion and tenderness never before known in the history of the Western races. Asylums and hospitals and charitable institutions of every kind have multiplied in number and have been increased in effectiveness in relieving want and distress as the centuries have passed, until these endowments and provisions have become a distinctive feature of Christian civilization. In the period we are here reviewing, and throughout the later medieval ages, gifts to the monasteries were especially numerous and large, one reason for this being that the monks were looked upon as the almoners of society and “trustees for the poor.” The founding of hospitals and the endowing of infirmaries afforded another outlet for the unbounded charity of the age. The first Christian hospital was founded at Rome in the fourth century by a Roman lady named Fabiola, a widow of the ancient house of the Fabii, who also established a hospice for pilgrims at the mouth of the Tiber.[651]

The spirit of charity found further expression in the emancipation of slaves, and in the ransoming of prisoners of war, especially, after the rise of Islam, of Christian captives. Unfortunately the teaching of the Church respecting the possibility of possession by demons caused insanity to be regarded as obsession by an evil spirit, and for more than a thousand years this belief not only put the unhappy class of the insane outside the pale of Christian charity, but subjected them to the most cruel treatment that fear and superstition could devise.[652]

Mitigations of slavery

A religion or a philosophy which has for aim the reform and improvement of human society may act directly either upon the individual or upon institutions. Thus modern socialism ignores the individual, maintaining that the individual is the product of environment, and makes its direct proximate end and aim the reform of social and economic institutions. Through the improvement and perfection of these it would bring about the improvement and perfection of the individual, and thus usher in the era of equality, justice, and brotherhood among men.