it being inconceivable to all the schools sprung from Socrates
that a man could truly know his own good and yet deliberately
choose anything else. This knowledge, as Aristotle held, might
be permanently precluded by vicious habits, or temporarily
obliterated by passion, but if present in the mind it must produce
rightness of purpose. Or even if it were held with some of the
Stoics that true wisdom was out of the reach of the best men
actually living, it none the less remained the ideal condition
of perfect human life. By Christian teachers, on the other hand,
the inner springs of good conduct were generally conceived as
Faith.
Faith and Love. Of these notions the former has a
somewhat complex ethical import; it seems to blend
several elements differently prominent in different minds. Its
simplest and commonest meaning is that emphasized in the
contrast of “faith” with “sight”; where it signifies belief
in the invisible divine order represented by the church, in the
actuality of the law, the threats, the promises of God, in spite
of all the influences in man’s natural life that tend to obscure
this belief. Out of this contrast there ultimately grew an
essentially different opposition between faith and knowledge
or reason, according to which the theological basis of ethics was
contrasted with the philosophical; the theologians maintaining
sometimes that the divine law is essentially arbitrary, the
expression of will, not reason; more frequently that its reasonableness
is inscrutable, and that actual human reason should
confine itself to examining the credentials of God’s messengers,
and not the message itself. But in early Christianity this latter
antithesis was as yet undeveloped; faith means simply force
in clinging to moral and religious conviction, whatever their
rational grounds may be; this force, in the Christian consciousness,
being inseparably bound up with personal loyalty and
trust towards Christ, the leader in the battle with evil, the ruler
of the kingdom to be realized. So far, however, there is no
ethical difference between Christian faith and that of Judaism,
or its later imitation, Mahommedanism; except that the
personal affection of loyal trust is peculiarly stirred by the
blending of human and divine natures in Christ, and the rule
of duty impressively taught by the manifestation of his perfect
life. A more distinctively Christian, and a more deeply moral,
significance is given to the notion in the antithesis of “faith”
and “works.” Here faith means more than loyal acceptance
of the divine law and reverent trust in the lawgiver; it implies
a consciousness, at once continually present and continually
transcended, of the radical imperfection of all human obedience
to the law, and at the same time of the irremissible condemnation
which this imperfection entails. The Stoic doctrine of the
worthlessness of ordinary human virtue, and the stern paradox
that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely,
guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter
(maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an
emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike
that of the Stoic) overcomes its practical exclusiveness through
faith. This faith, again, may be conceived in two modes,
essentially distinct though usually combined. In one view it
gives the believer strength to attain, by God’s supernatural aid
or “grace,” a goodness of which he is naturally incapable;
in the other view it gives him an assurance that, though he
knows himself a sinner deserving of utter condemnation, a
perfectly just God still regards him with favour on account of
the perfect services and suffering of Christ. Of these views
the former is the more catholic, more universally present in
the Christian consciousness; the latter more deeply penetrates
the mystery of the Atonement, as expounded in the Pauline
epistles.
But faith, however understood, is rather an indispensable pre-requisite than the essential motive principle of Christian good conduct. This motive is supplied by the other central notion, love. On love depends the “fulfilling of the law,” and the sole moral value of Christian duty—that Love. is, on love to God, in the first place, which in its fullest development must spring from Christian faith; and, secondly, love to all mankind, as the objects of divine love and sharers in the humanity ennobled by the incarnation. This derivative philanthropy characterizes the spirit in which all Christian performance of social duty is to be done; loving devotion to God being the fundamental attitude of mind that is to be maintained throughout the whole of the Christian’s life. But further, as regards abstinence from unlawful acts and desires Purity. prompting to them, we have to notice another form in which the inwardness of Christian morality manifests itself, which, though less distinctive, should yet receive attention in any comparison of Christian ethics with the view of Graeco-Roman philosophy. The profound horror with which the Christian’s conception of a suffering as well as an avenging divinity tended to make him regard all condemnable acts was tinged with a sentiment which we may perhaps describe as a ceremonial aversion moralized—the aversion, that is, to foulness or impurity. In Judaism, as in other, especially Oriental, religions, the natural dislike of material defilement has been elevated into a religious sentiment, and made to support a complicated system of quasi-sanitary abstinences and ceremonial purifications; then, as the ethical element predominated in the Jewish religion, a moral symbolism was felt to reside in the ceremonial code, and thus aversion to impurity came to be a common form of the ethico-religious sentiment. Then, when Christianity threw off the Mosaic ritual, this religious sense of purity was left with no other sphere besides morality; while, from its highly idealized character, it was peculiarly well adapted for that repression of vicious desires which Christianity claimed as its special function.
The distinctive features of Christian ethics are obedience, unworldliness, benevolence, purity and humility. They are naturally connected with the more general characteristics just stated; though many of them may also be referred directly Distinctive particulars of Christian morality. to the example and precepts of Christ, and in several cases they are clearly due to both causes, inseparably combined.
1. We may notice, in the first place, that the conception of morality as a code which, if not in itself arbitrary, is yet to be accepted by men with unquestioning submission, tends naturally to bring into prominence the virtue of obedience to authority; just as the philosophic view of goodness as the realization of reason gives a special value to self-determination and independence (as we see more clearly in the post-Aristotelian schools where ethics is distinctly separated from politics).
2. Again, the opposition between the natural world and the spiritual order into which the Christian has been born anew led not merely to a contempt equal to that of the Stoic for wealth, fame, power, and other objects of worldly pursuit, but also, for some time at least, to a comparative depreciation of the domestic and civic relations of the natural man. This tendency was exhibited most simply and generally in the earliest period of the church’s history. In the view of primitive Christians, ordinary human society was a world temporarily surrendered to Satanic rule, over which a swift and sudden destruction was impending; in such a world the little band who were gathered in the ark of the church could have no part or lot,—the only attitude they could maintain was that of passive alienation. On the other hand, it was difficult practically to realize this alienation, and a keen sense of this difficulty induced the same hostility to the body as a clog and hindrance, that we find to some extent in Plato, but more fully developed in Neoplatonism, Neopythagoreanism, and other products of the mingling of Greek with Oriental thought. This feeling is exhibited in the value set on fasting in the Christian church from the earliest times, and in an extreme form in the self-torments of later monasticism; while both tendencies, anti-worldliness and anti-sensualism, seem to have combined in causing the preference of celibacy over marriage which is common to most early Christian writers.[1] Patriotism, again, and the sense of civic duty, the most elevated of all social sentiments in the Graeco-Roman civilization, tended, under the influence of Christianity, either to expand itself into universal philanthropy, or to concentrate
- ↑ E.g. Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian.
