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

by P. V. N. Myers

During the age of chivalry the ideal of the knight overshadowed the ideal of the monk. Nevertheless throughout the whole period the monastic ideal inspired a great deal of moral enthusiasm. The founding and endowment of monasteries divided with the equipping of knightly expeditions for the Crusades the zeal and efforts and sacrifices of the European peoples.

In the old orders of monks, however, zeal for the ascetic ideal would often grow cold, and the high moral standard of the earlier time would be lowered. Then some select soul, set aflame by a fresh vision of the ideal, would draw together a group of devoted followers, and thus would come into existence a new order of monks, among whom the flame of a holy enthusiasm would burn brightly for a time.[691]

Among the numerous new orders called into existence by these reform movements there were two which, in the ideal of duty which they followed, stand quite apart from the ordinary monastic orders. This new ideal had its incarnation in St. Francis[692] and St. Dominic, the founders respectively of the Franciscan and the Dominican order of friars.

In this new conception of what constitutes the worthiest and most meritorious life, the quietistic virtues of the earlier ascetic ideal, which had developed during the period of terror and suffering which followed the subversion of classical civilization by the northern barbarians, gave place to the active, benevolent virtues. In the earlier monastic movement there was a self-regarding element. The monk fled from the world in order to make sure of his own salvation. The world was left to care for itself. In the new orders, the brother, in imitation of the Master who went about among men teaching and healing, left the cloister and went out into the world to rescue and save others. In its lofty call to absolute self-forgetfulness and complete consecration to the service of humanity, the early ideal of the Mendicants was one of the noblest and most attractive that had grown up under Christian influence. The loftiness of the ideal attracted the select spirits of the age—for noble souls love self-sacrifice. “Whenever in the thirteenth century,” says the historian Lea, “we find a man towering above his fellows, we are almost sure to trace him to one of the Mendicant Orders.”[693]

It is in the exaltation of this virtue of self-renunciation that we find one of the chief services rendered by the Mendicant Orders, especially by the Franciscan, to European morality. Just as the early monks, through the emphasis laid on the virtue of chastity, made a needed protest against the sensuality of a senile and decadent civilization, so did the friars, through the stress laid on the virtue of self-denial for others, make a needed protest against the selfishness and hardness of an age that seemed to have forgotten the claims of the poor and the lowly.[694] It can hardly be made a matter of reasonable doubt that the slowly growing fund of altruistic feeling in Christendom was greatly enriched by the self-devoted lives and labors of the followers of Saints Francis and Dominic.

But the value of the ideal of the friars as an ethical force in the evolution of European civilization was seriously impaired by certain theological elements it contained. It was an ideal in which, as in the ordinary monastic ideal, the duty of correct opinion came to be exalted above all others. The ethics of belief took precedence of the ethics of service. Thus the friars, particularly the Dominicans, through their zeal for orthodoxy, fostered the grave moral fault of intolerance. The growth of this conception of Christian duty, concurring with other causes of which we shall speak in the next chapter, ushered in the age of the Inquisition.

The ethics of Scholasticism

The ethical history of the friars or the preaching orders mingles with the ethical history of Scholasticism. The ethics of the Schoolmen was a syncretism of two moral systems, the pagan-classical or Aristotelian and the Christian. With the four classical virtues of wisdom, prudence, temperance, and justice were combined the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. But these two moral types, the classical and the theological, each being taken in its entirety, were mutually inconsistent ideals of virtue. The pagan code was a morality based on the autonomy of the individual reason; the Church code was based on an external authority. The one was inner and natural, the other outer and supernatural. The scholastic system was thus an incongruous combination of naturalism and supernaturalism in ethics, of native virtues and “virtues of grace.” This dualism is the essential fact in the history of the ethics of Scholasticism.

As it was the great effort of the Schoolmen in the domain of dogma to justify the doctrines of the Church, to show their reasonableness and consistency, so was it their great effort in the domain of ethics to justify the Church’s composite moral ideal, to show all its duties and virtues to form a reasonable and consistent system. The best representative of this effort of reconciliation was the great Schoolman Thomas Aquinas. But a perfect fusion of the diverse elements was impossible. There were ever striving in the system two spirits—the spirit of Greek naturalism and the spirit of Hebrew-Christian supernaturalism.

But there was another line of cleavage in the system which was still more fateful in its historical consequences than the cleavage between the Aristotelian and the Church morality. This cleavage was created by the twofold ethics of the Church, for the ecclesiastical morality, considered apart from the Aristotelian element, was itself made up of two mutually inconsistent ethics, namely, Gospel ethics and Augustinian ethics.[695] The saving virtue of the first was loving, self-abnegating service; the saving virtue of the second was faith, which was practically defined as “the acceptance as true of the dogma of the Trinity and the main articles of the creed.” Such was the emphasis laid by certain of the Schoolmen upon the metaphysical side of this dual system that there was in their ethics more of the mind of Augustine than of the mind of Christ. This making of an external authority the basis of morality, this emphasizing of the theological virtues, especially the virtue of right belief, had two results of incalculable consequences for the moral evolution in Christendom. First, it led naturally and inevitably to that system of casuistry[696] which was one of the most striking phenomena of the moral history of the later medieval and earlier modern centuries; and second, it laid the basis of the tribunal of the Inquisition. Thus does the theological ethics of Scholasticism stand in intimate and significant relation to these two important matters in the moral history of Europe.