Ethics

Jesus, detail of the Deësis Mosaic, from the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, 12th century.© iStockphoto/Thinkstock

This conception of morality had important consequences for the future development of Western ethics. The Greeks and Romans—and indeed thinkers such as Confucius—did not conceive of a distinctively moral realm of conduct. For them, everything that one did was a matter of practical reasoning, in which one could do either well or poorly. In the more legalistic Judeo-Christian view, however, falling short of what the moral law requires was a much more serious matter than, say, failing to do the household budgets correctly. This distinction between the moral and the nonmoral realms now affects every question in Western ethics, including the way the questions themselves are framed.

Another consequence of the retention of the basically legalistic stance of Jewish ethics was that from the beginning Christian ethics had to deal with the question of how to judge the person who breaks the law from good motives or keeps it from bad motives. The latter half of this question was particularly acute, because the Gospels describe Jesus as repeatedly warning of a coming resurrection of the dead at which time all would be judged and punished or rewarded according to their sins and virtues in this life (see Last Judgment). The punishments and rewards were weighty enough to motivate anyone who took this message seriously, and the warning was given added emphasis by the fact that the resurrection was not going to be long in coming. (Jesus said that it would take place during the lifetime of some of those listening to him.) This is therefore an ethics that invokes external sanctions as a reason for doing what is right. At the same time, it is an ethics that places love above mere literal compliance with the law. These two aspects do not sit easily together. Can one bring oneself to love God and neighbour in order to be rewarded with eternal happiness in another life?

The fact that Jesus and the Apostle Paul too believed in the imminence of the Second Coming led them to suggest ways of living that were scarcely feasible on any other assumption: taking no thought for the morrow, turning the other cheek, and giving away all one has. Even Paul’s preference for celibacy rather than marriage and his grudging acceptance of the latter on the assumption that “it is better to marry than to burn” makes some sense, once one grasps that he was proposing ethical standards for what he thought would be the last generation on earth. When the expected event did not occur and Christianity became the official religion of the vast and embattled Roman Empire, Christian leaders were faced with the awkward task of reinterpreting these injunctions in a manner more suited for a continuing society.

The new Christian ethical standards did lead to some changes in Roman morality. Perhaps the most vital change was a new sense of the equal moral status of all human beings. As mentioned earlier, the Stoics had been the first to elaborate this conception, grounding equality on the common capacity to reason. For Christians, humans are equal because they are all potentially immortal and equally precious in the sight of God. This caused Christians to condemn a wide variety of practices that had been accepted by both Greek and Roman moralists, including many related to the taking of innocent human life: from the earliest days Christian leaders condemned abortion, infanticide, and suicide. Even killing in war was at first regarded as wrong, and soldiers who had converted to Christianity refused to continue to bear arms. Once the empire became Christian, however, this was one of the inconvenient ideas that had to yield. Despite what Jesus had said about turning the other cheek, church leaders declared that killing in a “just war” was not a sin. The Christian condemnation of killing in gladiatorial games, on the other hand, had a more permanent effect. Finally, but perhaps most important, while Christian emperors continued to uphold the legality of slavery, the Christian church accepted slaves as equals, admitted them to its ceremonies, and regarded the granting of freedom to slaves as a virtuous, if not obligatory, act. This moral pressure led over several hundred years to the gradual disappearance of slavery in Europe.

The Christian contribution to improving the position of slaves can also be linked with the distinctively Christian list of virtues. As noted above, some of the virtues described by Aristotle—for example, greatness of soul—are quite contrary in spirit to Christian virtues such as humility. In general it can be said that, whereas the Greeks and Romans prized independence, self-reliance, magnanimity, and worldly success, Christians emphasized meekness, obedience, patience, and resignation. As the Greeks and Romans conceived virtue, a virtuous slave was almost a contradiction in terms; for Christians, however, there was nothing in the state of slavery that was incompatible with the highest moral character. St. Augustine

At its beginning Christianity had a set of scriptures incorporating many moral injunctions, but it did not have a moral philosophy. The first serious attempt to provide such a philosophy was made by St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was acquainted with a version of Plato’s philosophy, and he developed the Platonic idea of the rational soul into a Christian view in which humans are essentially souls, using their bodies as a means to achieve their spiritual ends. The ultimate objective remains happiness, as in Greek ethics, but Augustine conceived of happiness as consisting of the union of the soul with God after the body has died. It was through Augustine, therefore, that Christianity received the Platonic theme of the relative inferiority of bodily pleasures. There was, to be sure, a fundamental difference: whereas for Plato bodily pleasures were inferior in comparison with the pleasures of philosophical contemplation in this world, for Christians they were inferior to the pleasures of spiritual existence in the next world. Moreover, Christians came to regard bodily pleasures not merely as inferior but also as a positive threat to the achievement of spiritual bliss.

Augustine, St.St. Augustine.© Photos.com/Thinkstock

It was also important that Augustine could not accept the view, common to so many Greek and Roman philosophers, that philosophical reasoning was the means to achieving wisdom and happiness. For a Christian, of course, wisdom and happiness can be had only through love of God and faith in Jesus Christ as the Saviour. The result was to be, for many centuries, a rejection of the use of unfettered reasoning in ethics.

Augustine was aware of the tension between the dual Christian motivations of love of God and neighbour on the one hand and reward and punishment in the afterlife on the other. He came down firmly on the side of love, insisting that those who keep the moral law through fear of punishment are not really keeping it at all. But it is not ordinary human love, either, that suffices as a motivation for true Christian living. Augustine believed that all human beings bear the burden of Adam’s original sin (see Adam and Eve) and so are incapable of redeeming themselves by their own efforts. Only the unmerited grace of God makes possible obedience to the “first greatest commandment” of loving God, and without it one cannot fulfill the moral law. This view made a clear-cut distinction between Christians and pagan moralists, no matter how humble and pure the latter might be; only the former could be saved, because only they could receive the blessing of divine grace. But this gain, as Augustine saw it, was purchased at the cost of denying that humans are free to choose good or evil. Only Adam had this choice: he chose for all humanity, and he chose evil. St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics

After Augustine there were no major developments in ethics in the West until the rise of Scholasticism in the 12th and 13th centuries. Among the first significant works written during this time was a treatise on ethics by the French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142). His importance in ethical theory lies in his emphasis on intentions. Abelard maintained, for example, that the sin of sexual wrongdoing consists not in the act of illicit sexual intercourse, nor even in the desire for it, but in mentally consenting to that desire. In this he was far more modern than Augustine and more thoughtful than those who even today assert that the mere desire for what is wrong is as wrong as the act itself. Abelard recognized that there is a problem in holding a person morally responsible for the mere existence of physical desires. His ingenious solution was taken up by later medieval writers, and traces of it can still be found in modern discussions of moral responsibility.