CHAPTER III

CHRISTIANITY AND MEDIEVAL ETHICS

§ 1. The istics of

character

In the present work we are not concerned with the origin of the Christian religion, nor with its outward history; the causes of its resistless development during the first three Christian morality to centuries; its final triumph over Greco-Roman paganism; be distinits failure to check the decay of the Hellenistic civilisation guished. that centred in Constantinople, or to withstand in the east and south the force of the new religious movement that burst from Arabia in the 7th century; its success in dominating the social chaos to which the barbarian invasions reduced the Western empire; the important part it took in producing out of this chaos the new civilised order to which we belong; the complex and varying relations in which it has since stood to the political organisations, the social life, the progressive science, the literary and artistic culture of our modern world. Nor have we to consider the special doctrines that have formed the bond of union of the Christian communities in any other than their ethical aspect, their bearing on the systematisation of human aims and activities. This aspect, however, must necessarily be prominent in discussing Christianity, which cannot be adequately treated if considered merely as a system of theological beliefs divinely revealed, and special observances divinely sanctioned; as it essentially

§ 2. Christian and Jewish "law of

God."

claims to rule the whole man, and leave no part of his life out of the range of its regulating and transforming influences. It was not till the 4th century A.D. that the first attempt was made to offer anything like a systematic exposition of Christian morality; and nine centuries more had passed away before a genuinely philosophic intellect, trained by a full study of the greatest Greek thinker, undertook to give complete scientific form to the ethical doctrine of the Catholic Church. Before, however, we take a brief survey of the development of ethical thought that culminated in Thomas Aquinas, it may be well to examine the chief features of the new moral consciousness that had spread through Greco-Roman civilisation, and was awaiting philosophic synthesis. In making this examination it will be convenient to consider first the new form or universal characteristics of Christian morality, and afterwards to note the chief points in the matter or particulars of duty and virtue which received an important development or emphasis from the new religion.

The first point to be noticed as novel is the conception of morality as the positive law of a theocratic community, possessing a written code imposed by divine revelation, and sanctioned by express divine promises and threatenings. It is true that we find in ancient thought, from Socrates downwards, the notion of a law of God, eternal and immutable, partly expressed and partly obscured by the various and shifting codes and customs of actual human societies. But the sanctions of this law were vaguely and, for the most part, feebly imagined; its principles were essentially unwritten and unpromulgated, and thus not referred to the external will of an Almighty Being who claimed unquestioning submission, but rather to the reason

that gods and men shared, by the exercise of which alone this eternal law could be adequately known and defined. Hence, even if the notion of law had been more prominent than it was in ancient ethical thought, it could never have led to a juridical, as distinct from a philosophical, treatment of morality. In Christianity, on the other hand, we early find that the method of moralists determining right conduct is to a great extent analogous to that of jurists interpreting a code. It is assumed that divine_commands have been implicitly given for all occasions of life, and that they are to be ascertained in particular cases by application of the general rules obtained from texts of Scripture, and by analogical inference from scriptural examples. This juridical method descended naturally from the Jewish theocracy, which was universalised in Christendom. Moral insight, in the view of the most thoughtful Jews of the age immediately preceding Christianity, was conceived as knowledge of a divine code, emanating from an authority_external_to human reason, which latter had only the function of interpreting its rules and applying them to difficult cases. The normal motives to obey this law were trust in the promises and fear of the judgments of the Divine Lawgiver, who had made a special covenant to protect the Jewish people, on condition that they rendered Him due obedience; and the sources from which knowledge of the law was actually gained had the complexity often exhibited by the jurisprudence of an advanced community. The original nucleus of the code, it was believed, had been written and promulgated by Moses, other precepts had been revealed in the fervid utterances of the later prophets, others had been handed down through oral tradition from immemorial antiquity; and the body of prescriptions and prohibitions

thus composed had, before Judaism gave birth to Christianity, received an extensive development through the commentaries and supplementary maxims of several generations of students. Christianity inherited the notion of a written divine code acknowledged as such by the "true Israel ”— now potentially including the whole of mankind, or at least the chosen of all nations,-on the sincere acceptance of which the Christian's share of the divine promises to Israel depended. And though the ceremonial part of the old Hebrew code was altogether rejected, and with it all the supplementary jurisprudence resting on tradition and erudite commentary, still God's law was believed to be contained in the sacred books of the Jews, supplemented by the records. of Christ's teaching and the writings of His apostles. By the recognition of this law the Church was constituted as an ordered community, essentially distinct from the State; the distinction between the two being sharpened and hardened by the withdrawal of the early Christians from civic life, to avoid the performance of idolatrous ceremonies imposed as official expressions of loyalty; and by the persecutions which they had to endure, when the spread of an association apparently so hostile to the framework of ancient society had at length caused serious alarm to the imperial government. Nor was the distinction obliterated by the recognition of Christianity as the state religion under Constantine. The law of God and its interpreters still remained quite separate from the secular law and jurists of the Roman empire; though the former was of course binding on all mankind, the Church was none the less a community of persons who regarded themselves as both specially pledged and specially enabled to obey it, a community, too, that could not be entered except by a solemn ceremony typifying a spiritual new birth.

The

Thus the fundamental difference between morality and (human) legality only came out more clearly in consequence of the jural form in which the former was conceived. ultimate sanctions of the moral code were the infinite rewards and punishments awaiting the immortal soul hereafter; but the Decian persecutions, while they manifested in the unalterable constancy of martyrs and confessors the strength of the spreading faith, also pressed forcibly on the Church the problem of dealing with apostate members; and it was felt to be necessary to withdraw the privileges of membership from such persons, and only allow them to be regained by a protracted process of prayer, fasting, and ceremonies expressive of contrite humiliation, in which the sincerity of the repentant apostates might be tested and manifested. This formal and regulated "penitence" was extended from apostacy to other grave-or, as they subsequently came to be called, "deadly"-sins; while for slighter offences the members of the Church generally were called upon to express contrition by abstinence from pleasures ordinarily permitted, as well as verbally in public and private devotions. communication" and " penance" thus came to be temporal ecclesiastical sanctions of the moral law; as the graduation of these sanctions naturally became more careful and minute, a correspondingly detailed classification of offences was rendered necessary; the regulations for observing the ordinary fasts and festivals of the Church grew similarly elaborate; and thus a system of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, prohibitive and ceremonial, was gradually produced, somewhat analogous to that of the rejected Judaism. At the same time this tendency to develop and make prominent a scheme of external duties has always been balanced and counteracted in Christianity by the ineffaceable

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