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Title: History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals
Author: P. V. N. Myers
Release date: April 19, 2024 [eBook #73430]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Ginn & Co, 1913
Credits: WebRover, Tim Lindell, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY AS PAST ETHICS; AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF MORALS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Superscripts
are indicated by carets and braces: 5^{me}. Additional notes will be
found near the end of this ebook.
HISTORY AS PAST ETHICS
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
HISTORY OF MORALS
BY
PHILIP VAN NESS MYERS
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI. AUTHOR OF “ANCIENT HISTORY,”
“MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN HISTORY,” AND
“A GENERAL HISTORY”
GINN AND COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · LONDON
ATLANTA · DALLAS · COLUMBUS · SAN FRANCISCO
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
PHILIP VAN NESS MYERS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
526.2
The Athenæum Press
GINN AND COMPANY · PROPRIETORS
· BOSTON · U.S.A.
TO
I. C. M.
My conviction gains infinitely
the moment another soul will
believe in it.--NOVALIS
PREFACE
This work completes the series of historical textbooks which I
began more than thirty years ago. It is an expansion of a course of
lectures given for several years to my advanced classes in history,
and is designed as a brief introduction to the history of morals. In
treating the science of morals as a branch of history my thought is,
without trenching in the least upon the domain of the philosophy of
morals, to make the work of the department of history more helpfully
introductory than it has hitherto been to that of the department of
moral philosophy. The book is the outgrowth of a conviction that the
philosophy of ethics, if it shall become a stimulus and guide to
social service and humanitarian effort,--especially if it shall bring
reënforcement to that ethical idealism which so largely motives the
present-day movement for world peace,--must be based on a knowledge of
the facts of the moral life of the race in all the various stages of
the historic evolution, and that to gather and systematize these facts
is a part of the task of the historian, indeed the most important part
of his task. It is my hope that teachers of both history and ethics may
find the book helpful, whether made the basis of classroom discussion
or of lecture comment.
P. V. N. M.
COLLEGE HILL
CINCINNATI, OHIO
Ethics gives to History its rational goal; and all morality has the
perfect shaping of universal history as its ultimate end. A real
understanding of history is not possible without ethics; universal
history is the realization of the moral ... within humanity.--ADOLF
WUTTKE.
The real advance made by Thucydides consists, perhaps, in this,
that he perceived the motive forces of human history to be in the
moral constitution of human nature.--LEOPOLD VON RANKE.
Ethics, if it is to become truly a science, must shun the path of
speculation and follow closely the historical method.... Range in
fancy over the whole circle of the sciences, and you will find
there no place for ethics save as a branch of human history....
Given the earliest morality of which we have any written record, to
trace from it through progressive stages the morality of to-day;
that is the problem, and the only problem which can fall to a
truly scientific ethics.... Ethics as the comparative history
of universal morality is the vestibule to the temple of moral
philosophy.--JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. THE DAWN OF MORALITY: CONSCIENCE IN THE KINSHIP GROUP 12
I. INSTITUTIONS, IDEAS, AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE
DETERMINING THE RULES OF CONDUCT 12
II. ESSENTIAL FACTS OF KINSHIP OR INTRATRIBAL MORALITY 15
III. THE BEGINNINGS OF INTERTRIBAL MORALITY 22
III. THE MORAL LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT: AN IDEAL OF SOCIAL
JUSTICE 30
I. CIRCUMSTANCES AND IDEAS WHICH MOLDED AND MOTIVED
MORALITY 30
II. THE IDEAL 33
IV. THE BABYLONIAN-ASSYRIAN CONSCIENCE 45
V. CHINESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF FILIAL PIETY 53
I. IDEAS, INSTITUTIONS, AND HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
DETERMINING THE CAST OF THE MORAL IDEAL 53
II. THE IDEAL 60
III. EFFECTS OF THE IDEAL UPON CHINESE LIFE AND HISTORY 69
VI. JAPANESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF LOYALTY 77
I. FORMATIVE AND MODIFYING INFLUENCES 77
II. THE IDEAL 80
III. SOME SIGNIFICANT FACTS IN THE MORAL HISTORY OF JAPAN 87
VII. THE ETHICAL IDEALS OF INDIA 95
PART I. THE ETHICS OF BRAHMANISM--A CLASS MORALITY 95
I. HISTORICAL AND SPECULATIVE BASIS OF THE SYSTEM 95
II. THE VARIOUS MORAL STANDARDS 101
PART II. THE ETHICS OF BUDDHISM: AN IDEAL OF SELF-CONQUEST
AND UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE 106
I. THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE SYSTEM 106
II. THE IDEAL 110
III. SOME EXPRESSIONS OF THE ETHICAL SPIRIT OF BUDDHISM 115
VIII. THE ETHICS OF ZOROASTRIANISM: AN IDEAL OF COMBAT 123
I. PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS WHICH CREATED THE
ETHICAL TYPE 123
II. THE IDEAL 126
III. THE PRACTICE 131
IX. THE MORAL EVOLUTION IN ISRAEL: AN IDEAL OF OBEDIENCE TO A
REVEALED LAW 135
I. THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF HEBREW MORALITY 135
II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL IDEAL 140
1. The Development up to the Exile 140
2. The Morality of the Prophets of the Exile 157
3. The Moral Life in the Postexilic Age 162
X. THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HELLAS: AN IDEAL OF
SELF-REALIZATION 169
I. INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS DETERMINING THE MORAL TYPE 169
II. THE IDEAL 174
III. LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF THE IDEAL 179
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION 185
XI. ROMAN MORALS: AN IDEAL OF CIVIC DUTY 212
I. INSTITUTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE DETERMINING THE
EARLY MORAL TYPE 212
II. THE PRIMITIVE MORAL TYPE 214
III. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE REPUBLIC 218
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE PAGAN EMPIRE 231
XII. THE ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY: AN IDEAL OF RIGHT
BELIEF 255
I. RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND THEOLOGICAL DOGMAS MOLDING THE
IDEAL 256
II. THE MORAL IDEAL 261
XIII. MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE OF CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM 267
I. CONCEPTIONS OF LIFE AND HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT
PRODUCED THE ASCETIC IDEAL 267
II. THE IDEAL AND ITS CHIEF TYPES 270
III. THE CHIEF MORAL FACTS OF THE PERIOD 272
XIV. THE ETHICS OF ISLAM: A MARTIAL IDEAL 288
I. RELIGIOUS BASIS OF THE MORAL SYSTEM 288
II. THE MORAL CODE 289
III. THE MORAL LIFE 293
XV. THE MORAL LIFE OF EUROPE DURING THE AGE OF CHIVALRY 300
I. THE CHURCH CONSECRATES THE MARTIAL IDEAL OF
KNIGHTHOOD 300
II. THE COMPOSITE IDEAL OF KNIGHTHOOD 306
III. THE CHIEF MORAL PHENOMENA OF THE PERIOD 309
XVI. RENAISSANCE ETHICS: REVIVAL OF NATURALISM IN MORALS 320
I. DETERMINING INFLUENCES 320
II. SOME ESSENTIAL FACTS IN THE MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE 322
XVII. ETHICS OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 333
I. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION OF ETHICAL IMPORT 333
II. SOME IMPORTANT MORAL OUTCOMES OF THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY
RELIGIOUS REFORM 334
XVIII. THE MORAL EVOLUTION SINCE THE INCOMING OF DEMOCRACY: THE
NEW SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENCE 340
I. FORCES DETERMINING THE TREND OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 340
II. EXPRESSIONS OF THE NEW MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN
DIFFERENT DOMAINS OF LIFE AND THOUGHT 344
1. The Ethics of Democracy 344
2. The Ethics of Industrialism 347
3. The Ethics of Modern Science 353
4. The Ethics of Theology 360
5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience 364
6. International Ethics: the New International
Conscience 371
INDEX 383
HISTORY AS PAST ETHICS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
[Sidenote: The ethical
interpretation of history]
Professor Freeman defined history as “past politics.” Mr. Buckle argued
that the essence of the historical evolution consists in intellectual
progress.[1] Many present-day economists hold that the dominant forces
in the historical development are economic.[2] Churchmen consistently
make the chief factor in history to be religion.
Whether the upholders of these several interpretations of history
would have us understand them as speaking of the ultimate goal of the
historic evolution, or merely of the dominant motive under which men
and society act, none of these interpretations can be accepted by the
student of the facts of the moral life of the race as a true reading
of history. To him not only does moral progress constitute the very
essence of the historic movement, but the ethical motive presents
itself as the most constant and regulative force in the evolution of
humanity. His chief interest in all the other factors of the historical
evolution is in noting in what way and in what measure they have
contributed to the growth and enrichment of the moral life of mankind.
Thus the historian of morals is deeply interested in the growth of
political institutions among men, but chiefly in observing in what way
these institutions have affected for good or for evil the moral life of
the nation. Particularly is the progress of the world toward political
unity a matter of profound concern to him, not because he regards the
establishment of the world state as an end in itself, but because the
universal state alone can furnish those conditions under which the
moral life of humanity can most freely expatiate and find its noblest
and truest expression.
It is the same with intellectual progress. The student of morals
recognizes the fact that the progress of the race in morality is
normally dependent upon its progress in knowledge--that conscience
waits upon the intellect. But in opposition to Buckle and those of
his school, he maintains that, so far from an advance in knowledge
constituting the essence of a progressive civilization, this
mental advance constitutes merely the condition precedent of real
civilization, the distinctive characteristic of which must be a true
morality. A civilization or culture which does not include this is
doomed to quick retrogression and decay. As Benjamin Kidd truly
observes, “When the intellectual development of any section of the
race, for the time being, outruns the ethical development, natural
selection has apparently weeded it out like any other unsuitable
product.”[3]
As with the political and intellectual elements of civilization so is
it with the economic. The outward forms of the moral life are, it is
true, largely determined by the industry of a people; but the informing
spirit of morality is the expression of an implanted faculty. It is
elicited but not created by environment. No industrial order from
which it is lacking can long endure. Natural selection condemns it
as unfit. And this we are beginning to recognize--that economics and
ethics cannot be divorced, that every great industrial problem is at
bottom a moral problem. To the student of the ethical phase of history
all social reformers from the old Hebrew prophets down to Karl Marx
and Henry George are primarily moralists pleading for social justice,
equity, and righteousness.
And preëminently the same is it with religion. Religion has been a
great part of the life of man, and the historian of morals must be a
diligent student of the religious systems of the world, but mainly
because religion has been in general such a potent agency in the moral
education of mankind. For it is the ethical factor in the great world
religions which constitutes their universal and permanent element.
“It is the function of religion to kindle moral enthusiasm in society
at large.”[4] “Christianity has no other function or value than as an
aid to morality.”[5] All the great religions of the world--Buddhism,
Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism (reckoning historic Judaism as
beginning with the great prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries
B.C.), Christianity, and Islam--began as moral reforms.[6]
In short, in the words of Wellhausen, “Morality is that for the sake of
which all other things exist; it is the alone essential thing in the
world.”[7] The really constructive and regulative forces in history are
in truth moral ideas and convictions. And there is vast significance
in this--that the ethical motive, never absent and always active, is
constantly becoming more and more dominant in the processes of the
historical evolution. As the ages pass there enters into history--we
shall see this to be so later--an ever larger ethical element.
Conscience becomes ever more and more involved in the personal,
national, and international affairs of the world.
[Sidenote: The history of morals
in the main a record of the
expansion of the circle covered by
the moral feelings]
Moral progress consists not so much in changes in the quality or
intensity of the moral emotions, although these gain in diversity,
purity, and refinement as time passes, as in the successive
enlargements of the circle of persons embraced by the moral
feelings.[8] “It is not the sense of duty to a neighbor, but the
practical answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? that has
varied.”[9] As we shall see when we come to examine the morality of
primitive man, the moral feelings embrace at first only kinsmen, that
is, the members of one’s own family, clan, or social group. All others
are outside the moral pale. But gradually this circle grows larger and
embraces in successive expansions the tribe, the city, the nation, and
lastly humanity.
This expansion of the area covered by the moral feelings is the
dominant fact in the moral history of mankind. It is the overlooking
of this fact that has caused writers like Buckle to make their strange
misreading of history and to maintain that though man during historic
times has made immense progress on material and intellectual lines, he
has made little or no progress in morality. The truth is, as we shall
learn, that in no domain has progress been greater, the gains larger or
more precious, than in the moral. From clan morality, based on physical
kinship, mankind has advanced or is advancing to world morality, based
on the ethical kinship of men. This is the one increasing purpose
running through all history--the creation of a moral order embracing
the whole human race.
[Sidenote: Sources for the history
of morals]
The facts for a history of morals must be sought chiefly outside the
literature of ethical theory and speculation. They must be looked
for in the customs, laws, institutions, mythologies, literatures,
maxims, and religions of the different races, peoples, and ages of
history.[10] In all these there is always an ethical element; often
this forms their very essence. “In every sentence of the penal code,”
as the moralist Wilhelm Wundt remarks, “there speaks the voice of an
objective moral conscience.” In truth all law codes, whether civil or
criminal, are essentially nothing more nor less than the embodiment of
man’s conceptions of what is just and unjust. Mythologies, literatures,
and philosophies are charged with moral sentiment. In religion there
struggle for utterance the deepest moral feelings and convictions of
the human soul.
[Sidenote: The moral ideal]
The moral life fulfills itself in many ways. Every age and every race
has its own moral type or ideal.[11] This, as we shall use the term,
may be defined as a group of virtues held in esteem by a given people
or a given age. It is the accepted standard of conduct, of excellence,
of character. This ideal may be a very simple thing, embracing only a
few rudimentary virtues, as in the case of peoples on the lower levels
of culture; or it may be a very complex thing, embracing many and
refined virtues, as in the case of civilized societies in which the
mutual relationships of the members are many and various.
The history of morals is in the main an account of moral ideals or
types.[12] Indeed so large is the part that these have played in the
growth and decay of races and civilizations that universal history may
be defined quite accurately as “the paleontology of moral ideals.”[13]
There is one thing about a moral ideal which sets it apart from all
other ideals. It possesses a unique dynamic force. All ideals, it is
true, have in them the impulsion to their embodiment in reality. But in
a moral ideal there is the added imperative of conscience. There speaks
from it the majestic voice of duty, demanding that the ideal be made
actual in the life of the individual and of society. It is this that
has made moral ideals such molding and constructive forces in history.
[Sidenote: Composite moral ideals
or types]
There is a striking analogy between the different types of moral
character and the different types of human beauty. Thus corresponding
to the great types of masculine and feminine beauty there are masculine
and feminine types of moral excellence. And then, just as the elements
of the two chief types of feminine beauty, the blond and the brunette,
combine to form a great variety of mixed or composite types, so do the
elements of the chief types of goodness blend into many composite types
of character.[14]
There is no more instructive chapter in the history of morals than that
which has to do with the formation of these composite ethical types,
since these are often the most significant results of those great race
collisions and comminglings which make up so much of the history of
the past; for when races meet and mingle they blend not only their
blood but also their consciences. There appears not only a new physical
man but also a new moral man.
Thus the fusion of races in Europe has resulted in a great fusion
of moralities. The conscience of Europe is a very composite one,
including Greek, Roman, Hebraic, Celtic, Gothic, and Slavonic elements.
This heterogeneous conscience, so different, for instance, from the
comparatively homogeneous conscience of ancient Egypt and of China,
has been the most important factor in the life and civilization of
the European people. It is largely because Europe has been constantly
getting a new conscience that its history has been so disturbed and
so progressive, just as it is largely because China has had the same
Confucian conscience for two thousand years and more, that her history
has been so uneventful and unchanging.
[Sidenote: Causes which determine
and which modify the moral type]
Though every race and every age, since man is by nature a moral
being, must have some type or standard of moral goodness, still the
cast and content of this type is determined by a great variety of
circumstances, such as the stage of intellectual development, the
physical environment, social and political institutions, occupation,
and speculative and religious ideas.[15]
The stage of intellectual development of a given society determines
in general whether the moral standard shall be high or low. Peoples
still on the level of savagery must necessarily have a very simple
moral code, embracing only a few rudimentary virtues. As a people or
race progresses in intelligence and the mental horizon widens, the
moral sense becomes clarified and the moral standard comes to embrace
new and refined virtues, corresponding to the larger and truer mental
life; for, speaking broadly, there is a general coincidence between
intellectual and moral growth. To create a new intellectual life is to
create a new moral life.[16]
Physical environment is also a potent agency in determining the cast of
the moral type. Thus the hot depressing climate and the prodigality of
nature in the tropics foster the passive, quietistic virtues; while the
harsher and more grudging nature of the temperate regions favors the
development of the active, industrial virtues. The strongly contrasted
moral types of the peoples of the tropic regions of the earth and
those of the temperate lands may without reasonable doubt be ascribed,
in part at least, to differences in the climatic and other physical
influences to which these peoples have been subjected through long
periods of time.
More positively influential in the formation of moral ideas and
feelings are social institutions. Thus the place which a whole group of
moral qualities that we designate as domestic virtues are assigned in
the ethical standard is determined by the place which circumstances may
have given the family in the social organism. In ancient Sparta, for
example, where certain influences subordinated the family in an unusual
degree to the state, the family virtues held a very low place, indeed
scarcely any place at all, in the moral ideal; while in China, where
certain notions of the relation of the spirits of the dead members of
the family to its living members created a remarkable solidarity of
the family group, the domestic virtues, and among them preëminently
the virtue of filial piety, came to determine the entire cast of the
general ideal of goodness.
Government is another potent agency in molding the moral type.
Patriarchal monarchy and popular government tend each to nourish a
distinct morality, so that we speak of the ethics of monarchy and the
ethics of democracy. As time passes, governments, speaking broadly,
become constantly more and more ethical in aim and purpose, and hence
act more and more dynamically upon the moral evolution. The greatest
force making for a truer and higher morality in the world to-day is
political democracy.[17]
More effective than any of the agencies thus far mentioned in
determining the moral code of a people is occupation. “Man’s
character,” as the economist Alfred Marshall truly affirms, “has been
molded by his everyday work ... more than by any other influence
unless it be that of his religious ideals.”[18] Every occupation
develops a characteristic group of virtues. This is especially true of
agriculture. “The cultivation of the soil,” says Wedgwood, “cultivates
much besides--it molds ideals, implants aspirations, creates permanent
tendencies. It gives, where it is the predominant industry, to the
character of a people its moral stamp.”[19]
Finally we mention religion as the most potent of all agencies in the
molding of the moral type.[20] Religion has been the great schoolmaster
in the moral education of the race. It is true that religion has to go
to school itself in morals before it can become a schoolmaster. That
is to say, religion in its beginnings is in the main unethical. In its
lower manifestations it is hardly more than a system of incantations
and sorcery. One of the most important facts of the moral history
of the race is the gradual moralization of man’s at first unethical
conception of the gods, and the rise out of the unethical religions of
primitive times of the great ethical world religions.
[Sidenote: In what virtue or moral
goodness consists]
Having defined ethical ideals and noted the agencies determining their
cast and content, we may now seek an answer, in terms of the ethical
ideal, to the question, In what does moral goodness consist? All the
truly great seers and moral teachers of the race have here the same
word for us, and it is this: Do the thing thou seest to be good;
realize thy ideal. In the words of Sabatier, “The essential thing
in the world is not to serve this ideal or that, but with all one’s
soul to serve the ideal which one has chosen.” Such loyalty to one’s
ideal is moral goodness.[21] This imperative of conscience that one be
true and loyal to the best one knows is the only thing absolute and
categorical in the utterance of the moral faculty.
[Sidenote: Every age must be
judged by its own moral standard]
“A man must learn a great deal,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to enable him
to pass a correct judgment on another man’s acts.”[22] And among the
things which he must first learn is this--that the men of every age
have their own standard of excellence and that they can be judged
fairly only by their own code of morals.[23] It is largely because of
the general ignorance of the history of moral ideals that there is
so much uncharitableness in the world, so much intolerance, so much
race prejudice and hatred. As one’s intellectual outlook broadens, as
he becomes acquainted with the various types of goodness of different
peoples and different ages, he becomes more liberal and charitable in
his moral judgments, since he comes to understand that moral character
is determined not by the ideal of conduct but by the way in which this
ideal is lived up to. “There may be as genuine self-devotion,” declares
the moralist Professor Green, “in the act of the barbarian warrior
who gives his life that his tribe may win a piece of land from its
neighbors, as in that of the missionary who dies in carrying the gospel
to the heathen.”[24]
Studying the ideals of races and epochs in the spirit of these words,
we shall make some fruitful discoveries. We shall learn for one thing
that since the beginning of the truly ethical age there has ever been
about the same degree of conscientiousness in the world; that the
different ages, viewed in respect to their moral life, have differed
chiefly in the degree of light they have enjoyed, and consequently in
their conceptions of what is noblest in conduct, of what constitutes
duty, not in their fealty or lack of fealty to their chosen standard
of excellence. That is to say, speaking broadly, the majority of men
in every age and in every land have ever followed loyally the right
as they have been given to see the right.[25] “If men and times were
really understood,” the historian Von Holst truly observes, “the moral
fault of their follies and crimes will almost always appear diminished
by one half.”
CHAPTER II
THE DAWN OF MORALITY: CONSCIENCE IN THE KINSHIP GROUP
I. INSTITUTIONS, IDEAS, AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE DETERMINING THE RULES OF
CONDUCT
[Sidenote: The kinship group]
The most important social product of the human evolution on the lower
levels of civilization was the patriarchal family or clan. This
community of kinsfolk is the great history-making group. It was the
seed plot and nursery not only of almost every social and political
institution of the historic peoples, but of their morality as well.
In the bosom of this group were born and nurtured the chief of those
affections and sentiments into which enters an ethical element and
which form the basis of the moral life.[26]
The fundamental bond uniting this group was the bond of blood. The
members of the group were, or believed themselves to be, the actual
descendants of a common ancestor. It was this tie of blood, this
physical relationship real or assumed, that rendered the clan such a
closely knit body and created its feeling of corporate oneness. “The
members of one kindred,” says W. Robertson Smith in describing this
characteristic of the Semitic clan, “looked on themselves as one living
whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no
member could be touched without all the members suffering.... If one of
the clan has been murdered, they say ‘Our blood has been shed.’”[27]
Compared with this sense of solidarity as it is found among certain
of the negro clans in Africa, the feeling of solidarity of the family
among European peoples “is thin and feeble.”[28]
It was this corporate consciousness of the primitive clan that created
its moral solidarity. It naturally called into existence those
altruistic sentiments that formed the ground out of which grew man’s
earliest feelings of moral obligation.
[Sidenote: The religious
bond--ancestor worship]
There was a second bond uniting the members of the kinship group.
They were united not only by the ties of physical kinship but also
by the bonds of a common cult. This was the worship of ancestors. To
realize the ethical educative value of this worship we must recall
the remarkable constitution of the clan. This group of kinsmen has a
visible and an invisible side. There are the earthly members of the
group and the spirit members--the souls of the dead. These spirit
members are the protectors of the little group, the punishers of
wrongdoing, the conservators of morals. Among the most sacred duties of
the earthly members are the duties they owe to these spirit members;
for these spirits have need of many things, especially of meat and
drink at the grave, and it is the duty of their earthly kinsmen to
supply all these wants. The earth group is thus enveloped in a sort of
sacred atmosphere, and in this atmosphere are nurtured those ethical
sentiments which form the most precious product of history.
As an agency in the moralizing of the life of the race it would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance of ancestor worship. To no other
form of religion, save ethical monotheism, does morality owe so large
a debt. In this cult religion and morality are at one almost at the
outset,[29] whereas in nature cults, or the cults of nature gods, it
is generally only at a late period that these elements are united. It
was this cult of ancestors which formed the basis of an essential part
of the morality of the Greeks and Romans, particularly the latter, at
the first appearance of these peoples in history, and which to-day, as
the chief religion of the Chinese, Japanese, and other peoples of the
Far East, fosters the best virtues of a third of the human race.
[Sidenote: Conceptions of the god
world]
Another influence determining the moral code of primitive man is his
ideas of the god world. It is true that the conceptions formed of the
gods by the untutored mind are for the most part crude and unethical.
But man ever makes and remakes his gods in his own image; therefore
as soon as an ethical element begins to enter into his own life he
begins to moralize the character of his gods. At this stage the god
world begins to react favorably upon the moral life of man. The gods
are now conceived as taking notice of the conduct of men and as
approving certain acts as right and disapproving certain other acts as
wrong. Especially are they believed to punish atrocious crimes, such
as the slaying of a kinsman and the breaking of the word sworn by the
oath-god. In this way primitive man’s ideas of deity react favorably
upon his morality.
The gods further advance morality by being invoked as the witnesses and
guardians of treaties between clans and tribes. By thus giving an added
sanctity to solemn engagements mutually entered into by communities
they widen the moral domain and become the promoters of intertribal
morality.[30]
[Sidenote: The fact that
competition is between communities
and not between individuals]
In nothing perhaps does primitive society differ more widely from
modern than in the fact that the competition or struggle for existence
is between communities and not between individuals. Within the
kinship group life is almost wholly communistic. There is practically
no competition between the individuals of the community such as
characterizes societies advanced in civilization. The only real
competition is that between communities. And here the struggle for
existence or for superiority is generally habitual and ruthless, often
being carried to the point of the complete destruction of one of the
competing communities.
These conditions of existence have vast significance for morality. Just
as the individual competition in cultured societies molds an essential
part of their moral code, so does the group competition of races still
in the clan or tribal stage of civilization determine what qualities of
character shall be developed among them. As we shall see in a moment,
it makes them strong in the clan virtues.
II. ESSENTIAL FACTS OF KINSHIP OR INTRATRIBAL MORALITY
[Sidenote: The life of primitive
peoples largely unmoral]
As students of morals our chief interest in primeval man as he emerges
from the obscurity of prehistoric times is not concerning the degree
of skill he has developed in making his weapons or in constructing
for himself a shelter, nor concerning what advance he has made in the
arts of weaving and pottery, nor yet concerning what kind of social
arrangements he has worked out; our main interest in this primeval man
as he appears on the threshold of the historic day is not concerning
these or any like things, but rather respecting what kind of a
conscience has grown up within him during those long prehistoric ages
of struggle, privation, watch and ward.
The first fact that compels our notice here is that the life of the
savage is largely _un_moral.[31] His activities to secure food,
shelter, and clothing arise from purely animal impulses, such as hunger
and cold. Into all of these activities, however, there enters as time
passes an ethical element.[32] The economic life, in a word, comes
more and more under the dominance of moral feelings and motives.[33]
Conscience becomes more and more involved in all these matters. This
gradual moralization of these at first nonmoral activities of primitive
man constitutes one of the most important phases of the moral evolution
of the race.
[Sidenote: The “goodness” of
uncivilized races largely a
negative goodness]
A second fact in the moral life of savages that claims our attention
is that much that is counted unto them for “goodness” is a purely
negative goodness. Failure in discrimination here often results in a
wrong estimate of their morality as compared with that of advanced
communities. Thus in portraying the manners and customs of primitive
peoples, some writers, like Tacitus in his account of the early German
folk, laud their morals as superior to those of civilized men. This
opinion is based rather on the absence among such peoples of the usual
vices and crimes of civilized societies than on the practice by them
of the higher positive virtues.[34] But the absence of the vices which
characterize civilization is to be explained, of course, by the simpler
organization of society and the fewer temptations to wrongdoing. Thus
the single circumstance that the institution of individual property has
not yet come into existence, or at least has not as yet received any
great extension, accounts for the comparative absence of crimes against
property, which constitute probably the greater number of criminal acts
in civilized society.
[Sidenote: The true starting
point of the historic ethical
development]
But notwithstanding that so much of the life of primitive man is
lived on the nonmoral plane, and that much which is reckoned unto
him for goodness is merely negative goodness, still in certain of
his activities growing out of his clan relationships we discover the
beginnings of all human morality. For as we have already said, the true
starting point of the moral evolution of mankind is to be sought in the
altruistic sentiments nourished in the atmosphere of the kinship group.
There is scarcely an ethical sentiment which does not appear here
at least in a rudimentary form. Out of the most sacred and intimate
relationships of the group we find springing up the maternal virtues
of patience, tenderness, and self-denial,[35] and the filial virtues
of love, obedience, and reverence; out of the fellowship of the men in
hunting and in war[36] we see developing the manly virtues of courage,
fortitude, self-control, and, above all, self-devotion to the common
good; out of the hearth worship of ancestors[37] we observe springing
up many of those religious-ethical feelings and sentiments which form
one of the chief moral forces in civilization; out of the sacrificial
meal shared with the gods and the spirits of the dead through
offerings of portions of the food and drink, we see forming customs
of incalculable moral value in the ethical training of the race.[38]
A great part of the history of morals consists in the record of how
these earliest forms of social virtues, first nourished by the customs,
habits, and practices of the kinship group, have been gradually refined
and developed into wider and richer forms of ethical sentiment and
feeling.
[Sidenote: Custom as the maker of
group morality]
There is one special feature of this germinal morality to which our
attention must now be directed. It is what is often called customary
morality. That is to say, the standard of right and wrong in the
kinship community is custom. Custom is the lawgiver, and morality
consists in following custom. The individual, in a word, follows
the tribal or group conscience rather than the dictates of his own
conscience. Indeed there is practically no such thing here as a private
conscience. Individualism has not yet arisen. No one ordinarily has
private notions of right and wrong which he feels impelled to set up
against the immemorial customs and usages of the community.[39]
But there is really nothing in this fact which sets this nascent
morality apart from our own. It differs from ours not in kind but
only in degree. The morality of the masses is still largely customary
morality. Most persons in their social relations, in business, and
in religion, follow unthinkingly the tribal conscience, that is,
the conventional morality of the society of which they are members,
rather than their own individual sense of right and wrong. “Reflective
morality” is still the morality of the few. The ever-renewed moral task
of man is to change the customary tribal conscience into a reflective
individual conscience.
[Sidenote: Collective
responsibility]
There is still another phase of the incipient morality of the kinship
group which claims our attention because of its significance for the
history of the evolution of morals. It is a group morality, that is, a
morality based on the idea of collective responsibility.
This conception presents one of the most striking phenomena in the
history of the moral evolution of mankind. Among peoples in the earlier
stages of moral development the family or clan group rather than the
individual is regarded as the ethical unit, and the act of any member
of this group, when such act concerns a member or members of another
social group, is looked upon as the act of the whole body to which he
belongs.[40] For the wrongdoing of one all are held responsible.[41]
This group morality, with which the true history of the unfolding
moral consciousness of the race begins, we shall meet with as a sort
of survival in every stage of the moral progress of humanity from
the lowest to the highest level of culture. “It is,” in the words of
Hobhouse, “one of the dominant facts, if not _the_ dominant fact,
ethically considered, in the evolution of human society.”[42] The
account of that slow change in the moral consciousness of man which has
gradually caused group morality, in most spheres of life and thought,
to give place to individual morality, that is, to that conception of
moral responsibility which holds every man responsible for his own act,
and only for his own act, makes up one of the most instructive chapters
in the moral history of the world.[43] We shall find significant
survivals of this idea of collective responsibility, particularly in
the religious domain. In truth, a large part of religious history is
nothing more nor less than an account of the influence and outworkings
of this notion. Men making their gods like unto themselves have
imagined them as acting on this principle of communal responsibility,
and as bringing upon a whole people pestilence, famine, war, or other
calamity in revenge or punishment for some neglect in worship or act of
sacrilege on the part of perhaps a single member of the tribe or nation.
By the early Fathers of the Church this idea of collective
responsibility, embodied in the doctrine of the imputation of the guilt
of the transgression of the first man Adam to all his descendants to
the end of the world, was given a prominent place in Christian theology
and has been a great force in molding the morality of the Western world.
Again, we find this idea of group morality embodied in the war ethics
of the modern nations, which, regarded from one point of view, is
largely group ethics, that is to say, the survival in the domain of
international relations of ethical ideas that had their birth on the
low intellectual and moral levels of barbarism.
As we follow the upward trend of the lines of the moral evolution of
the race we shall hear louder and louder protests against this notion
of communal responsibility, especially when this form of human morality
has been transferred to the heavens and made a fundamental principle of
the divine government.
[Sidenote: The duty of revenge;
the blood feud]
In primitive society if a man slay a kinsman, he is punished by
outlawry, that is, by expulsion from the family or clan.[44] The
story of Cain, the first murderer of a kinsman in Hebrew legend, is
typical.[45] If, however, a member of a clan is slain by an outsider,
it is the duty of the nearest kinsman of the person killed, or of the
collective body of his kinsfolk, to kill in revenge the slayer or some
relative of his.[46] To ignore this obligation or to forgive the slayer
of one’s kinsman is regarded as base and cowardly.
As, through the advance of society, the ties of the clan become relaxed
and this group becomes more and more perfectly merged with the larger
group of the tribe or state of which it has become a part, and justice
comes to be administered by the tribal head or by regular tribunals,
then blood revenge on the part of the kinsmen of the slain gradually
ceases to be a duty and private vengeance becomes a crime. But this is
a slow evolution, and within societies far advanced in civilization
we often find belated groups still following with good conscience the
ancient custom of blood revenge. The vendetta in Italy and the feud in
some sections of our Southern states[47] are survivals or degenerate
forms of this primitive virtue.
[Sidenote: The _Lex talionis_]
Closely related to the punishment of homicide in primitive society is
punishment of lesser offenses, especially the infliction of bodily
injury, within the social group. Here, too, private vengeance rules.
The person wronged or injured inflicts such punishment upon the
offender as passion or resentment may dictate. As time passes, however,
and the sense of justice grows more discriminating, there are limits
set to this private vengeance. There is established what is called
the rule of equivalence. The avenger is not allowed to wreak upon the
offender indiscriminate and unmeasured punishment, but is restricted
to the infliction upon him of exactly such injury and pain as he has
inflicted upon his victim. Hence arose the _Lex talionis_, limb for
limb, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.[48] This regulation thus
registers an advance in moral feeling, and may be regarded as probably
the first rule of the criminal code of the nations.
[Sidenote: The virtue of courage;
its altruistic element]
In early society those virtues are most highly esteemed which are of
service to the clan or tribe. Thus courage comes to hold a first place
among the virtues. What is especially important to be noted here is
that under courage is hidden the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we
give the highest place in our ideal of character. It is this altruistic
element in courage which lends to it its real ethical quality. In
primitive society this virtue finds expression chiefly in the ready
self-devotion of the individual in battle for the common good.
Throughout pagan antiquity this virtue held a central place in
practically every ideal of excellence. In the words of Robertson
Smith, “This devotion to the common weal was, as every one knows, the
mainspring of ancient morality and the source of all the heroic virtues
of which ancient history presents so many illustrious examples.”[49]
III. THE BEGINNINGS OF INTERTRIBAL MORALITY
[Sidenote: Primitive man’s double
standard of morality]
The accounts given by travelers and observers of the morals of savages
often present a perplexing contrariety of opinion. Some writers
represent such people as absolutely without a moral sense, while
others, as has already been remarked, hold them up as models for
imitation by ourselves.
This contrariety in view results in part from an overlooking of the
fact, just pointed out, that the moral goodness of the savage is
largely a negative goodness, but chiefly from a failure to observe
that the shield has two sides, that is to say, that savages have a
double standard of morality--one standard regulating conduct within
the social group, and another regulating conduct toward outsiders.
Thus the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” means to the savage merely
that he shall not kill a kinsman. It has in his mind no application to
strangers, just as in our minds it has no application to animals.
It is the same in regard to lying. Savages in general have a high
regard for truthfulness, as they understand this virtue. The plighted
word among them is probably as sacredly kept as by the average of
civilized men.[50] The repute of many savage folk for untruthfulness
comes about from the fact that they do not think that a stranger has
any right to the truth. “Among themselves,” writes Professor Starr of
certain Congo tribes, “lying is not commended and truth is appreciated;
but to deceive a stranger or a white man is commendable.”[51]
And so it is with stealing. Many uncivilized peoples are charged, and
in a certain sense rightly, with making of theft a virtue. But it must
be borne in mind that to the savage all persons not members of his own
group are strangers and enemies. To steal from such is looked upon as a
most praiseworthy exploit, while to steal from the members of one’s own
group is regarded as a crime.[52]
[Sidenote: This dual morality a
survival in civilization]
Now the important thing to note here is that this double morality is
not something peculiar to the ethics of savages. This dualism runs
through the whole moral history of the race, from the beginning to the
present day, and constitutes one of the most important facts in the
moral evolution of humanity. We too, like the savage, have our double
standard of morality. The chief difference between us and the savage
is this: he puts his double standard in practice all the time, we only
occasionally. On occasion we fling aside our ordinary standard of
morality, lift the savage’s war standard, and then like the savage lie
and steal and kill--outside the tribe. To deceive the stranger now is
commendable; to steal from him proper and right; to kill him a glorious
exploit.
The great task of this century is to put an end to this scandal of
civilization, to teach men the oneness and universality of the moral
law, to get them to understand that right and wrong are right and wrong
everywhere--outside the tribe as well as within.
The history of intertribal or international morality, then, is the
record of its gradual assimilation to intratribal morality.[53] It is a
record of how the stranger, the outsider, has come, or is coming, to be
regarded as a kinsman, as a neighbor.
[Sidenote: Hospitality, or the
guest right; the first step beyond
kinship morality[54]]
The duty of hospitality, to which a high place is assigned in the code
of primitive peoples, shows morality taking a step, the first step,
beyond the narrow circle of the original group of kinsmen. As we have
seen, in the beginning the feeling of duty and obligation is restricted
to the little group of fellow clansmen or tribesmen. Every one outside
this social circle is an enemy, and is without rights. But necessity
forces men to go beyond the limits of their own clan or tribe, and
in time there grows up a rule that the defenseless stranger shall be
kindly received, entertained for a certain period, and then allowed to
depart unharmed. It is easy to see how among clans scattered thinly
over a wide territory, and where the earlier isolation is beginning to
be broken by trade relations, this duty of hospitality should come to
be regarded as a very sacred one, and the person of the stranger guest
as inviolable.[55]
Thus in the development of the guest right we see morality broadening,
the circle of moral obligation enlarged, and the stranger, ordinarily
counted as an enemy and as rightless, brought for a moment within the
sacred pale of ethical sentiment and duty.[56] A new ground of moral
obligation other than that of kinship has been established. Morality
is now something more than clan morality. We witness the rise of
intertribal morality. The first step in the moral unification of the
human race has been taken.
[Sidenote: Beginnings of the
ethics of war]
Even in the domain of war we discover traces of the awakening of an
intertribal conscience in races that are still in what we may regard as
the kinship stage of culture. Speaking broadly, primitive man, whose
chief occupations are hunting and fighting,[57] makes no distinction
between war and the hunt. All persons not belonging to his own group
are regarded by him just as he regards wild game. In his efforts to
kill or capture them, all means are right. Once in his power, he may
do with them as he likes; he may make slaves of them, he may torture
them, or he may eat their flesh as he would that of animals taken in
the chase. Conscience lays upon him not the least restraint. Only
slowly do the moral feelings make conquests in this province.
One of the earliest mitigations of the barbarities of primitive warfare
is probably to be found in the discontinuance of the practice of
eating the bodies of the slain.[58] It is this practice of cannibalism
as a concomitant of war by peoples in the earlier stages of their
development that perhaps more than any other circumstance gives such a
repellent aspect to human life on the lower levels of culture. But as
Montaigne observes, the wrong consists in killing men, not in eating
them after they are dead[59]--a very just observation, and one which
should awaken reflection in us who, while piously abstaining from
eating our enemies, still persist in killing them.
The discontinuance of the practice of cannibalism--the practice seems
invariably to be left behind by all peoples as soon as they have
made any considerable advance in civilization[60]--may with little
hesitation be attributed in part at least to the growth and refinement
of the moral feelings. In one case at least we have historical evidence
that among a wide reach of savage tribes the custom was abolished by
the action of a more civilized people, who did just what the more
advanced European nations, under the impulsion of moral feeling, are
doing in regard to the slave trade and cannibalism in Africa to-day.
The Incas of Peru, before granting to conquered tribes terms of peace,
forced them to abandon the practice of cannibalism.[61]
The disuse of poisoned arrows marks another significant mitigation of a
common barbarity of early warfare. We know that in the Greek world by
the opening of the historic period there were communities that had come
to look on the use of poisoned weapons with abhorrence, and to regard
the practice as a crime that aroused the anger of the gods. Thus Homer
represents Ilus of Ephyra, when asked by Odysseus for the fatal poison
wherewith to smear the tips of his arrows, as refusing his request
because he feared the immortal gods.[62]
In these mitigations and prohibitions of the barbarities of war on
the lower levels of savagery we have probably the earliest articles
of the war code of the nations. They mark the first steps taken in
the humanization of war. They indicate the birth of those sympathetic
and moral feelings which, though of painfully slow growth and of
intermittent action, have during the course of the historic ages
effected great ameliorations of the cruelties of primitive warfare, and
foreshadow a time when war between civilized nations shall have become
an inconceivable thing.
[Sidenote: The reaction of
intertribal upon intratribal
morality]
There is a heart of good in things evil. Even the habitual intertribal
wars of primitive communities contain a germ of good. The pressure
exerted by these life-and-death struggles upon the clan or tribe has
a good effect upon the inner relationships of the group. Many of the
social virtues, such as loyalty to comrades and self-devotion to the
common weal, are called into constant and keen activity. For this
reason we usually find these social virtues well developed among
peoples in the clan or tribal stage of civilization. Such peoples may
even be stronger in these special virtues than civilized peoples.
But there is another side to this. Intertribal wars, though they may
in the very earliest stages of human culture be positively promotive
of some of the social virtues, in later and more advanced stages exert
a decidedly unfavorable influence upon the moral development. The low
backward standard of intertribal ethics, reacting upon the higher and
more advanced intratribal standard, tends to make it like unto itself.
As Spencer expresses it, the life of internal amity is assimilated to
the life of external enmity. “Taken in the mass the evidence shows,”
he says, “as we might expect, that in proportion as intertribal and
international antagonisms are great and constant, the ideas and
feelings belonging to the ethics of enmity predominate; and conflicting
as they do with the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of amity
proper to the internal life of a society, they in greater or less
degree suppress these, or fill with aggressions the conduct of man
to man.”[63] Thus tribes engaged habitually in war are characterized
by the frequency of homicide within the group. Tribes that regard
the robbery of strangers as honorable come to regard stealing within
the tribe as irreproachable.[64] Revengefulness, inhumanity, and
untruthfulness within each tribe characterize warlike communities.[65]
On the other hand, peaceful tribes are characterized by their superior
intratribal morality. Tribes among whom war is infrequent or unknown
are scrupulously honest.[66] Among such people crimes of violence are
rare.[67]
Thus war, a heritage (as a phase of the “struggle for existence”) of
the human from the lower animal world, becomes early in the human stage
of the cosmic evolution a drag upon the moral progress of the race.[68]
CHAPTER III
THE MORAL LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT: AN IDEAL OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
I. CIRCUMSTANCES AND IDEAS WHICH MOLDED AND MOTIVED MORALITY
[Sidenote: A homogeneous
population and a comparatively
static civilization]
Egypt was the China of the ancient Mediterranean world. Like the
Chinese, the Egyptians were a comparatively unmixed people. During the
historic period no new elements of importance were incorporated with
the native population. Again, like the civilization of China, that
of Egypt throughout a great part of the historic age was singularly
static. After having made wonderful advance in early times the
Egyptians ceased to make further noteworthy progress.
Both these fundamental facts of Egyptian history had great significance
for Egyptian morals; for since when races mingle their blood they
mingle also their moralities, it is a matter of supreme importance
to the moral life of a people whether on the one hand it has, as the
centuries have passed, undergone a change in physical type through
the incorporation of new racial elements, or on the other hand has
preserved unchanged its racial type and physical characteristics.
Equally important for the moral ideal is it whether the civilization
of which it forms one element is progressive or unprogressive; for
changes in the moral standard are largely dependent on changes in the
other elements of civilization. Where the intellectual life and the
religious ideas remain unmodified, and where all political, social,
and industrial institutions remain essentially unchanged, we need not
look for fundamental changes in ethical ideas and convictions. How
the history of conscience in ancient Egypt illustrates these truths we
shall see a little further on.
[Sidenote: The teaching that
immortality is conditioned on
righteousness]
We have seen how potent an influence the notion of a life beyond the
tomb exercised upon the conduct of the members of the primitive kinship
group, giving birth to some of the noblest virtues of their simple code
of morals. Now this idea of continued existence after death dominated
the life of no other civilized people of antiquity so completely as it
dominated the life of the Egyptians; and probably in the case of no
other people ancient or modern has the belief exerted so profound an
influence upon conduct. This was so for the reason that the conception
was here early moralized and represented the blessed life in the
hereafter as dependent upon rightdoing in the present life. No soul
that had done evil was admitted to the bark of the ferryman at the
Egyptian Styx. In this discrimination we find “the earliest traces in
the history of man of an ethical test at the close of life.”[69]
[Sidenote: The ethical qualities
of the sun-god Ra]
It is the sun-god Ra who in the remotest times is most intimately
associated with these moral requirements for participation in the
felicities of the celestial hereafter. The latest reading and analysis
of the texts of the Pyramid Age has thrown new light upon the relations
of the rival divinities Ra and Osiris to the development of the moral
consciousness in ancient Egypt. In his latest work Professor Breasted
says: “The later rapid growth of ethical teaching in the Osiris
faith and the assumption of the rôle of judge by Osiris is not yet
discernible in the Pyramid Age, and the development which made these
elements so prominent in the Middle Kingdom took place in the obscure
period after the development of the Pyramid Age. Contrary to the
conclusions generally accepted at present, it was the sun-god ... who
was the earliest champion of moral worthiness and the great judge in
the hereafter.”[70]
The conception of Ra as the righteous judge, as the father and
protector of the reigning Pharaoh, and as the guardian divinity of
the Egyptian state, influenced profoundly the moral development in
prefeudal Egypt, and was seemingly the inspiration of the great social
reform movement which marked the history of the Eleventh and Twelfth
Dynasties. In the words of Professor Breasted, “The moral obligations
emerging in the Solar theology thus wrought the earliest social
regeneration and won the earliest battle for social justice of which we
know anything in history.”[71]
[Sidenote: Religious dualism]
In our introductory chapter we spoke of the influence of physical
environment upon the moral life of a people. The history of the
formation of the ethical type of ancient Egypt affords an excellent
illustration of this; for it was probably out of the striking physical
dualism of the Egyptian lands--the antagonism between the life-giving
Nile and the ever-encroaching desert--that grew Egyptian religious
dualism, embodied in the myth of the struggle between Osiris and
Set.[72] At first the tale was a pure nature myth reflecting simply the
conflict between two physical elements; but as the moral consciousness
of the people who recited the story deepened, there was gradually read
into it an ethical meaning. The conflict was now conceived as a mighty
struggle between the powers of good and evil, between the beneficent
Osiris (and his son and avenger, Horus) and the malignant Set.[73]
This world philosophy reacted powerfully upon Egyptian morality,
keeping as it did in the foreground of the moral consciousness the
truth that the moral life is a battle against evil. “The triumph of
right over wrong ... is the burden of nine tenths of the Egyptian texts
which have come down to us.”[74]
[Sidenote: The Osirian myth in its
special development]
Acted upon by the moral feelings, the Osirian myth underwent a special
development. It came to represent not simply the eternal opposition
between good and evil, but the whole moral order of the present and
the future world. It told of the beneficent life of Osiris as king of
Egypt, his death and resurrection, and of his office as king and judge
in the realms of the dead.
After having been given this rich moral content, the myth reacted
powerfully upon the moral consciousness and became a chief agency in
the formation of the moral character of the Egyptian race. Osiris, as
reflected in the Osirian myth, became the incarnation of the ethical
ideal. It is a great advantage to morality when the ideal of goodness
is thus embodied in a divine exemplar. Osiris held some such relation
to the moral life of ancient Egypt as Christ holds to the moral life of
the Christian world.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: A homogeneous and
unchanging conscience]
By the dawn of history there had been developed in ancient Egypt
an enlightened and discriminating conscience.[75] There are two
aspects of this conscience which we need to note. First, it was a
comparatively homogeneous conscience; that is, the morality of the
ancient Egyptians was not a mixture of moralities like that of the
modern European nations whose morality is a blend of the moralities
of different races--Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Teutonic; of different
religions--pagan and Christian; and of different civilizations--Greek,
Latin, Celtic, and German.
Second, it was a comparatively unchanging conscience. The moral
consciousness which we find in pre-Christian Roman Egypt is
fundamentally the same as that which emerged in the Pyramid Age more
than three thousand years before. During this long period the Egyptian
conscience, although it gained in depth and sensitiveness as the
millenniums passed, underwent less change in its essential qualities
than the moral consciousness underwent in less than ten centuries in
all the other great nations, save China, of the ancient world.
[Sidenote: Evidences of moral
progress during early times]
But though the moral development, like the development of all other
phases of Egyptian civilization, was early checked and thereafter made
but slow progress, the essential refinement and clarification of the
moral sense during prehistoric times, or in the obscure period of the
earliest dynasties, is shown by various testimonies, as, for instance,
in the moralization of the Osirian myth, to which we have already
referred, in the abandonment of the practice of human sacrifices at
the tomb, and in the transition, concerning the conception of the life
after death, from the continuance to the retribution theory.
[Sidenote: Substitution of
ka-statues for human sacrifices]
The early Egyptians, after the manner of savages, killed and buried
with the dead master a number of his slaves, that their souls
might attend him in the spirit land. But after a time the growing
humanitarian and ethical feelings of the Egyptians forbade human
sacrifices, and then merely the portrait-statues of the slaves were
placed in the tomb.[76] These, it was thought,--in consonance with the
belief which led to the substitution of pictures or of clay and wood
models for the real articles at first buried with the dead,--would take
the place of the actual bodies of the servants.
But as time passed, the deepening moral feelings of the Egyptians would
not permit them to do even this thing. It did not now seem right to
them that because a man was a slave in the earthly Egypt he should be
a slave forever in the Osirian fields.[77] So they ceased to place in
the tomb of the master these portrait-statues of his servants, and in
their stead put in statuettes of nobody in particular. The doubles of
these, it was conceived, would appear as newly created souls in the
underworld, and, being indebted for life itself to the master of the
tomb, would, it was naïvely assumed, gratefully labor for him through
all eternity.[78]
The history of the ka-statues, as these substitutes are called, thus
bears testimony similar to that of the Osirian myth as to the upward
trend of ethical thought and humanitarian feeling in prehistoric
Egypt.[79]
[Sidenote: Transition from the
continuance to the retribution
theory]
Still further evidence of the advance on moral lines in early Egypt is
afforded by the character of the belief held by the Egyptians at the
beginning of the second millennium B.C. and perhaps earlier respecting
the fate of souls in the world beyond the tomb. To understand this we
need to cast our glance a little aside and observe how the world of
shades, in its social and ethical classifications, has ever been a
register of the changing moral feelings of men. As Oscar Peschel finely
says, “The other world has ever answered to this as spectrum to the
source of light.”
Edward B. Tylor happily names the two chief theories which have
been held in regard to the state of souls in the hereafter as the
continuance and the retribution theory. The first theory is that of
primitive man while his moral sense is yet undeveloped. According to
this theory the same fate is allotted to all who go down to death.
There is no such thing as rewards and punishments. This is the
conception of the after-life which is held by all races on the lower
levels of culture, and it is a view which often lingers on as a
survival among peoples far advanced in civilization. But as the moral
judgment becomes more discriminating, then this view of the other
world is very certain to undergo a change. The quickened sense of
justice demands that the allotments after death shall be in accordance
with merit and demerit. This ethical feeling gradually transforms
the topography of the underworld and organizes the as yet undivided
community of shades. The hitherto common abode of the dead is usually
divided into two distinct compartments or regions, heaven and hell,
and souls are separated, according to their deeds on earth, into two
classes, the good and the bad, those to be welcomed to the abode of
the blessed and these consigned to the place of torment. Sometimes,
however, the lot conceived for the wicked is simply annihilation.
The incoming of this theory of rewards and punishments after death
constitutes a great landmark in the moral evolution of mankind. In the
words of Tylor, this transition from the continuance to the retribution
theory “for deep import to human life has scarcely its rival in the
history of religion.”[80] The sanctions of morality are doubled.
Now in ancient Egypt by the beginning of the second millennium B.C. the
transition from the continuance to the retribution theory had already
been effected, as will appear in the following account of the Egyptian
Judgment of the Dead. Thus here, as in the change of practices at the
tomb, we have indisputable evidence of the progress of moral ideas in
early Egypt.
[Sidenote: The Judgment of the
Dead]
The Judgment of the Dead was the trial which every soul had to undergo
before Osiris and his forty-two assessors in the great tribunal hall of
the underworld. The astonishing thing about this tribunal, as we have
just intimated, is that at a time when the oldest monuments raised in
Egypt were yet recent this whole conception of the moral order in all
its details was already fully matured.[81] Osiris had been raised to
the judgment seat in the other world, and the moral standard in some
departments of life, particularly in the relations of man to man in the
everyday social and business spheres, was as high and true as is the
standard in many of the civilized nations of to-day. This admirable
code of social morals points unmistakably to long periods of organized
society and moral training in prefeudal Egypt.
[Sidenote: The Negative Confession]
This early standard of goodness is embodied in the so-called Negative
Confession, in which the soul before the Osirian tribunal pleaded his
innocence of the forty-two sins condemned by the Egyptian code of
morality. This confession, previous to the discovery of the Babylonian
code of Hammurabi, constituted the oldest known code of morality of the
ancient world. These are some of the declarations of the soul: “I did
not steal”; “I did not get any man treacherously killed”; “I did not
utter any lie”;[82] “I did not make any one weep”; “I did not kill any
sacred animals”; “I did not damage any cultivated land”; “I was angry
only when there was reason [for being angry]”; “I did not turn a deaf
ear to the words of truth”; “I did not commit any act of rebellion”;
“I did not do any witchcraft”; “I did not blaspheme a god”; “I did not
make the slave to be misused by his master”; “I was not imperious”; “I
did not strip the mummies of their stuff.”[83]
After this confession to the forty-two assessors in the hall of
judgment, the soul made the following affirmative declaration, which
makes a singularly close approach to Christian morality: “I gave bread
to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, a bark to
the one who was without one [that is, a boat to the detained traveler],
offerings to the gods, and funeral conservations to the shades.”[84]
After this confession and declaration the heart of the man was placed
in one scale of a balance and the image of Truth in the other. If
the heart was not found wanting, but weighed just equal to the
image, Osiris pronounced the soul justified, and it was welcomed to
the company of the blessed. The punishment meted out to the soul
found lacking seems to have been of a negative nature--a denial of
immortality.[85]
[Sidenote: Comparison of the
morality of the Negative
Confession with that of the Hebrew
Decalogue and other codes]
It is instructive to compare this ancient code, both in its contents
and in its omissions, with the moral codes of other peoples and other
ages. The similarity of the morality of the Negative Confession to that
of the Hebrew Decalogue forces itself at once upon the attention.[86]
The Egyptian code, however, lays less emphasis than the Hebrew upon
religious duties. In the forty-two duties named only seven are duties
toward the gods, while of the Ten Commandments five concern religious
duties. As we have already observed, the duties of the Egyptian code
are those due from man to man; that is, they are social as opposed to
religious duties.
In striking contrast to the Confucian code of the Chinese, the
Egyptian code gives very little place to the duties of children to
their parents. These duties are noticed, it is true, by the Egyptian
moralists, but no emphasis is laid upon them. They are mentioned only
once in the Negative Confession before Osiris. As the stress laid
by Chinese moralists upon filial piety came about largely through
the supposed need of the spirits of the dead for regular offerings
at the grave, so it may be that the neglect of this virtue by the
Egyptian teachers is to be explained, as Flinders Petrie suggests,
by the circumstance that “the provision of offerings in semblance by
the Egyptians in the tomb left little place for the urgency of filial
duties in maintaining continual supplies for the deceased.”[87]
Another defect of Egyptian morality is its lack of depth and
seriousness. There is no hungering and thirsting after righteousness,
no passionate yearning for holiness. There is no call to lofty
self-sacrifice. It is a calm, prudent, worldly-wise, practical
morality. Its spirit and temper are well set forth by Petrie when, in
speaking of its virtues and vices, he says that “these belong far more
to the tone of Chesterfield and Gibbon than to that of Kingsley and
Carlyle.”[88]
But in spite of the limitations and defects of the code, it was one
of the purest and loftiest framed by the moral consciousness of the
races of antiquity. The Negative Confession shows that Egypt had early
learned the lesson that blessedness in the hereafter is conditioned on
the practice of justice, truth, and righteousness in the present life
on earth.[89]
[Sidenote: The moral precepts of
Ptah-hotep; an ethical conception
of kinship]
After the Negative Confession the most valuable memorial of the
character of the Egyptian conscience is found in the precepts of the
moralist Ptah-hotep,[90] who lived probably in the time of the Twelfth
Dynasty. This moralist laid particular emphasis upon the duties of
rulers and of the rich and great. His maxims are intended as a sort
of “Manual of the Perfect Official.” “If, having been of no account,
thou hast become great, and if, having been poor, thou hast become
rich, and if thou hast become governor of the city, be not hard-hearted
on account of thy advancement, because thou hast become merely the
guardian of the things which God has provided.”[91] In like words
emphasis is laid upon the duties of gentleness and considerateness on
the part of the administrator and the judge. In truth the doctrine
of trusteeship of wealth and of office has never been more zealously
taught than in these precepts of the early Egyptian moralist.[92]
The teachings of Ptah-hotep respecting the duties of rulers would seem
to have made effective appeal to the heart and conscience of even
the holders of the royal office. In any event we find these lofty
conceptions of the duties of kingship incarnated in the lives and
deeds of several of the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom. The view held by
these monarchs respecting the nature of the royal office was almost
exactly like that entertained by the so-called benevolent despots of
the eighteenth century of our era. The inscriptions on the royal
tomb boast not alone of exploits and triumphs in war, but the prince
vaunts himself for having put no ward in mourning, for having made
no distinction between the great and the humble, for having been the
protector of the widow and the asylum of the orphan, and for having
laid no unjust taxes.[93]
[Sidenote: Slavery approved by the
Egyptian conscience]
The Egyptian conscience, like the conscience of the ancient world in
general, did not condemn the institution of slavery. The relation of
master and slave was looked upon by the Egyptians as perfectly natural
and legitimate.
The slave class, which included both whites and blacks, was recruited
not only from the prisoners of war brought back by the Pharaohs from
their numerous foreign conquests, but also from captives secured on
regular man-hunting expeditions into the negro regions of the Upper
Nile.
The treatment of the slave was usually mild, and the development of
the moral feelings had already in early times placed him under the
protection of the gods. Thus in the judgment hall of Osiris the soul
repudiates the sin of oppression by affirming, “I did not cause the
slave to be misused by his master.”[94]
Respecting the moral side, in general, of the slave system of
antiquity, which we encounter now for the first time here among the
Egyptians, the following observation may be made. If we except the
Hebrews, we shall not find among the peoples of the ancient world
whose ethical standards we shall pass in review any fundamental change
throughout their history in the common conscience regarding the
rightfulness of slavery. Indeed any radical and permanent change in
the moral feelings of men on this subject was hardly possible till
after the incoming of Christianity with its teachings of a common
Father-God and the brotherhood of man.
[Sidenote: The ethics of war]
One of the most striking phenomena of the moral evolution of mankind is
the unequal rate of movement on different lines. Thus while morality
has made great progress in some departments of life, in the domain of
war it has remained comparatively stationary from the dawn of history
down almost to the present day. The war code of the modern nations,
notwithstanding improvements and ameliorations to which our attention
will be drawn later in our study, is still in large part an unchanged
heritage from the ages of primitive savagery.
Bearing this in mind, it will not be a matter of surprise to us that
the laws of war of the Egyptians showed little advance the practices of
the negro savages of Africa; indeed it seems probable that this part of
the moral code of Egypt was actually of African origin.[95] There is
not a word in Egyptian literature in reprobation of war.[96]
While in their relations to their own people the Pharaohs observed a
comparatively enlightened code of ethics, being in general humane,
considerate, and clement, still in their treatment of the vanquished
they seem to have been wholly insensible to all humanitarian feelings.
Like the Assyrian kings they “immortalized their cruelty in their art.”
Numerous scenes upon the monuments celebrate the Pharaoh’s inhumanity;
not one celebrates his compassion or mercy. He is constantly
represented in the act of slaying in heaps with his own hands his bound
and suppliant captives.[97]
[Sidenote: Influence of the moral
ideal upon Egyptian life and
history]
Taken altogether, the moral standard of ancient Egypt, as disclosed in
the foregoing brief account of what the Egyptian conscience condemned
and what it approved, was not a high one, but it was, in so far as
it concerned the everyday life of the people, wholly practical, and
probably was as well lived up to by the masses as our higher ideal of
character is lived up to by ourselves. We have a right to infer this
from the persistence of Egyptian institutions through two thirds of
the historic millenniums; for no nation or society can long endure
where the relations of man to man and of subject to ruler are not in
substantial agreement with the real convictions of the age as to what
constitutes essential justice and righteousness.
The moral standard of the Egyptians has been compared to that of the
Romans after it had felt the influence of Stoicism and Christianity.
Like the Roman ideal of excellence at its best, the Egyptian ideal
tended to develop a strong and manly type of character, particularly
in the ruling class. We think it not an illusion which causes us to
see the influence of the ideal in the face of Rameses the Great. This
face bears the stamp of strength, resolution, indomitable energy. We
may believe that it was the moral ideal which had something to do in
creating such a type of character as we see here, just as it was the
primitive Roman ideal which helped to create that admirable type of
character which lives in the legends of early Rome.
Further, the moral ideal tended to ameliorate the autocratic government
of the Pharaohs by holding constantly before the ruler the example of
the righteous and beneficent king-gods Ra and Osiris. The influence of
the ideal in this relation may be likened to the influence of the moral
ideal of Christianity upon the government of the later Cæsars.
Again, the practical moral ideal of Egypt, laying its emphasis upon the
fundamental social virtues, helped to establish and maintain relations
of justice and equity between man and man, and thus contributed to the
general well-being of Egyptian society and to the stability of Egyptian
institutions.
Nor was the influence of the moral ideal of Egypt confined to the
Egyptian land. For, as Amélineau truly says, the wonderful edifice of
morality is the collective work of all peoples and all ages.[98] In the
uprearing of this edifice Egypt played a great rôle. Her contributions
to the morality of the first nations were as helpful, we may believe,
as were those she made to the other domains--material, artistic, and
intellectual--of the civilization of the early world.
Later she made a rich bequest to European morality, a bequest only less
important perhaps than that made by Judea. Her ideas of the future
life, her meditations on death and the final judgment, reënforced the
teachings of Christianity and thus contributed to create that deep
conviction of a life hereafter and a coming retribution which for
eighteen hundred years and more has furnished sanction and stimulus
to the moral life of Christendom.[99] It is not without significance
that Christian monasticism, with all its otherworldliness, had its
beginnings in Egypt. “The first Christian monk [Pachomius] had been a
pagan monk of Serapis.”[100]
CHAPTER IV
THE BABYLONIAN-ASSYRIAN CONSCIENCE
[Sidenote: The importance of
Babylonian-Assyrian morality for
the history of comparative morals]
The information which the cuneiform texts have yielded concerning the
moral life of the Babylonian and Assyrian peoples, though scanty, is
of the greatest value to the student of comparative morals, not only
because it casts light upon a moral development in some important
respects like the moral evolution of the kindred Semitic people of
Israel, but also because that later evolution was probably deeply
influenced by it. Therefore, though nothing like a connected account of
the moral evolution in the Euphratean lands can be attempted till the
thousands of cuneiform tablets recovered from the ancient libraries of
the Babylonian-Assyrian cities have been deciphered, and the ethical
character and value of their contents determined, we shall devote a
few pages to the portrayal of such manifestations of conscience as are
disclosed in the religious, literary, historical, and law tablets whose
contents are already known to us.
[Sidenote: The general
nonethical character of the
Babylonian-Assyrian religion]
Religion filled a large place in the life of the ancient Babylonians
and Assyrians, especially in that of the former; but religion with
them had at first little or nothing to do with morality. Like the
religion of savage and barbarian folk, it lacked wholly or almost
wholly the ethical spirit. Throughout the early period it was in the
main simply a system of incantations and magical rites. Scarcely any
moral element entered into the system until the later centuries of
Babylonian-Assyrian history.
This religion was in truth simply a survival from primitive savage
times when religion was merely a belief in the existence of evil
spirits, and in their disposition and power to do harm to men.[101] In
this stage of the religious evolution sickness, death, misadventure
of every kind are believed to be caused by some malignant demon or by
some offended and revengeful god. The evil spirits are supposed to
act from pure malignancy, while the great gods are conceived to be
angered especially by the nonobservance of some religious rite, by the
violation of some taboo forbidding the use of certain kinds of food, or
by some other like act.
To ward off the attacks of the evil demons, or to appease the offended
gods, recourse was had to the recital of magical formulas and
incantations. This was Shamanism in its lowest and crudest form, in
which there was at work as a motive on the part of the suppliant only
cringing fear or a desire to get rid of some present pain, without the
least trace of moral emotions, such as remorse and repentance.
[Sidenote: Ethical tendencies in
the religion]
But as time passed, this earlier nonethical religion, as is evidenced
by the texts recovered from the long-buried temple libraries,[102]
became in a measure moralized. A moral character was given to the great
gods, and they became the inspirers and guardians of a true morality.
This ethicalizing process was the same in character as that which
went on in the religion of the ancient Hebrews, gradually moralizing
the primitive conceptions and cult of Yahweh until among that people
religion and morality became wholly at one. The ethical development,
however, never went as far as this in Babylonia and Assyria, but the
movement was such as to lift these peoples far above the low moral
plane of primitive society. “In the seventh century before Christ,
if not earlier, the Babylonians and Assyrians possessed a system of
morality which in many respects resembled that of the descendants of
Abraham.”[103]
[Sidenote: Evidence afforded by
the penitential psalms of the
growth in moral feeling]
The ethical movement found its truest expression in the so-called
penitential hymns,[104] which are in spirit altogether like the
penitential psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures.[105] They exhibit the same
intense yearning of the penitent soul for reconciliation and union with
a god conceived as just and holy and piteous.
In one hymn is found the new moral conception that disease is the work
of a good spirit. This is a very lofty ethical idea, and approaches
the Hebrew conception of afflictions as the visitation in disguise of
love. But this idea seems never to have become a permanent part of the
Babylonian moral consciousness.
In these psalms and prayers we have evidence that at times the
worshipers of Marduk and Ashur attained to almost as lofty a conception
of deity as that reached by the teachers and prophets of Israel. The
great gods were conceived as the creators, the sustainers of man; as
loving, compassionate, merciful, and forgiving. The religious-moral
ideal was here verging toward the highest that man has ever been able
to form, and could this standard have been steadily upheld and the
lower abandoned, then Babylonia and Assyria like Judea might have made
precious contributions to the moral life of humanity. But this was not
done. The tablets holding magical formulas and incantations, wholly
devoid of all ethical character, outnumber a thousand to one those
exhaling the spiritual perfume of genuine moral feeling and aspiration.
[Sidenote: Ethical significance of
the conception of the after life]
Respecting the lot of the dead, the Babylonians held views like those
of the early Hebrews. This was the continuance as opposed to the
retribution theory.[106] Arallu, “the land of no return,” was a vast
underground region where were gathered all, without distinction, who
went down to the grave. It was a sad, dolorous life that the drowsing
shades lived in this dark underworld, where the bats flitted in
the twilight and the dust gathered on the lintels of the doors. An
undiscriminating fate allotted the same destiny to all. In so far as
the moral consciousness of the Babylonians demanded that a distinction
be made between the good and the bad, this demand was met by the
assumption--which was also that of the Hebrews so long as they held the
Babylonian view of the life after death--that the evil man is punished
in this life, and the good man rewarded here on earth with numerous
flocks, reputation, many children, and long life.
For four thousand years the masses in Babylonia seem to have remained
satisfied with this view of the moral government of the world. In the
later periods of Babylonian history, however, we find in the literature
traces of a protest against this nonethical conception of life in
the afterworld--a protest which shows that, in the case of the more
spiritually minded at least, the moral consciousness was deepening and
the ethical judgment becoming clearer and truer.
[Sidenote: The ethical spirit of
the laws; the code of Hammurabi]
Since the law code of a people embraces all those duties the
performance of which the state or public authority attempts to
enforce, the ethical spirit of an age or people finds one of its
truest embodiments in its laws. It is this fact which renders of such
extraordinary interest to the student of the history of morals the
recent discovery of the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi,[107]
the oldest known code of public and private morality. This law system
exhibits in some departments of life an enlightened and advanced
morality, yet one with serious limitations and defects, a morality
in many respects like that of the Mosaic code of the kindred Semitic
nation of Israel.
The code informs us that the Babylonian feeling as to what is right
and wrong, just and unjust, in the ordinary business relations of life
was much like the average conscience of to-day. In some matters the
Babylonian law held ground morally in advance of that held by modern
codes, as, for instance, in providing that in case of misfortune
the debtor should have both his rent and the interest on his debt
remitted.[108]
But in its provisions touching the family relations the code reveals
ethical conceptions very different from our own. As in other Oriental
law systems, ancient and modern, polygamy was regarded as a moral
institution. A man in debt could bind his wife and children out to
service or sell them as slaves, but not for a longer period than three
years.
The punishments meted out to offenders were harsh and cruel, yet not
much more atrociously cruel than those provided by the English laws of
three hundred years ago. Impaling, burning, cutting out the tongue,
gouging out the eyes, cutting off the fingers, breaking the bones of
the hands were common penalties.
Sometimes the punishment was measured by the primitive principle of
the _Lex talionis_; it was eye for eye, bone for bone, tooth for
tooth.[109] This law of retaliation was carried out so rigorously as
to result in the punishment of the innocent for the guilty. Thus if a
man caused the death of another man’s daughter, the law required that
his own daughter should be put to death.[110] If a builder, through
the faulty construction of a house, caused the death of the son of the
owner through the falling of the house, the son of the builder was
to be put to death.[111] It is in these provisions of the code that
we find the greatest divergence between the Babylonian feeling and
our own as to what is right and just. Yet this Babylonian conscience
which sanctioned the visiting of the iniquity of the father upon the
children is a conscience which we shall meet with in societies much
more advanced than that for which the Hammurabi code was formulated.
The Babylonian conscience in regard to slavery as embodied in the
code was about like our own conscience respecting negro slavery of a
generation or two ago. The slave was viewed as a mere chattel, and the
master possessed over him the power of life and death. Kind treatment,
however, was enjoined by the law. There was a fugitive-slave law which
reads curiously like our negro-slave laws of two generations ago, in
which the aiding and harboring of a fugitive slave is made a crime
punishable with death.[112]
The slave class was recruited, as in other lands of the ancient world,
from prisoners of war, foundlings, debtors, criminals, and through the
sale by fathers and husbands of their children and wives. The system
seems to have undergone no essential changes or ameliorations, such
as we shall see effected in the Hebrew system, by growth in ethical
feeling during the four thousand years of Babylonian history. It is
true that enfranchisement of slaves was not uncommon, the freed man
becoming the dependent of his old master, but it does not appear that
moral sentiment afforded the motive for manumission.[113]
[Sidenote: International morality;
war ethics]
The international ethics of the Babylonians and Assyrians was in every
essential respect the international ethics of their age in the Semitic
world. It was the character of the religion of these peoples which
determined in large measure international relations in the Mesopotamian
lands throughout the period of Semitic ascendancy. “The conception
of religion as an alliance between God and man against other peoples
and their gods never ceased in Mesopotamia.”[114] This conception was
essentially the same as that held by the Hebrews down to the time of
the great prophets. “Let us go up against them, for our god is greater
than their god,” is the war cry of four thousand years of history of
the Semitic world.
The Assyrians far surpassed the Babylonians in their ferocious cruelty
in the treatment of war captives. Notwithstanding their advanced
morality in some departments of life, in this domain they stood, if
we except the practice of cannibalism, on practically the same level
as savages. Witness the following inscription of Assur-natsir-pal,
in which he tells of his treatment of certain prisoners of war: “The
nobles, as many as had revolted, I flayed; with their skins I covered
the pyramid. Some [of these] I immured in the midst of the pyramid;
others above the pyramid I impaled on stakes.... Three thousand of
their captives I burned with fire. I left not one alive among them to
become a hostage.... I cut off the hands [and] feet of some; I cut
off the noses, the ears [and] the fingers of others; the eyes of the
numerous soldiers I put out. In the middle [of them] I suspended their
heads on vine stems in the neighborhood of their city. Their young men
[and] their maidens I burned as a holocaust.”[115]
The significant thing here is not so much the fact that these things
were done, as the fact that the king exults in having done them and
thinks to immortalize himself by portraying them upon imperishable
stone. The careful way in which to-day all reference to atrocities of
this character, when in the fury of battle they are inflicted upon a
savage enemy, are suppressed by those responsible for them, and the
indignant condemnation of them by the public opinion of the civilized
world, measures the moral progress humanity has made even along those
lines on which progress has been so painfully slow and halting.[116]
CHAPTER V
CHINESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF FILIAL PIETY
I. IDEAS, INSTITUTIONS, AND HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES DETERMINING THE
CAST OF THE MORAL IDEAL
[Sidenote: Introductory]
With the exception of the teachers of the ancient Hebrews, the leaders
of thought of no people have so insistently interpreted life and
history in terms of ethics as have the sages of the Chinese race. And,
excepting the Hebrew teachers, no moralists have so emphasized duties
while leaving rights--upon which the Western world in modern times has
laid such stress--to take care of themselves.[117]
It cannot fail to enhance our interest in a study of the ideal
upheld by these teachers of morality, if we recall that this ideal
of character has for upwards of three thousand years exercised an
incalculable influence upon the moral life of probably a fourth of the
human race and is the cement of a social structure that has outlasted
all others of the ancient world.
The cast of this moral ideal affords a good illustration of the
way in which the moral type of a people is molded by religious and
philosophical ideas, social institutions, race experiences, and
physical environment. Following our usual method of exposition we shall
begin our examination of Chinese morality by first casting a glance
at some of the agencies which have been especially influential in the
creation of the ethical standard.
[Sidenote: Confucianism: the state
worship of Heaven and the popular
worship of ancestors]
There are two religious elements in Confucianism which have special
significance for Chinese morality. These are, first, the state worship
of Heaven and of the lesser gods of the sky and earth; and second, the
popular cult of ancestral spirits.
The worship of Heaven, the supreme deity, is a state function; that
is, it is a matter which is left entirely to the Emperor and the
magistrates. Consequently those duties to God, that is, to a being
looked upon as Creator and Father,--duties of reverence, love, and
worship, which fill so large a place in the moral ideals of Judaism and
Christianity,--find scarcely any place among the duties enjoined upon
the multitude by Confucianism.[118]
The worship of ancestors is the essential and popular element of
Confucianism. Commenting on the ethical value of this cult, Dr.
Martin affirms that “in respect to moral efficiency, it would appear
to be only second to that of faith in the presence of an all-seeing
Deity.”[119] The constant and reverent dwelling upon the virtues of
their ancestors has exalted the virtue of filial piety among the
Chinese to the highest place in their ideal of character and has helped
to make respect for what is old, for what has been handed down from
ancestral ages, a highly prized virtue and a distinguishing trait of
the race character.
In an indirect way also ancestor worship has exerted a great influence
upon the moral life of the Chinese people, for this worship is
necessarily a family cult and must be cared for by the head of the
family. This has prevented the growth of a priestly caste in Confucian
China. The absence of a powerful national priesthood has been a great
boon to Chinese morality. The place thus left vacant has been filled
by the _literati_, or learned class,[120] whose influence upon the
ethical life of the people has, without question, been more beneficent
than that of a priestly class would have been.[121]
[Sidenote: Demonism: evil spirits
the ministers of retributive
justice]
Besides peopling the invisible world with beneficent ancestral spirits,
the Chinese have filled heaven and earth with innumerable demons or
evil spirits. Even the souls of dead men, if they have been wronged on
earth or if their wants since death have been undutifully neglected,
may become malignant, revengeful spirits. These demons are believed to
be the cause of all kinds of diseases, of blight and famine, and of
every misfortune befalling men.[122]
The thing about this Chinese demonism which is of interest to the
student of morals is that, unlike the demonism of Babylonia (p. 46),
or that of the Middle Ages in Europe, it contains a distinct ethical
element. There was little or nothing ethical in the Babylonian or the
medieval belief in the existence of evil spirits because the good
man and the bad were indifferently the victims of their malignant
activity. But the Chinese have moralized their demonism and conceive
these spirits as under the control of Heaven and without power to
do harm without Heaven’s commission or consent. They thus represent
retributive justice and become the ministers of the Supreme Power to
punish evildoers, like Nemesis and the Erinyes of the Greeks. It is
this ethical side of the Chinese belief in evil spirits which causes De
Groot, in emphasizing the import of this demonism for Chinese morality,
to say that “it occupies the rank of moral educator of the people, and
has fulfilled a great mission to many thousands of millions who have
lived and died on Asiatic soil. Demonism, the lowest form of religion,
in China a source of ethics and moral education--this certainly may be
called a singular phenomenon, perhaps the only one of its kind to be
found on this terrestrial globe.” [123]
[Sidenote: Taoism: nature the
exemplar]
Next to Confucianism and demonism, Taoism has been the most important
moral force in the life of the Chinese people. Taoism was originally a
lofty philosophical ethical system out of which was developed later a
religion.[124] The philosophy, however, has always remained something
quite distinct from the religious system.
The essence of Taoism is the pantheistic doctrine that the universe,
or nature, is God. The ethical character of the universe is revealed
in its way or method, which is _Tao_. Now the characteristics of
nature as disclosed in its method of operation are constancy--“heaven
never diverges from its course”; unselfishness--“the earth nourishes
all things”; impartiality--“the earth brings forth its fruits for all
alike”; placidity--“heaven is calm, serene, passionless”; humility--the
sun which “after shining sets,” the moon which “after fullness, wanes,”
the warmth of summer which “when it has finished its work retires,”
water which “seeks the lowest place,” all these are symbols of
“nature’s humility.”[125]
What gives these interpretations of the ethical qualities of nature
their importance for human morality is that man’s highest duty is to
imitate the universe, to behave as nature behaves.[126] “Taoism is the
exhibition of a way or method of living which men should cultivate as
the brightest and purest development of their nature.”[127] “The true
Taoist then is the man who unites in himself [the] virtues or qualities
of the universe, including the constant virtues.”[128] Man’s way must
be nature’s way (Tao). The perfect man must cultivate constancy,
unselfishness, impartiality, benevolence, impassibility, serenity,
humility, and quietness, for these are the characteristics of the
universe.[129]
This Taoist code is designed especially for rulers.[130] He who has
assimilated all his virtues to the virtues of nature is qualified
to administer government.[131] It is in the qualities of character
cultivated by the highest-minded ministers and mandarins, and in the
state worship and official customs that we are to look for the main
ethical influence of the doctrines of Taoism.[132]
[Sidenote: The conception of human
nature as good]
“The tendency of man’s nature to good,” says Mencius, “is like the
tendency of water to flow downwards.”[133] Just as the theological
dogma that man’s nature is hereditarily corrupt, with a proneness to
evil, has shaped and colored a large part of Christian ethics, so has
this opposing conception of human nature as good exercised a tremendous
influence upon the ethical ideal of the Chinese race.[134] For if
man’s nature is good, then for him to live conformably to his nature
is to live rationally, that is, morally. “To nourish one’s nature,”
declared Mencius, “is the way to secure heaven.”[135]
Objections to this view of human nature, based on the fact that men are
actually very different in moral character, are met by saying that this
difference is the effect of environment, just as the inequalities in
the yield of barley seed are due not to a difference in the nature of
the grain but to the different qualities of the soil.[136] In a word,
it is the social environment--instruction and example--which determines
the character of men. “By nature,” says Confucius, “men are nearly
alike; by practice they get to be far apart.”[137]
As we shall see, it makes a vast difference in a man’s conception as to
what he ought to do,--as to how he should regulate his life,--whether
he believes his nature to be inclined to virtue and all his instincts,
impulses, and appetites to be good, or believes his nature to be
corrupt and all his instincts and appetencies to be evil.
[Sidenote: Conception of the past
as perfect]
Another conception that has had a molding influence upon the moral
ideal of China is the conception of the past as perfect without any
historic lapse from this perfection. To understand the import of
this in the ethical history of China we must compare it with the
theological conception of the fall of man. This conception determined
what should be the saving virtues of the historic ethical ideal of the
Western world, making them to be theological in character and having to
do with man’s restoration from an hereditary fallen state.
Now the Chinese, instead of believing in the lapse of man from a
state of original innocence, conceive the past as perfect. This
interpretation of history has had the effect of making reverence for
the past, for the customs, institutions, and teachings of the fathers,
a chief virtue of the moral ideal.[138] The far-reaching consequences
for Chinese life and history which the emphasis laid upon this virtue
has had will be the subject of remark a little further on.
[Sidenote: Geographical and
intellectual isolation]
Again, the moral development of the Chinese people has been profoundly
influenced by the geographical isolation of China. From the earliest
times down almost to the present day China was shut out from
intercourse with the civilized and progressive nations of the West,
and was surrounded by neighbors greatly her inferior in intellectual,
social, and moral culture. The effect of this isolation upon the
Chinese was to foster in them an exaggerated self-esteem and a feeling
of contempt for foreigners. In this respect the masses are still
ethically in that stage of development that the Greeks were in when
they looked contemptuously upon all non-Greeks as “barbarians.”
In still another way has the physical and intellectual isolation of
the Chinese people reacted upon their ethical life. This isolation
has prevented progress beyond a certain stage, and where there is no
progress or very slow progress there is likely to grow up an undue
attachment to ways and customs that are old. This is what has happened
in China, and this has worked together with the worship of ancestors
to create one of the main requirements of the ideal of character,
namely, reverence for the past.
[Sidenote: The appearance of great
men: Confucius and Mencius]
Besides the various agencies already passed under review, the teachings
of two great moralists, Confucius and Mencius, have been a vital force
in the shaping of the moral ideal of China. The greater of these sages
was Confucius (551–478 B.C.) He was unimaginative and practical.
He was not an original thinker. His mission was not to found a new
religion or hold up a new ideal of character, but to give new force
and effectiveness to the already existing moral code of his time and
people.[139] His teachings were especially effective in giving filial
piety the fixed place it holds in the moral ideal of his countrymen.
The influence of Mencius (371–288 B.C.), whose teachings are
characterized by an emphatic denunciation of the wickedness of war, is
to be traced particularly in the low place which is assigned in the
Chinese standard of character to the martial virtues, and the general
disesteem in which the military life is held.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The four cardinal
virtues]
Chiefly under the molding influence of the agencies noticed in the
preceding sections, there was shaped in early times in China one of
the most remarkable moral ideals of history, an ideal which has been a
guiding and controlling force in the moral life of probably more of the
human race than any other of the ethical ideals of mankind.
The duties given the highest place in this standard of character are
filial obedience, reverence for superiors, a conforming to ancient
custom, and the maintenance of the just medium. The man who is
carefully observant of these duties is looked upon in China as a man
of superior excellence. In the following pages we shall speak with some
detail of each of these requirements of the ethical ideal.
[Sidenote: Filial obedience or
piety]
In an analysis of the symbols used in the Chinese system of writing
Dr. Legge points out the significant fact that one of the oldest of
these characters, the one standing for filial piety, was originally the
picture of a youth upholding on his shoulders an old man.[140] In this
worn-down symbol is embodied the fundamental fact in the moral life
of the Chinese people. It tells us that the first of family virtues,
filial piety, the virtue that formed the basis of the strength and
greatness of early Rome, constituted also the firm foundation upon
which the enduring fabric of Chinese society was raised. The whole
framework of the social structure is modeled on the family, and all
relations and duties are assimilated, in so far as possible, to those
of the domestic circle.
In no other of the moral ideals of history do we find a more prominent
place given the duties of children toward their parents. It was
ancestor worship, doubtless, as we have already said, which gave these
duties this foremost place in the moral code, and which through all
the millenniums of Chinese history has maintained for them the highest
place in the Chinese standard of moral excellence.[141] The Classic of
Filial Piety declares: “The services of love and reverence to parents
when alive, and those of grief and sorrow to them when dead--these
completely discharge the fundamental duty of living men.”[142] “The
Master said: ‘There are three thousand offenses against which the five
punishments are directed, and there is not one of them greater than
being unfilial.’”[143]
The punishments which the Chinese laws enjoin for unfilial conduct
bear witness to the high estimation in which the Chinese moralists and
rulers hold the virtue of filial obedience and reverence. Thus a parent
may, with the consent of the maternal uncle, require a magistrate to
whip to death an unfilial son.[144] A parricide is beheaded, his body
cut in pieces, his house torn down, his neighbors are punished, his
chief teacher is put to death, and the magistrates of the district in
which he lived are degraded or deposed.[145]
[Sidenote: Reverence toward
superiors]
Filial piety is regarded by Chinese moralists as the root out of
which grow all other virtues. Immediately out of this root springs
the duty of obedience and reverence toward all superiors. This is the
corner stone of the Chinese system of political ethics. “In the family
life,” in the words of Jernigan, “may be seen the larger life of the
empire.”[146]
[Sidenote: A conforming to ancient
custom]
We have here the third of the cardinal duties, the duty which in
practice constitutes the heart and core of Chinese morality.[147]
The commandment is, Follow the ancients; walk in the trodden paths;
let to-day be like yesterday. This duty, as we have already noticed,
springs from the Chinese conception of the past as perfect. If that
past be perfect, then of course it becomes the duty of living men
to make the present like unto it, and in no case to depart from the
customs and practices of the fathers.
We can easily make the Chinese view in this matter intelligible to
ourselves by recalling how we have been wont to regard the religious
past of that Hebrew world of which we are the heirs. Sanctity in our
minds has attached to it all, and we regard any departure from the
teachings and commandments of that past to be a fault, even a species
of wickedness deserving eternal punishment.
Now in China this idea of sanctity, which among ourselves attaches
only to the religious side of life, has attached to all phases of
life, to government, to society, to art, to science, to trade and
commerce--to all of the ideas, ways, and customs of antiquity. As their
fathers did, so must the children do. They must deem worthy what their
fathers deemed worthy and love what their fathers loved.[148] He who
departs from the beliefs and practices of the ancients is regarded as
irreverent and immoral, just as he who with us departs from the beliefs
and customs of the fathers in religion is looked upon as presumptuous
and irreligious.
[Sidenote: The maintenance of the
just medium]
The virtue with which we here have to do is akin to the Greek virtue of
moderation. It consists in never going to extremes, in avoiding excess
in everything, in being always well balanced, standing in the middle,
and leaning not to either side; “to go beyond is as wrong as to fall
short.”[149] One of the sacred books of the Chinese, called _Chung
Yung_, which is ascribed to a grandson of Confucius, and in which is
portrayed an ideally perfect character, The Princely Man, celebrates
this virtue of the just medium.[150] This portraiture of the perfect
man, held up as a pattern for imitation to the successive generations
of Chinese youth, has been a molding force in the moral life of the
Chinese race.[151]
[Sidenote: The duty of
intellectual self-culture]
Having now spoken of the four cardinal virtues of the Chinese standard
of excellence, we shall next proceed to speak more briefly of several
other virtues, which, though not given the most prominent place in
the ideal, are nevertheless assigned a high place among the virtues
exemplified by the perfect man.
First among these we note that of intellectual self-culture. Concerning
this virtue and duty the Chinese sages have thoughts like those of the
Greek teachers. Confucius taught that true morality is practically
dependent upon learning. “It is not easy,” he says, “to find a man who
has learned for three years without coming to be good.”[152] Here we
have, as in the teachings of the Greek philosophers, knowledge made
almost identical with goodness. Intellectual culture and good morals
run together. Again the Master, speaking of the ancients, says: “Their
knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere; their thoughts
being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.”[153] “How would it
be possible,” asks Lao-tsze, “to go forward in one’s knowledge and go
backward in one’s morals?”[154]
This commendation of learning by the sages, as we shall see further on,
gave a great impulse to the educational system of China.
[Sidenote: The duties of rulers]
The teachings of Chinese moralists are especially marked by the
emphasis laid upon the duties of rulers. In the times of Confucius
there was lack of union between the different provinces, and China was
in a state bordering on political anarchy. A chief aim of the teachings
of the Master was to correct this condition of things by laying stress
upon the duties of those in authority. Never have the duties of rulers
been more insistently inculcated.
In the first place Confucius set a high aim for the state, an aim
altogether like that set by Plato for the ideal Greek city. He makes
the end of government to be virtue and not wealth. Its aim should be
to promote goodness and not merely material prosperity: “In a state,
pecuniary gain is not to be considered to be prosperity, but prosperity
will be found in righteousness.”[155]
The indispensable qualification in the ruler is goodness. “The love
of what is good,” declares Mencius, “is more than a sufficient
qualification for the government of the empire.”[156] The ruler should
be a father to his people, kind and benevolent, should instruct them,
should follow the laws of the ancient kings, should be a model for his
subjects, should leave a good example to future ages.
Much is said by the Master respecting the influence of the example
set by the ruler: “When the ruler as a father, a son, a brother, is
a model, then the people imitate him.”[157] The relation between
superior and inferior is like that between the wind and the grass:
“The grass must bend when the wind blows across it.”[158] “Never has
there been a case of the sovereign loving benevolence and the people
not loving righteousness.”[159] “If good men were to govern a country
in succession for a hundred years, they would be able to transform the
violently bad and dispense with capital punishment.”[160]
But there has never been such a succession of good rulers in China.
Respecting the influences and circumstances which have brought about
a great discrepancy between the ideal and practice we shall have
something to say in the last division of this chapter.
[Sidenote: Disesteem of the heroic
or martial virtues]
The Chinese ideal of goodness and nobility allows no place among its
virtues to the qualities of the warrior, which have in general been
given such a prominent place in the moral ideals of almost all other
peoples throughout all periods of history. Soldiers hold a very low
place in the social scale; they are looked upon as a “pariah class,”
and their life is regarded as degrading. The Emperor of China, “alone
among the great secular rulers of the world, never wears a sword.”[161]
This spirit of opposition to militarism is embodied in the teachings
of the great moralist Mencius. “The warlike Western world has scarcely
known a more vigorous and sweeping protest against warfare and
everything connected with it and every principle upon which it is
based.”[162] To gain territory by the slaughter of men Mencius declared
to be contrary to the principles of benevolence and righteousness.[163]
He speaks as follows of the military profession: “There are men who
say, I am skillful at marshaling troops. I am skillful in conducting
a battle. They are great criminals.”[164] In _Spring and Autumn_,
a chronicle of early Chinese history, he declares, “There are no
righteous wars,” though he admits that one might be better than
another.[165]
Confucius also, though he did not lay the stress upon the inherent
wickedness of war that was placed upon it by Mencius, maintained that
the same rules of morality apply in the relations of nations as in
those of individuals, and taught that differences between nations
should be settled by arbitration and by considerations of equity and
justice, not by brute force.
[Sidenote: Principles and inner
disposition]
It is often affirmed that the teachings of Chinese moralists are
defective in that they consist in moral precepts rather than in moral
principles, that they lay stress upon the observance of minute rules
of conduct rather than upon the inner disposition. There is, however,
in the body of ethical teachings of the sages no lack of insistence
upon principles of conduct and upon states and dispositions of mind and
heart. All must be right within the heart, says Confucius, for “what
truly is within will be manifested without.”[166] “Let the prince be
benevolent,” says Mencius, “and all his acts will be benevolent; let
the prince be righteous and all his acts will be righteous.”[167] Have
no depraved thoughts, sums up the contents of the three hundred pieces
in the Book of Poetry. “In the ceremony of mourning,” says Confucius
again, “it is better that there be deep sorrow than a minute attention
to observances.”[168]
And it is the same teaching as to what constitutes true morality
which we find in such sayings as these: “The doctrine of our Master
is to be true to the principles of our nature.”[169] “Man is born for
uprightness,”[170] and he should love virtue as he loves beauty,[171]
for its own sake.
In reciprocity Confucius found that same comprehensive rule of conduct
which is rightly regarded as one of the noblest principles of Christian
morality. Being asked if there was one word which may serve as a rule
of practice for all one’s life, the Master said: “Is not reciprocity
such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to
others.”[172]
And surely nothing could be farther from mere preceptorial teaching
than these words of Mencius: “Let a man not do what his own sense of
righteousness tells him not to do;... To act thus is all he has to
do.”[173] And in the following utterances the sages of China speak with
an accent strangely like that of the Great Prophet of Israel: “The
great man is he who does not lose his child heart.”[174] Again, “I like
life; I also like righteousness. If I cannot keep the two together, I
will let life go and choose righteousness.”[175] Still again: “With
coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a
pillow--I have still joy in the midst of these things.”[176]
In the following Mencius shows that he understood the moral use of
dark things: “When Heaven is about to confer a great office on any
man, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and
bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger and subjects him
to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these
methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies
his incompetencies.”[177] And again: “Life springs from sorrow and
calamity, and death from ease and pleasure.”[178] “Men who are
possessed of intelligent virtue and prudence in affairs will generally
be found to have been in sickness and trouble.”[179]
[Sidenote: Defects of the ideal:
no duties to God, and the duties
of parents to children not
emphasized]
Regarded from our point of view the Confucian ideal of moral character
has serious limitations and defects. First, it omits practically all
duties to God. In the words of Dr. Legge, “man’s duty to God is left to
take care of itself.” God or Heaven was a subject of which Confucius
seldom spoke, and the Chinese have in this matter followed the example
of the Master. Heaven is not in all their thoughts.
If we recall what an influence the conception of a supreme being as
Creator and Father has exerted upon the morality of all the races that
have accepted as their creed the ethical monotheism of the Hebrew
teachers, we shall realize how fundamentally the Chinese ideal of
excellence has been modified by the omission of all those duties which
have entered into our own moral code as duties owed to God.[180]
Second, while laying such stress upon the duties of children to their
parents, Confucianism is almost silent regarding the duty of parents
to their children. At this point there is a wide divergence between
the Christian and the Chinese conception of duty. Commenting upon
this matter, Dr. Legge says: “I never quoted in a circle of Chinese
friends the words of Paul in Corinthians--‘The children ought not to
lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children’--without
their encountering a storm of opposition. When I tried to show that the
sentiment was favorable to the progress of society, and would enable
each generation to start from a higher standpoint, I found it difficult
to obtain a hearing.”[181]
The effects of the family ethics of Confucianism upon the moral
practice of the Chinese in the domestic sphere will be noted in the
following division of this chapter.
III. EFFECTS OF THE IDEAL UPON CHINESE LIFE AND HISTORY
[Sidenote: Degree of accordance
between theory and practice;
mandarin morality]
No people have ever lived up to their ideal of moral excellence. The
Chinese like others have obviously fallen far short of embodying in
actual practice the high standard of their sages. But it is certainly
a gross misjudgment of Chinese morality to say, as some writers on
things Chinese have said, that the ideal and the standard maintained
are wholly disconnected.[182] This depreciatory opinion, however,
admits of little dispute if its application be confined to the mandarin
class. In public or official morality there is a deplorable divergence
between theory and practice. Probably the Chinese official class, in
spite of the stress which is laid by moralists upon the duties of
magistrates and rulers, is the most corrupt in the world. Peculation
in office is universal. Bribery is as rife as it was in Rome under the
later Republic. Justice is almost universally bought and sold. This
very general lack of integrity in office is attributable in part at
least to the inadequate salaries. This inevitably calls into existence
a system of fees and presents, which as inevitably grows into a system
of extortion, oppression, and corruption. But, as a well-informed
writer affirms, “Whatever laxity Chinese morality may permit in
official relations, from the workingman, the tradesman, and the servant
it exacts most scrupulous honesty.”[183] The average man in China, it
may be confidently affirmed, is as moral--defining morality as loyalty
to an ideal--as the average man in any other country of the world.
[Sidenote: Favorable effects of
the ideal]
But this general loyalty to the ideal, since this has serious defects,
has brought it about that the ideal has been an efficient force for
evil as well as for good. In some respects it has promoted a true
morality, while in others it has marred and cramped the moral life of
the Chinese people.
Prominent among the favorable effects of the ideal is its exaltation
of the family life. Through the emphasis laid upon special domestic
virtues, particularly that of filial piety, the ideal has given the
family such a place in the fabric of Chinese society as has probably
been given it in no other society ancient or modern, except in that
of early Rome. As the family is the connecting link between the
generations, and consequently as a true family life must characterize
every society that shall live long on the earth, we may without
reserve accept that interpretation of Chinese history which finds in
the exaltation of filial virtue by the sages of China one secret of
that longevity of the Chinese nation which makes it the sole survivor
among the nations from the ancient world of culture.
Like the maxim of filial piety, the Confucian teaching which makes
virtue and not material prosperity the aim and end of government has
been a conservative force in Chinese life and society. “It would be
hard to overestimate,” says Dr. Martin, “the influence which has been
exerted by this little schedule of political ethics [the Great Study],
occupying, as it has, so prominent a place in the Chinese mind for
four and twenty centuries, teaching the people to regard the Empire as
a vast family, and the Emperor to rule by moral influence, making the
goal of his ambition not the wealth but the virtue of his subjects.
It is certain that the doctrines which it embodies have been largely
efficient in rendering China what she is, the most ancient and the most
populous of existing nations.”[184]
In still another way has the moral ideal reacted favorably upon
Chinese civilization. We have noted the high place in the standard of
excellence assigned by the Chinese sages to the duty of intellectual
self-culture. It is scarcely to be doubted that this emphasis laid upon
learning as an important factor in the formation of moral character has
greatly fostered learning and has been a chief agency in the creation
of the Chinese educational system with its competitive literary
examinations, which from the earliest times down almost to the present
day formed the sole gateway to public office.
[Sidenote: Unfavorable effects of
the ideal]
But Confucius, while inculcating the duty of seeking wisdom, taught his
people to look for it in the past. He enjoined them to seek the moral
ideal in the life and deeds of the ancients.
Never in the moral history of the world has the inculcation of a
specific duty had a profounder influence upon the destinies of a
people than this requirement of conformity to the ways of the fathers
has had upon the destinies of the Chinese race. It has been one of
the chief causes of the unchanging, stereotyped character of Chinese
civilization. In obedience to the requirements of this ideal of
goodness the Chinese for two millenniums and more have made to-day like
yesterday. Hence the cycling, goalless movement of Chinese history.
Just as the undue emphasis laid by the Chinese moralists upon the duty
of conforming to the ways of the ancients has reacted in some respects
unfavorably upon Chinese life, so has the exaggerated stress laid by
them upon the doctrine of the just medium exerted a similar unfavorable
influence. This has tended to produce a dull uniformity in Chinese life
and thought. The lack of lofty ideal aims has caused Chinese history to
be singularly barren in chivalric and heroic elements. The everlasting
round of routine makes life a treadmill. It is “the prose of existence.”
Again, the Confucian system tends to produce a formal morality. While
it is not true, as we have seen, that Confucianism neglects to deal
with general principles, right feelings, and motives of action, still
it is true that instead of relying upon these there is an immense
multitude of precepts and minute rules covering the smallest details
of conduct. There are three thousand rules of deportment. This has
resulted, and naturally, in the substitution of the letter for the
spirit. Even the Master has come to serve as a pattern rather in the
outer form of his life than in its informing spirit.[185]
Never was there a better illustration of how the letter killeth;
for a reliance on exact rules and instructions as to conduct in
all conceivable relations and situations has made much of Chinese
morality a formal and lifeless thing. The Chinese are governed by a
sense of propriety rather than by a sense of duty. Their morality is
largely etiquette.[186] It has justly been likened to the morality of
the ancient Romans in that it makes manners and morals to be almost
interchangeable terms. Especially have the hundreds of rules prescribed
for the expression of reverence for superiors tended to empty this
part of Chinese morality of reality and sincerity, and to make Chinese
official ceremonialism one of the most curious phases of Chinese life.
It would seem, further, that the very great emphasis laid by the
Chinese moralists upon the duties of children toward their parents has
prevented the normal development among the Chinese of that ethical
sentiment which among ourselves assigns the duties of parents to infant
children an important place in the code of domestic morality. This lack
among the Chinese of any deep feeling of parental obligation results in
a widespread practice condemned by the conscience of Christian nations.
The exposure or destruction of infants prevails in almost every
province of the Republic. It is the girl babies that are the victims of
this practice.[187] They are often drowned or buried alive.
In this practice the subsistence motive of course is active. It is in
general the extreme poverty of the people which causes them thus to
destroy their offspring. But what renders this practice significant
for the student of morality is the fact that these things are done with
little or no scruple of conscience,[188] showing that acts respecting
which the conscience of Christian nations has become very sensitive
have not yet among the Chinese been brought generally within the circle
covered by the moral feelings.
[Sidenote: Impending changes in
the moral ideal]
We have seen how the moral ideal of a people is modified by all the
changing circumstances of their life and history. The moral ideal
of the Chinese has undergone little modification for upward of two
millenniums, such, for instance, as the ideal of the European peoples
has undergone in a like period, because throughout this long term
the influences acting upon the national life have been practically
unchanged. There have been in Chinese history no such interminglings of
races, revivals in learning, religious reformations, and political and
industrial revolutions as mark the history of the Western nations, and
responding to which the moral evolution of these peoples has gone on
apace.
But now that the long-continued isolation of China has been broken,
and she is being subjected to all the potent influences of the
civilization of the West, it is certain that her social and mental life
will be remolded and cast in new forms. Sooner or later constitutional
government must supersede, has already superseded, the patriarchal
government of the past; the whole social fabric must necessarily be
reconstructed and the individual instead of the family or clan be made
the social and ethical unit;[189] the science of the Western nations
will displace, is already displacing, the obsolete learning of the
Four Classics; Christianity will quicken the atrophied religious
consciousness of the race; and in place of the isolation of the
past there will be established those international relations and
intellectual exchanges which perhaps more than all other agencies
combined have been the motive force of European civilization and
progress.
This new environment, these new influences molding afresh Chinese
social, intellectual, and religious life and institutions, cannot fail
to react powerfully upon the moral ideal of the nation. It too must
inevitably undergo a great change. There will be a shifting in the
standard of character of the different virtues, for the moral ideal
of a simple patriarchal community cannot serve as the model for a
complex modern society, and doubtless some of those virtues--as, for
instance, reverence for the past--which now hold the highest rank in
the code will exchange places with others at present held in little
esteem. Changes in the feelings and beliefs of the people in regard to
ancestor worship, which changes are inevitable, will effect important
modifications in family ethics. The substitution of Western science for
the lore of the classics will introduce evolutionary ethics and the
philosophical virtues of the Western world; while the substitution of
popular government for the patriarchal autocracy will necessarily bring
in the ethics of democracy.
These certain changes in the form and content of the ancestral ideal of
goodness will not only assimilate it to the ethical standard of the
Western world, but, correcting some of its obvious shortcomings, will
render it a still more effective force in the guidance and control of
the moral life of a great and ancient people, whose day apparently is
still in the future.[190]
CHAPTER VI
JAPANESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF LOYALTY
I. FORMATIVE AND MODIFYING INFLUENCES
[Sidenote: Introductory: a
practically independent evolution
in morals]
In their moral evolution the Japanese people have developed a system
of morals which, notwithstanding certain defects and limitations, is
one of the noblest created by any of the great races. A study of this
system is especially interesting and instructive for the reason that it
shows how a very admirable moral ideal may be created by a people in
comparative isolation and under influences wholly different from those
which have shaped and molded our own ideal of moral goodness. This
compels a recognition of the fact that the historian of morals can no
longer overlook or ignore the moral phenomena of the Far East.
A second reason that a study of the Japanese code of morals is
important and interesting is because this ideal of worthiness and duty
has been indubitably a main factor in lifting the Japanese nation to
the high place it holds to-day among the great nations of the earth.
In our examination of this system of morality we must first note the
nature of the agencies which lent to the moral ideal its characteristic
cast. Among the various forces molding and modifying the ethical type
we shall find the most important to have been the family and clan
system, ancestor worship, the monarchy of supposed divine origin,
feudalism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Western civilization.
[Sidenote: The family and clan
system]
As in China, so in Old Japan the family rather than the individual
was the social unit. Through the expansion of the family arose the
clan, which in the sentiments and feelings which governed its members
was simply a large patriarchal household. This organization of early
Japanese society, with the family and its outgrowth, the clan, forming
the basis of the fabric, was, as we shall learn, a potent force in the
creation of the moral type of the nation. The relationships of the
kinship group determined the duties and virtues of its members and
constituted the chief sphere of their moral activity. Here was the
nursery of Japanese morality.
[Sidenote: Shinto, or ancestor
worship]
The influence of religion has mingled with that of the family
sentiment. Throughout all the past the vital religious element in the
life of the Japanese peoples has been the Shinto cult, and this is now
the established religion of the state. The system in its essence is
ancestor and hero worship, the spirits of the dead being revered as
guardian divinities. This cult has created moral feelings and family
duties like those called into existence by the same cult in China.
Out of these rudimentary family virtues, as from a central root, have
sprung many of those virtues of wider relationships which have helped
to give to the Japanese type of moral excellence its essential features.
[Sidenote: The monarchy of divine
origin]
The central teaching of Shinto is that the Emperor is of divine descent
and that his person is sacred and inviolate.[191] This doctrine of the
divine nature of the monarchy[192] has exerted a profound influence
upon the moral ideal of Japan and has had consequences of great moment.
It has made unquestioning obedience and absolute loyalty to the Emperor
the religious duties and preëminent virtues of the subject.
[Sidenote: Feudalism]
In times preceding the twelfth century there grew up in Japan a feudal
system which in many respects was remarkably like the feudal system of
medieval Europe. The unit of the system was the clan, the members of
which, forming a close brotherhood, were bound to their lord by ties of
affection and fidelity like those which in Europe theoretically bound
the retainer to his lord.[193] This system exerted a great influence
upon the moral type. It developed a martial ideal of character known
as Bushido, many of the virtues of which are almost identical with
corresponding virtues in the European ideal of chivalry. Probably this
system has had more to do with creating in Japan a moral consciousness
in many respects like our own than has any other single agency. To the
lack in the Chinese social system of any institution like Japanese
feudalism may be ascribed in part at least the wide difference which
exists between the moral ideals of the two peoples, especially in
regard to the rank assigned the military virtues.
[Sidenote: Confucianism]
Along with the Chinese classics Confucianism was introduced into Japan
about the middle of the sixth century of our era, and being in perfect
accord with the native system of Shinto and with the Japanese ways of
thinking, this cult of ancestors tended to reënforce native ethical
tendencies and thus contributed essentially to make the virtues of
filial obedience and reverence for superiors prominent in the growing
type of character.
[Sidenote: Buddhism]
Buddhism was introduced into Japan in the sixth century of our era. Its
incoming had deep import for the moral life of the Japanese people.
It inculcated the gentler virtues, exerting here in this respect, as
elsewhere in the Far East,--save in China, where it too quickly became
shockingly degenerate,--an influence like that exerted by Christianity
in the Western world. It helped to make gentleness, courtesy, and
tenderness distinctive traits of the Japanese character. Through the
regard which it instilled for dumb animals it placed the whole lower
world of animal life under the protection of the moral sentiment.[194]
[Sidenote: Western civilization]
A little more than a generation ago the civilization of Japan came into
vital contact with the civilization of the West. Almost every element
of the old Japanese culture has felt the modifying effect of this
contact. The political, the economic, the social, the domestic, and the
religious institutions have undergone or are undergoing great changes.
These changes in these departments of life and thought have caused, as
such changes always do, important modifications in ethical sentiments
and convictions. Of all the influences which for more than two thousand
years have been at work shaping and molding the moral ideal of the
Japanese nation, those now entering from the Occidental world will
doubtless leave the deepest impress upon the ethical type.
In a still more direct way is this contact of Japan with Western
civilization resulting in important consequences for Japanese morality.
Christian ethics, like Buddhist ethics, is making a strong appeal to
certain classes of Japanese society. The result is what in an earlier
chapter was designated as a “mingling of moralities” and the creation
of a new composite conscience.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: Bushido]
The heart of Japanese morality is to be sought in Bushido,[195] the
ethics of the samurai. We shall best understand this moral code by
thinking of it as the Japanese ideal of chivalry or, perhaps better,
as a blending of the Western chivalric, Spartan, and Stoic ideals of
goodness and nobility, since in the list of virtues making up the
Bushido ideal we find several of the cardinal virtues entering into
each of these three distinct types of character.
As we have already intimated, Bushido is an ideal of excellence
which grew up out of the root of Japanese feudalism, just as the
Western ideal of chivalry developed out of European feudalism. It was
essentially an ideal of knighthood, the prime virtue of which was
personal loyalty to one’s superior. Fealty to one’s chief was made
so dominant a virtue that it overshadowed all other virtues. In the
defense or in the service of his lord a samurai might commit, without
offense to his sense of moral right, practically any crime, such as
blackmailing, lying, treachery, or even murder.
Grouped about this cardinal virtue of loyalty were the other knightly
virtues of courage, fidelity to the plighted word, liberality,
self-sacrifice, gratitude, courtesy, and benevolence. Liberality, or
free-handedness, was carried to such an extreme as to become a defect
of character. The true samurai must have no thought of economy and
money-making. “Ignorance of the value of different coins was a token of
good breeding.”[196] To handle money was thought degrading.
In one respect the code of honor of the Japanese knight was wholly
unlike that of the Western knight. It did not include any special duty
to woman. “Neither God nor the ladies inspired any enthusiasm in the
samurai’s breast.”
The Spartan element in the samurai code appears particularly in the
training of the youth. The boy was taught always to act from motives
of duty. He was denied every comfort. His clothing and his diet were
coarse. He was allowed no fire in the winter. “If his feet were numbed
by frost, he would be told to run about in the snow to make them
warm.” To accustom him to the sight of blood, he was taken to see the
execution of criminals; and to banish foolish fear from his mind, he
was forced to visit alone at night the place of execution.[197]
The Stoic element in the ideal appears in the high place assigned to
the virtue of self-control. The samurai, like the Stoic, must suppress
all signs of his emotions. Like the Stoic, too, he must have courage
to live or courage to die, as enjoined by duty. And his code of honor
taught him what true courage is: “It is true courage to live when it is
right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.”[198]
This samurai ideal of character constitutes, as we shall see, a molding
force in the moral life of Japan. Bushido, it is true, died with the
passing of feudalism,[199] but the spirit of Bushido lived on. The
samurai’s sense of honor and of duty became the inheritance of the
Japanese people. This great bequest of honor and valor and of all
samurai virtues is, in the words of the author of the _Soul of Japan_,
but “a trust to the nation, and the summons of the present is to guard
this heritage, nor to bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons
of the future will be so to widen its scope as to apply it in all walks
and relations of life.”[200]
[Sidenote: The virtue of loyalty
to the Emperor, or patriotism]
The belief in the divine origin of the imperial house of Japan makes
loyalty to the Emperor the supreme duty.[201] During the ascendancy
of feudalism this duty, in so far as the samurai class was concerned,
was, it is true, overshadowed by the duty of loyalty to one’s immediate
feudal superior. The sentiment due the Emperor was intercepted by the
daimyos. But in theory loyalty to the imperial house has ever been
the paramount virtue of the Japanese. The Emperor’s command is to his
subjects as the command of God to us, and obedience must be perfect and
unquestioning. So dominant is the place assigned this virtue of loyalty
to the head of the nation that the Japanese moralist seems almost to
make morality consist in this single virtue, as if “to fear the Emperor
and to keep his commandments” were the full duty of man.[202]
This sentiment of the people toward the imperial family renders the
government a sort of theocracy. Hence patriotism with the Japanese
is in large measure a religious feeling. Indeed, patriotism has been
called the religion of the Japanese. It is this virtue, exalted to a
degree which the world has never seen surpassed, which has contributed
more than any other quality of the Japanese character to make Japan a
great nation and to give her the victory over a powerful foe in one of
the most gigantic wars of modern times.
[Sidenote: Family ethics]
If the first duty of the Japanese is to his Emperor, his second is to
his parents. In Japanese phrase, the two virtues of loyalty and filial
piety are “the two wheels of the chariot of Japanese ethics.”[203]
Shinto and Confucianism, as we have seen, have both contributed to
the fostering in children of the moral sentiments of grateful love,
reverence, and obedience toward parents and all ancestors living and
dead. The Japanese regard the high place assigned to these filial
duties in the standard of character as a mark of the vast superiority
of their morality to ours.[204] The sentiments of filial affection and
reverence, coloring as they do the whole moral life, lend to Japanese
society an ethical cast which places it in many respects in strong
contrast to the social order of the Western nations, and makes it
difficult for the Japanese to understand us and for us to understand
them.[205]
[Sidenote: Woman as wife and as
mother]
As respects the position of woman the family ethics of Japan are
the family ethics of the East. In a work from every page of which
breathes the spirit of the Orient, a Japanese writer, dwelling
upon the difference between the ethical sentiments respecting
family relationships which have been evoked by the different social
environments of the East and the West, says: “In the East woman has
always been worshiped as the mother, and all those honors which the
Christian knight brought in homage to his ladylove, the samurai laid at
his mother’s feet.”[206]
Lafcadio Hearn, touching upon this same feature of the family ethics
of the Japanese, declares that the Bible text, “For this cause shall a
man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife,” is, to
their way of thinking and feeling, “one of the most immoral sentences
ever written.”[207]
In another important respect does the domestic morality of the Japanese
differ essentially from that of the Christian West. The family is not
strictly monogamous, as with us. The moral sense of the Japanese
discerns nothing wrong in polygamy or concubinage.[208] As respects the
whole relation of marriage, the Japanese appear to be in about the same
stage of evolution as had been reached by the Hebrews at the time of
Abraham.
A chief virtue of the Japanese women in all their relations is
obedience to the one--whether father, or husband, or son--to whom
obedience is due. It is the setting of this duty before all other
duties that causes the Japanese women sometimes to do what appears
to us immoral, but which seems to them truest piety and noblest
self-sacrifice.[209] In loyalty to duty, as they interpret duty, they
maintain a standard rarely surpassed by the women of any land.[210]
[Sidenote: Suicide regarded as a
virtuous act]
Suicide is infrequent among savage and barbarian races, but is common
among all peoples in an advanced stage of civilization. It is not so
much the fact itself of self-destruction that claims the attention of
the historian of morals, as the light in which the act is viewed; that
is, whether it is considered a virtuous or a reprehensible deed.
Now the Japanese regard suicide, if prompted by a good motive, as a
justifiable and noble act. The motives with them for the deed are
various, as in the case of other peoples, but among these motives is
one which discloses the existence among the Japanese of a sentiment
unknown or almost unknown among ourselves. The deed is often committed
in the way of making a solemn protest against something disapproved of
in the conduct or acts of others. Thus when the Japanese government
after war with China in 1898 acceded to the demands of Russia, France,
and Germany respecting the recession to China of certain territories
on the Continent, forty men in the Japanese army, by way of protest,
committed suicide “in the ancient way.”[211]
Tyrannicide is also looked upon by the Japanese as an heroic and
praiseworthy deed, provided the person committing the act makes clear
the self-sacrificing and patriotic character of his motives by at once
taking his own life.
[Sidenote: Low estimation of the
virtue of truthfulness]
A marked defect of the moral standard of the Japanese is the low place
assigned to the virtue of truthfulness. Among the Japanese, to call a
person a liar is not to apply to him a term of reproach, but rather to
pay him a pleasant compliment as a person of tact and shrewdness.
This lack of reverence for truth probably springs in part from the
virtue of politeness as a root. The extreme emphasis laid upon courtesy
as the sign and expression of reverence and loyalty toward superiors
fosters the general habit of saying things which are pleasant and
agreeable whether they are true or not. This complacent disregard of
truth in social intercourse would seem to have dulled the sense of
obligation of truth-speaking in other relations.
III. SOME SIGNIFICANT FACTS IN THE MORAL HISTORY OF JAPAN
[Sidenote: General influence of
the ideal of Bushido]
The Japanese knightly ideal, which, as we have said, constitutes the
heart and core of theoretical Japanese morality, has a history somewhat
like that of the ideal of European knighthood. It was a lofty ideal
very imperfectly realized, yet realized to such a degree as to make
it a chief motive force in the political and social life of Japan for
several centuries.[212] It left a permanent impress upon the moral
consciousness of the Japanese nation, an impress certainly deeper and
more enduring than that left by the ideal of European chivalry upon
the moral consciousness of the peoples of Western Europe. New Japan is
directly or indirectly the creation of Japanese knighthood.
We have seen that loyalty to his chief was the preëminent virtue of the
samurai. Upon the downfall of feudalism this loyalty was transferred
to the Emperor. The spirit of the samurai came to inspire the Japanese
nation. Since the time when the loyalty of Scottish clansmen to their
chief was transferred to Scottish royalty, there has not been seen a
more remarkable example of the absolute devotion of a people to their
sovereign than that exhibited to-day by the people of Japan.
The samurai were taught to despise the love of gain, and thus these
knights of Japan were strangers to those vices which spring from the
love of money. To this circumstance may be ascribed the fact that the
statesmen of Japan, who almost invariably are of the samurai class,
have been so notably free from venality and corruption.[213]
Finally, Bushido held aloft a high standard of truthfulness. The true
samurai regarded an oath as a derogation of his honor. It cannot be
affirmed that this Bushido virtue of veracity has yet become the
inheritance of the mercantile and peasant classes of Japan, but it has
at least been retained by the samurai as a class, and is working to-day
like leaven in the mass of Japanese society.
[Sidenote: The Bushido code in
action]
There are two remarkable passages in recent Japanese history which
well illustrate in what way and to what degree the spirit of the
samurai, “the spirit of not living unto one’s self,” has become an
inspiration to the whole Japanese nation. The first passage has to do
with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which on the part of Japan
was a struggle for national existence. It was the samurai morality, a
morality of loyalty, of valor, of selflessness, of fidelity to duty,
that formed a chief element of the strength of Japan in that critical
juncture of the nation’s life. The Bushido code of honor showed itself
equal to the Spartan code in creating a race of invincible warriors.
Since the Spartan Leonidas and his companions died for Greece in the
pass of Thermopylæ there has been no sublimer exhibition of fortitude
and self-devotion in a great cause than that shown by Japanese soldiers
in the trenches before Port Arthur and on the battlefields of Manchuria.
This war for national independence also afforded proof of how the
gentle virtue of Japanese knighthood, courteous generosity to the
vanquished, has passed as a noble legacy to the nation at large; for
as an eminent Japanese statesman affirms, “In the tender care bestowed
upon our stricken adversary of the battlefield will be found the
ancient courtesy of the samurai.”[214]
[Sidenote: The moral standard of
the samurai in competition with
that of the plebeian trader]
The second passage shows the morality of the samurai in competition
with the morality of the common Japanese shopman. Now the morality
of the plebeian Japanese trader is about on a level with that of the
ancient Greek shopkeeper.[215] And a chief cause of his low moral
standard is the same, namely, the general disesteem in which the
trader’s business has been held. This social stigma has resulted in
the mercantile business being left in the hands of the lowest class
socially, intellectually, and morally.[216] The great mass of the
people have from time immemorial been engaged in the honorable business
of agriculture; while the samurai class, as we have seen, regarded
it as degrading to engage in trade or even to handle money. In these
circumstances it was inevitable that the mercantile class should evolve
a very low code of business ethics; for, as the author of _Bushido_
very justly observes, “put a stigma on a calling and its followers
adjust their morals to it.”
The strictly class character of this loose commercial morality is shown
by the experience of the samurai after the abolition of feudalism in
1868. Upon that event many of them engaged in mercantile business,
carrying with them their high moral standard, with results pathetically
depicted by Nitobé in these words: “Those who had eyes to see could
not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize
enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally
and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and
industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful
plebeian rival.... It will be long before it will be recognized how
many fortunes were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to
business methods, but it was soon apparent to every observing mind that
the ways of wealth were not the ways of honor.”[217] About ninety-nine
out of every hundred samurai who ventured into business are said to
have failed.
This passage out of the history of New Japan carries with it various
lessons, but particularly does it teach how unjust it is to judge the
morality of a people by the morality of a class.[218]
Notwithstanding the disastrous outcome of their first venture into the
mercantile field, the samurai still remain in business, so that there
is going on to-day in Japan in the commercial domain a competition
between two moral standards. The triumph of the standard of the samurai
over that of the plebeian trader would mean the development in Japan
of a matchless business morality, which, in the increasing closeness
of commercial relations between the East and the West, might well act
cleansingly on our own business ethics.[219]
[Sidenote: Moral education in the
schools; the Imperial Rescript]
The rapid transformation in the institutions and ideas of Old Japan
after the revolution of 1868 created a crisis in the moral life of
the Japanese people. The old basis of the national morality was
destroyed. Reverence for the Confucian teachings was lost. Respect
for ancestral customs was seriously impaired. Moral anarchy impended.
In this critical juncture some proposed that Buddhism, others that
Christianity, should be made the basis of the moral code.
Especially in the schools was the urgency of the need of some new
sanction for morality felt, because moral instruction and training
have always formed an essential part of the education of the youth of
Japan. The Japanese have ever believed that it is possible to mold
the character of the nation by education. “With us,” says a native
writer, “education has meant moral education more than anything else
for centuries.”[220] “The object of teaching,” says the official
regulations for teaching in elementary schools, “is to cultivate
the moral nature of children and to guide them in the practice of
virtues.”[221] Because of this central place assigned moral education
in the work of the schools, the necessity for removing all uncertainty
as to what should be inculcated was all the more exigent.
To meet the crisis the following imperial rescript was
issued--certainly one of the most remarkable state papers ever
promulgated:
“Know ye, our subjects:
“Our imperial ancestors have founded our Empire on a basis broad
and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; our
subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from
generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is
the glory and the fundamental character of our Empire, and herein
also lies the source of our education. Ye, our subjects, be filial
to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as
husbands and wives be harmonious; as friends true; bear yourselves
in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue
learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual
faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public
good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution
and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves
courageously to the state; and thus guard and maintain the
prosperity of our imperial throne coeval with heaven and earth. So
shall ye not only be our good and faithful subjects, but render
illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.
“The way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by our
imperial ancestors, to be observed alike by their descendants and
the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is
our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you,
our subjects, that we may all thus attain to the same virtue.
“The 30th day of the 10th month of the 23d year of Meiji”
[1890].[222]
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of this
imperial edict. “Our whole moral education,” affirms Baron Kikuchi,
“consists in instilling into the minds of our children the proper
appreciation of the spirit of this rescript.”[223] The children learn
it by heart just as the Roman children committed to memory the Twelve
Tables of the laws.
Japanese believe that the effect of this instruction upon the national
character, reënforcing the ancestral virtues of loyalty and devotion to
duty, was exhibited in the recent war with Russia.[224]
A noteworthy feature of the rescript is that it is simply a
reaffirmation of the teachings of the ancient moralists and the ethical
traditions of the fathers--an inculcation of those virtues of loyalty
and filial piety which the Japanese people have held in esteem and
practiced from generation to generation.
A second feature of the edict which arrests attention is the
universalistic and secular character of the morality inculcated. The
virtues enjoined are universal benevolence, loyalty to duty, and
self-devotion to the common good--a morality of the universal human
heart and conscience, a morality, as the edict declares, good for all
ages and for all places.
[Sidenote: Japanese morals and
Western civilization]
The foregoing anticipates and gives answer to the questions: What will
be the effect upon Japanese morality of those changes now going on in
the life and thought of Japan through contact with the civilization of
the West? What will be the effect upon Japanese public morality when
the common belief in the divine descent of the Emperor, which is the
root from which springs the primal duty of loyalty, is undermined, as
modern science is certain to undermine it? What will be the effect upon
Japanese domestic morality when Occidental conceptions of the family
and of woman’s place in it come to modify, as they seem likely to do,
those ideas and sentiments which from time immemorial have formed the
basis of the family ethics of the East? What will be the ethical
consequences when Western science renders obsolete the Shinto learning
and the Confucian classics, which have hitherto formed the basis of
so large a part of Japanese morality? What will be the effect upon
the ancient ideal of character of the adoption of Christian ideas and
teachings in place of those which have so long nourished the ethical
feelings and sentiments of the Japanese people?
That the intrusion into the ancient culture of Japan of these various
elements of Western civilization has deep import for Japanese morality
cannot be made a matter of doubt. In the new environment, so different
from that in the midst of which the ancient ideal of goodness was
developed, this ideal must inevitably undergo important changes. Some
of those qualities of character which have so long held high places in
the ideal of excellence will cease to evoke the old-time homage, while
other qualities at present assigned low places in the standard will
be exalted. Virtues now practically unrecognized by the Japanese as
virtues, but which among us are highly esteemed moral qualities, will
certainly be incorporated in the modified ideal, giving it a new cast,
yet probably without changing fundamentally the type; for the moral
life of the Japanese people is too virile and too essentially sound to
permit us to think that the new influences now coming in will produce
such radical changes in the ethical feelings and convictions of the
race as to result in a repetition of what happened upon the entrance
of Christianity into the morally decadent Greco-Roman world--the
displacement of the old ideal of character by a new and essentially
different ideal.
CHAPTER VII
THE ETHICAL IDEALS OF INDIA
PART I. THE ETHICS OF BRAHMANISM--A CLASS MORALITY
I. HISTORICAL AND SPECULATIVE BASIS OF THE SYSTEM
[Sidenote: The conception of the
First Cause--Brahma]
As in Judea so in India the conception formed of the Supreme Being
reacted potently upon morality. Hence in naming the influences under
which the moral ideal of Brahmanism was molded we must speak first of
the Indian conception of the First Cause.
The Aryan conquerors of India originally held notions of the gods in
general like those held by their kinsmen, the early Greeks and Romans.
When they entered India they were ancestor worshipers and polytheists.
They had earth gods and sky gods. The gods of the celestial phenomena
gradually acquired ascendancy. Then, as in Egypt, there came a tendency
toward unity. The various gods came to be looked upon by the loftier
minds as merely different manifestations of one primal being.[225]
It is right at this point that we find the great antithesis between
Indian modes of thought and those of all or almost all other peoples.
When the thinkers of Egypt, of the Semitic lands, of Persia, of Greece
and Rome, had at last through reflection evolved the lofty conception
of a single great First Cause, they endowed this cause with conscious
personal life. This mode of thought is our heritage from the past. It
is to us almost or quite impossible to conceive of conscious personal
life as springing from an unconscious impersonal cause. Hence we place
behind the manifold phenomena of the universe a conscious personal
being as the origin and source of all things and all life.[226]
It is wholly different with the thinkers of India. They seem to be able
to postulate as the beginning of things an impersonal cause, a cause
without perception, thought, or consciousness. They affirm that out of
unconsciousness consciousness arises. They teach that out of Brahma,
the unconscious, impersonal, passionless One, emanate all material
worlds and sentient beings, gods as well as men.
How profoundly this conception of the First Cause has reacted on the
ethical speculations of the Hindu sages and on the moral life of India
will appear a little further on.
[Sidenote: The god Brahma
(Brahman)]
But this incomprehensible, unconscious, passionless Brahma is not the
Brahma of the popular faith. The masses and even the philosophers
themselves must have something more concrete. So this impersonal,
neuter Brahma is conceived as giving existence to the personal,
masculine God Brahma (Brahman), “the progenitor of all worlds, the
first-born among beings.”[227]
It is very necessary for the student of Brahmanic ethics to keep in
mind the distinction between the uncreated, unconditioned, impersonal
Brahma and the created, conditioned, personal Brahma, since there
is here laid the foundation of a double goal for rational moral
striving: the goal of the ascetic whose ultimate aim is deliverance
from individual existence and absorption into the absolute,
unchangeable, impersonal Brahma, which means a state of eternal
unconsciousness--dreamless sleep; and the goal of the multitude, whose
hope and aim is blissful, though temporary, union with the personal
Brahma in the heaven of the mortal, conditioned gods.[228]
[Sidenote: The system of castes]
The ethical evolution in India was also profoundly influenced by a
prehistoric event, namely, the subjection of the original non-Aryan
population of the land by an intruding Aryan people. As a result of
the long and bitter struggle the two races became separated by a sharp
line of race prejudice and hatred. The dark-skinned natives were
reduced to a state of servitude or dependence upon their conquerors.
Intermarriages between the two races were strictly prohibited, and
thus the population of the conquered districts of the peninsula became
divided into two sharply defined classes. These constituted a model
upon which Indian society was framed. Other classes were formed, and
these gradually hardened into castes, that is, into classes between
which marriages were prohibited. Four great castes arose: namely,
priests or Brahmans, warriors and rulers, peasants and merchants, and
sudras. Below these castes were the pariahs, or outcasts, made up of
the most degraded of the natives. As time passed, still other divisions
were formed, every occupation coming to constitute the basis of a new
caste, till society was stratified like a geologic deposit.
Religion came in to consecrate this division of the people into
privileged and nonprivileged classes.[229] The sacred scriptures
declare that the Brahmans sprang from the mouth of Brahma, the
warriors from his arms, the peasants and traders from his thighs, and
the sudras from his feet.[230]
No institution known among men ever exercised a more fateful and
sinister influence upon morality than this caste system has exercised
upon the morality of the peoples of India. The rooted belief and dogma
of the natural inequality of men has made Brahmanic ethics a thing of
grades and classes, and has thus rendered impossible the evolution of
a true morality, which requires for its basis genuine sentiments of
equality and brotherhood.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of
transmigration]
We easily realize the importance for morality of a belief in a
life after death. But a belief in preëxistence may exert an even
greater influence upon the moral code of a people than a belief in
post-existence.[231] Now the morality of the Hindus has been molded
by both these doctrines, for according to the teachings of Brahmanism
a man has lived through many lives before his “birth,” and may wander
through “ten thousand millions of existences” after death has freed
him from his present body.[232] The class and the condition into which
he is born here on earth is believed to be determined by the sum total
of his merits or demerits earned in preceding existences. As a result
of sin he may in his next birth be reborn in a lower caste, or may be
imprisoned in some animal or vegetable form. He may pass a thousand
times through the bodies of spiders, snakes, and lizards, and hundreds
of times through the forms of grasses, shrubs, and creepers. And all
this experience may come after the soul has passed through dreadful and
innumerable hells for vast cycles of years.[233]
This transmigration theory was framed by the thinkers of India to
explain among other things the seemingly unjust inequalities of human
life.[234] It afforded an explanation why one man should be born a
Brahman and another a sudra, one born in a hovel and another in a
palace, by conceiving the place of every person born into the world as
being determined by the manner of his life in former existences.[235]
It is unnecessary to dwell upon the profound influence which this
doctrine of transmigration, or round of births, has exerted upon
the moral life of India. The tendency of this theory, as soon as
elaborated, was to render still more intolerable the position of the
lower castes, particularly that of the sudras, since it made their low
place and hard lot to be the merited punishment of crimes and misdoings
in previous lives; while at the same time it fed the pride and enhanced
the arrogance of the Brahmans, since their superior lot was, according
to the theory, attributable to merit acquired in other existences. Thus
did the theory tend to give a more sinister aspect to the baneful caste
system, to make it appear a part of the unchangeable order of things,
and to render impossible the growth of any other than a class morality.
[Sidenote: Indian pessimism]
Hardly less important than the doctrine of transmigration for Hindu
morality is the Indian conception of life--of all individual, conscious
existence whether here on earth or in other worlds--as inseparable from
misery, pain, decay, and death.
The Aryan immigrants into India seem to have been, like their kinsmen
the Greeks, a light-hearted folk, filled with a strong joy in life.
But as in their journeyings they pressed southward into the valleys
of the Indus and the Ganges and came under the influences of the
hot, depressing climate, and of an oppressive social and political
system,[236] they appeared to have lost their buoyant spirits. The
skies seemed less bright and life less worth living, and, weary of it
all, they at last came to regard eternal death, annihilation, as the
greatest of boons.
This pessimistic view of the world and of life, as we shall see a
little further on, forms the basis of large sections of Indian ethics,
since it makes the ultimate goal of rational or moral effort to be the
getting rid of conscious existence.
[Sidenote: The conception of
sacrifice]
Another conception which has exerted a profound influence upon the
religious ethics of Brahmanism is that respecting sacrifice. This
conception is that the gods need sustenance, and can only exist through
the gifts and offerings made to them by men.[237] “The gods live by
sacrifice” say the sacred scriptures; “the sun would not rise if the
priests did not make sacrifice.”
To understand this teaching we must connect it with the belief of
primitive man that the spirits of the dead have absolute need of meat
and drink offerings at the hands of the living, and remember that in
India there is no sharp distinction drawn between the gods and the
souls of men. The gods, like the spirits of the dead, are dependent
for life and strength upon the offerings laid on their altars. Without
these gifts they would die or pine away, and all the movements of the
universe controlled by them would cease.[238]
From this conception of the gods came the emphasis laid by Brahmanism
upon sacrifice, and the prominence given the religious duty of bringing
rich gifts to the priests and keeping the altars of the gods heaped
with food.[239]
II. THE VARIOUS MORAL STANDARDS
[Sidenote: A class morality]
The fundamental fact of Brahmanic morality is that as a result of the
caste system it is a class morality; that is, there is a different
moral standard or code for each of the different castes.
In the account given in the _Laws of Manu_ of the origin of the
four chief castes, the occupation and the duties of each class are
carefully prescribed. To the Brahman was assigned teaching and offering
sacrifice; to the warriors and rulers the protection of the people;
to the peasants and merchants the tilling of the ground and trading;
and to the sudras--“One occupation only,” reads the sacred law, “is
prescribed to the sudra, to serve meekly the other three castes.”[240]
The Brahman is by right the lord of the whole creation.[241] His name
must express something auspicious, but the first part of the sudra’s
name must express something contemptible, and the second part must be a
word denoting service.[242]
For a man of a lower caste to affect equality with a person of a higher
caste is a crime: “If a man of an inferior caste, proudly affecting an
equality with a man of superior caste, should travel by his side on the
road, or sit or sleep upon the same carpet with him, the magistrate
shall take a fine from the man of inferior caste to the extent of his
ability.”[243]
For a Brahman to explain to a sudra the sacred Vedas is a sin: “Let him
[the Brahman] not give to a sudra advice nor the remnants of his meal
...; nor let him explain the sacred law to such a man; ... for he who
explains the sacred law to such ... will sink together with that man
into hell.”[244]
In the matter of punishments for crimes the laws are grossly unequal,
the punishment of a person of inferior caste being always more severe
than that of a person of a superior caste for the same offense.
Thus for a crime punishable with death if committed by a person
of an inferior caste, tonsure only is ordained if committed by a
Brahman;[245] for a Brahman must never be slain, “though he have
committed all horrible crimes.”[246] There is no crime in all the world
as great as that of slaying a Brahman.[247]
A knowledge of the inequality of these sacred laws of the Brahmans and
the burdensomeness of this caste morality as it pressed upon the lower
classes is necessary to an understanding of the rise and rapid spread
of Buddhism, and the fervor with which its teachings of equality and
brotherhood were embraced by the masses of Brahmanic India.
[Sidenote: The highest moral
excellence attainable in general
only by Brahmans]
Of the different standards of morality of the several castes that of
the Brahman is of course the highest. The study of the sacred books is
for him the chief duty. “Let him,” says the sacred law, “without tiring
daily mutter the Veda at the proper time; for that is one’s highest
duty; all other observances are secondary duties.”[248] Knowledge
of the Veda destroys guilt as fire consumes fuel.[249] Among the
secondary duties are observance of the rules of purification, the
practice of austerities, and doing no injury to created beings.[250]
By austerities, that is, by ascetic practices, by hideous self-torture,
the Brahman may atone for all sins of whatsoever kind and may become
so holy that at death, having conquered all desires, save only the
desire for union with the Universal One, he may hope to fall away
into unawakening unconsciousness and be absorbed into the absolute,
impersonal Brahma, and thus escape forever from the weary round of
births. This way of full salvation, and it is the only one, is open
only to Brahmans and to the chosen few from other castes who, having
gone forth “from home into homelessness,” as mendicants or forest
hermits, follow this life of complete renunciation of all that is
earthly.
[Sidenote: The moral code for
inferior castes]
The duties, the faithful performance of which avail most for persons of
inferior castes, are those that have to do with religion, and chiefly
with sacrifice. These duties are the bringing of gifts and offerings
for the sacrifices and the giving of generous fees to the priests.
Through the faithful performance of his assigned duties the man of
inferior caste can make sure of salvation--not the full and perfect
salvation attained by the Brahman through his austerities, but a
qualified salvation. He may hope for rebirth in some higher caste or in
some better state either on earth or in some other world.[251]
[Sidenote: Animal ethics]
Duty to animals seems to have formed no part of the moral code of the
early Indian Aryans. But chiefly through the influence of the doctrine
of transmigration respect for every living thing became a high moral
requirement. To take life wantonly became a crime. To kill a kine, a
horse, a camel, a deer, an elephant, a goat, a sheep, a fish, a snake,
a buffalo, insects, or birds is an offense which must be expiated by
penances.[252]
In order that he may not harm any living creature, the ascetic is
enjoined “always by day and by night, even with pain to his body, to
walk carefully, scanning the ground.”[253] Should he unintentionally
injure any creature he must expiate its death by penitent
austerities.[254]
Animals may, however, be slain for food[255] and for sacrifices,
since they were created for these special purposes. And then there is
compensation for the victims of the altars: “Herbs, trees, cattle,
birds, and all animals that have been destroyed for sacrifices receive,
being reborn, higher existences.”[256]
The killing of animals for sport is an inexpiable sin: “He who injures
innoxious beings from a wish to (give) himself pleasure never finds
happiness, neither living nor dead.”[257]
Under the influence of Buddhism we shall see this consideration for
animal life deepening into a genuine tenderness for every living
creature, and duties toward the inferior animals becoming one of the
most beautiful and characteristic features of the ethical ideal.
[Sidenote: War ethics]
In Brahmanic as in Confucian ethics the military virtues are assigned
a low place. Brahmanism, however, concedes the legitimacy of war
and permits the employment of force by the king in augmenting his
possessions,[258] even enjoining upon him to be ever ready to strike;
for “of him who is always ready to strike, the whole world stands in
awe.”[259]
But the genuine spirit of Brahmanism is opposed to the fierce war
spirit of the Aryan conquerors of India, and the sacred law attempts
to ameliorate the cruelties and atrocities of primeval warfare,
instilling in the warrior a spirit of magnanimity and chivalry. Thus
the “blameless law for the warrior” forbids to him the use of barbed or
poisoned weapons; he must spare the suppliant for mercy; he must not
strike an enemy who has lost his armor or whose weapons are broken,
or who has received a wound, or who has turned in flight. He must do
no harm to the onlooker. The king must conduct war without guile or
treachery.[260]
[Sidenote: Natural morality versus
ritualism]
At the heart of Brahmanism, as at the heart of every other great
religion of the world, there is a core of lofty spiritual teachings and
true morality. The sacred scriptures of the Brahmans declare, “The soul
itself is the witness of the soul, and the soul is the refuge of the
soul; despise not thy own soul, the supreme witness of men.”[261]
The sacred law teaches that he is pure who is pure in thought and in
deed: “Among all modes of purification, purity in (the acquisition of)
wealth is declared to be the best; for he is pure who gains wealth with
clean hands, not he who purifies himself with earth and water.”[262]
Repentance and resolutions of amendment free the soul from its
transgressions: “He who has committed a sin and has repented, is freed
from that sin, but he is purified only by the resolution of ceasing to
sin and thinking I will do so no more.”[263]
Brahmanism teaches the duty of forgiving injuries and of returning
blessings for curses: “Against an angry man let him [the ascetic] not
in return show anger; let him bless when he is cursed.”[264] “A king
must always forgive litigants, infants, aged and sick men, who inveigh
against him.”[265] “He who, being abused by men in pain, pardons them,
will in reward of that act be exalted in heaven.”[266]
Here is a morality as pure and lofty as any taught by Hebrew prophets.
But as in Judaism, so in Brahmanism, such was the stress laid by the
priests upon sacrifice, upon the observance of the rites and ceremonies
of the temple, and upon the performance of a thousand and one morally
indifferent acts, that as time passed there resulted an almost complete
overshadowing of natural by ritual morality. It was such a triumph of
ritualism as marked the postexilic period in the history of Israel. As
there came a protest and reaction in Judea issuing in Christianity, so
did there come a protest and reaction in Brahmanic India issuing in
Buddhism.
PART II. THE ETHICS OF BUDDHISM; AN IDEAL OF SELF-CONQUEST AND
UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE
I. THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE SYSTEM
[Sidenote: The four great truths]
Four tenets or principles, called the four truths, sum up the
essentials of Buddhism.[267] These are the truth of pain, the origin of
pain, the destruction of pain, and the eightfold way that “leads to the
quieting of pain.”[268]
The first three of these truths form the philosophical basis of
Buddhist ethics, and to a brief exposition of these tenets we shall
devote the immediately following sections. The fourth truth is a
summary of the ethics of Buddhism,[269] and therefore what we shall
have to say about it will appropriately find a place under the next
subdivision of this chapter when we come to speak of the moral ideal of
Buddhism.
[Sidenote: The truth of pain]
The truth of pain, in the language of the sacred scriptures, is this:
“Birth is pain, death is pain, clinging to earthly things is pain.”
This is simply an expression, with added emphasis, of that
world-weariness, of that despair of life, which we have seen pressing
like an incubus upon the spirit of Brahmanic India. Buddhism teaches
that life is an evil, that misery and sorrow and pain are inseparable
from all modes of existence. We shall be able to get the Buddhist’s
point of view if we bear in mind how we ourselves sometimes look upon
this earthly life. In despondent moods we ask, “Is life worth living?”
and make answer ourselves by declaring that if this earthly life is
all, then there is in it nothing worth while. If now we extend this
gloomy view so as to make it embrace the life to come as well as the
life that now is, we shall have the viewpoint of the true Buddhist. To
him life not only in this world but in all other possible worlds is
transitory, illusive, and painful, and in utter despair and weariness
he longs to be through with it all and to lay down forever the
intolerable burden of existence.[270] “As the glow of the Indian sun
causes rest in cool shades to appear to the wearied body the good of
goods, so also with the wearied soul, rest, eternal rest, is the only
thing for which it craves.”[271]
[Sidenote: The origin of pain]
The truth of the origin of pain is this: “It is the thirst for life,
together with lust and desire, which causes birth and rebirth.”
It should be noted here that there are different interpretations given
to this tenet. Some understand by it not that all desires, but simply
evil desires, cause and feed the flame of life; others interpret it as
teaching that desires or longings of every kind whatsoever possess this
sinister potency of recreating life and keeping one entangled in the
meshes of the net of existence.
[Sidenote: The truth of the
destruction of pain]
The truth of the destruction of pain is this: “Pain can be ended only
by the complete extinction of desire.” Desire being the root which
feeds life and causes the round of births, existence can be ended only
by getting rid of desire.
Here again there are different acceptations of the dogma. To most it
means simply the getting rid of all unholy passions and desires, while
to the thoroughgoing Buddhist it means freedom from every desire of
whatsoever kind: “Not a few trees but the whole forest” of desires must
be cut down, together with all “the undergrowth.”[272]
[Sidenote: The doctrine of karma]
Besides these three philosophical principles,--the truth of pain,
the origin of pain, and the extinction of pain,--there are two other
speculative doctrines of orthodox Buddhism, a comprehension of which is
necessary to an understanding of the ethics of the system. The first of
these is the doctrine of karma. This is a denial of the soul theory.
Orthodox Buddhism denies that man has a soul separable from the body.
It teaches that when a person dies there does not go out of his body
a spirit which lives elsewhere a conscious life, a continuation of
the life just ended, but that all that goes out is _karma_, that is,
something which is the net product of all the good and evil acts of
the person in all his various existences--a sort of seed or germ from
which will spring up here on earth or in some heaven or hell another
being.[273] There is no conscious identity, however, between the two
beings. They stand related to each other as father to son.
Some illustrations will help us to seize the thought. The Buddhist
teacher likens the relation of the life going out here to the new life
beginning elsewhere, to the relation of two candle flames, the second
of which has been lighted from the first. Through the transmission of
karma the flame of life is passed on from one being to another; but
all these life flames are different. No abiding self-consciousness
binds them together and makes them one. Again, this succession of lives
is likened to the undulations of a wave in the ocean. The successive
undulations are not the same, yet the first causes the second, the
second the third, and so on.
Notwithstanding the important place this doctrine holds in Buddhist
speculative philosophy and theoretical ethics, it was neither
understood nor adopted by the masses. It was developed in the schools,
but the people in general held to their old Brahmanic belief in the
soul and its transmigrations, so that in most Buddhist lands to-day
belief in a conscious personal existence after death is the prevailing
one.[274]
[Sidenote: Nirvana and the
different senses in which the term
is used]
The other philosophical doctrine of which we have to speak is that
of Nirvana. This term is used with many different meanings. Often it
denotes merely the extinguishment in the soul of lust and hate and
ignorance, and the state of quiet contentment and blissful repose which
results from such self-mastery. Buddha himself, says Rhys Davids, meant
by the term just what Christ meant by the kingdom of God, that kingdom
within the soul of calm and abiding peace.[275]
Again, it is used to express a state of eternal, unchanging, blissful
rest and ineffable peace beyond all the realms--heavens and hells--of
transmigration.
Still again the term is used to denote the absolute extinction of
existence, annihilation. This is the view of Nirvana held to-day by
the Buddhists of Ceylon, Siam, and Burma who claim to hold the ancient
faith in its primitive purity.[276]
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The truth of the
eightfold path]
The ethics of Buddhism is summed up in the formula of the truth of the
eightfold path.[277] The truth of the eight-membered way is this: the
only path which leads to the quieting of pain is the eightfold holy
path--right belief, right resolve, right speech, right behavior, right
occupation, right effort, right thought, right concentration.[278]
The essence of all this expressed in familiar ethical phrase is that
the demands of morality are right thoughts, right words, and right
deeds. As the eight requirements are interpreted and expounded by
Buddhist teachers, they demand a mind free from all evil passions and
unholy desires (and, according to the thoroughgoing Buddhist, of every
desire whatsoever)[279] and “a heart of love far-reaching, grown great,
and beyond measure.” This is the path leading to deliverance from
transmigration, this the path leading to the quieting of pain, this the
path leading to the sweet rest and peace of Nirvana.
It will be worth our while to note with some attention some of the
special primary duties and virtues which are included in these general
demands of self-conquest and unmeasured love.
[Sidenote: Particular virtues and
duties of the ideal]
One of the primary duties of the true Buddhist is to seek knowledge,
for true knowledge, insight, is the cure for desire. This knowledge
which quenches all craving thirst is best attained, so Buddha taught,
through meditation.[280] One must meditate on the transitoriness of
life, on pain, on death, on truth, on gentleness, on love. It was
through profound meditation under the Bo tree that Gautama became the
Buddha, “The Enlightened.”
Another cardinal virtue of the Buddhist ideal of character is universal
benevolence. By no other ethical system has such stress been laid upon
the duty of gentleness to everything that has life. The animal world
is here brought within the sanctuary of morality and safeguarded by
ethical sentiment. It is of course the doctrine of transmigration,
which Buddhism inherits from Brahmanism, which gives animal ethics the
prominent place it holds in Buddhist morality.[281]
Still a third requirement of the true Buddhist is toleration, which
follows as a corollary from the virtue of universal benevolence. In
the prominent place assigned this virtue in the ideal of character,
Buddhism stands alone among the great world religions.
A fourth cardinal duty of the ideal is to make known to all men the
eightfold way to salvation. Buddha’s command to his disciples was,
“Go ye now and preach the most excellent Law, explaining every point
thereof, unfolding it with diligence and care.” This is a duty which
brings its own reward; for the exercise of compassion and charity
produces that serenity of spirit which is the aim of moral striving;
and hence nothing advances one more rapidly on the way to salvation
than preaching the good tidings and laboring to lessen the sorrows and
lighten the burdens of one’s fellow creatures. The moral requirement
to preach to all the most excellent way made of Buddhism a missionary
religion. In a few centuries after the death of Buddha devoted
missionaries had spread the new faith throughout the Far East.
[Sidenote: The different degrees
of moral attainment]
There are in Buddhism three grades of moral attainment. The lowest is
that which may be reached by any one in the ordinary life. Through
purity of thought and word and deed, through the exercise of universal
kindliness, and by the fulfillment of every duty pertaining to his
station in life, one attains such a degree of moral excellence that he
may at least hope at death to avoid painful rebirth.
The second degree of moral excellence is that attained by the monk
of Gautama’s Order. The idea of the Buddhist here is like that of
the Christian respecting the monastic life. For centuries in the West
the ascetic life was looked upon as more perfect than the ordinary
life, and as the better and surer way to salvation. It is the same
in Buddhist lands. The goal striven after, the extinction of unholy
desires, the Buddhist believes is most quickly and surely reached by
him who has rid himself of the cares and worries of domestic life, and
withdrawn from all the distractions of the world.
The prime duty of the Buddhist monk is meditation, which takes the
place of prayer in the code of the Christian recluse. Through following
faithfully and patiently all the rules of the Order he may hope to
attain such comparative perfection that at his death he will be reborn
in some better state.
The third and highest degree of moral attainment can be reached only
in the Arhatship. The Arhat is what we would call the perfect man.
He is one who, like the Buddha, reaches a state of perfect insight
or mental illumination and of perfect freedom from all desires[282]
save the desire for Nirvana. This state is reached only through
absolute renunciation of the world. He who would be perfect must leave
all earthly pleasures behind, and calling nothing his own, with all
appetites stilled, passionless and desireless, go out from home into
homelessness.[283] In such a one karma becomes extinct, and for him
there are no new births. “The living, moving body of the perfect man is
visible still,” says Rhys Davids in explaining this state, ... “but it
will decay and die and pass away, and as no new body will be formed,
where life was, will be nothing.”[284]
[Sidenote: The genuine altruism of
Buddhist ethics]
It is impossible to conceive a higher altruism than that inculcated
by the higher thoroughgoing Buddhism. Since it denies the existence
of the soul,--nothing save the seed (karma) of another but different
life remaining at death,--when one strives to break the chain of
existence, to make an end of the weary cycle of births, such a one
is seeking good not for himself but for another. In the words of Dr.
Hopkins, “It is to save from sorrow this son of one’s acts that one
should seek to find the end.”[285] Thus orthodox Buddhism alone, of
all the great ethical systems of history, refuses to sully virtue with
promises of reward. Its morality stands absolutely alone, unsupported
by the hope of recompense either in this world or in the world to come.
“Buddhism alone teaches that to live on earth is weariness, that there
is no bliss beyond, and that one should yet be calm, pure, loving, and
wise.”[286]
Another thing especially noteworthy regarding the ethics of Buddhism is
that it is the ethics of naturalism. “For the first time in the history
of the world,” in the words of Rhys Davids, “Buddhism proclaimed a
salvation which each man could gain for himself and by himself in this
world, during this life, without the least reference to God or the
gods, either great or small.” In this respect Buddhism is somewhat like
the present-day socialism of the materialistic school, which ardently
proclaims justice, equity, and universal brotherhood, but says nothing
about God.
III. SOME EXPRESSIONS OF THE ETHICAL SPIRIT OF BUDDHISM
[Sidenote: Introductory]
Buddhism has been called the Christianity of the Orient. Like
Christianity, it has been a great moralizing force in history. Its
ethical ideal has been just such a factor in the moral life of the East
as the ethical ideal of Christianity has been in the moral life of the
West.
To portray even in scantiest outline the influence of this ideal
upon the different peoples who have accepted it as their standard of
goodness, or whose moral codes have felt its modifying effects, would
lead us far beyond the limits of our work. In what follows we shall aim
at nothing more--after having first remarked the ethical kinship of
the Buddhist reform with other contemporary reform movements--than to
note briefly the practical outworkings of the ideal in three or four
departments of the moral domain.
[Sidenote: The ethical
relationships of the Buddhist
reform]
We shall understand best the import for the moral evolution of humanity
of that remarkable revolution in Brahmanic India which resulted in
the establishment of Buddhism throughout the peninsula and in other
countries of the Far East, if we first notice its ethical kinship
with other reform movements which, about the close of the sixth
pre-Christian century, make a dividing line in the inner histories of
so many of the progressive societies and cultures of that age.[287]
In Greece Pythagoreanism was rising. This movement was in its essential
spirit a social and moral reform. It was an attempt to introduce a true
ethics in Greek city life, and to find a basis for morality in the deep
intuitions of the human soul.[288]
In Israel the Isaiah of the Exile was proclaiming the loftiest ethical
doctrines ever taught by Hebrew prophet, and in his interpretation of
the moral government of Yahweh was scattering the seed from which was
to spring up a new ethical life among men.
In Persia the great teacher Zarathustra (Zoroaster), with like vision
of moral things, was declaring to the followers of Ahura Mazda that
what God requires of men is purity of purpose, truthfulness in word and
act, and unceasing warfare against evil within and without.
In China the Master, Confucius, reaffirming the teachings of antiquity,
was inculcating essentially the same truth--that the sum of true
morality is reverence, obedience, and right living.
It probably would be unhistorical to suppose that there was any actual
connection between these several ethical or religious reform movements
in these widely separated lands. They are brought together here merely
that they may be used to interpret one another in terms of ethical
progress, and that they may bear witness to the substantial oneness of
the expressions of the moral faculty of man in response to the same or
similar intellectual and social stimulus.
[Sidenote: The ethical content for
the masses of Buddha’s message]
The question naturally arises, How could Buddha’s dismal doctrine of
annihilation as the ultimate aim and end of moral striving--for this
dogma was undoubtedly one of the fundamental principles of primitive
Buddhism--ever have been received by the multitude as a word of
consolation and hope? What is there of ethical authority or appeal in
such a doctrine to constitute it the motive force in a great popular
moral reform? The answer is that although Buddha himself probably
believed that death for the perfect man meant absolute extinction of
being, nevertheless he lay no emphasis upon this part of his world
philosophy. He knew very well that it would be a hard doctrine for many
to receive, and when questioned about it he was reticent. It was his
other doctrine, the way in which one may escape painful rebirths, upon
which Buddha laid the stress of his teaching. And here his simple word
to the people was this: Be gentle and merciful and just; get rid of all
impure and craving desires, and then at death, instead of suffering
some painful rebirth, you will be reborn into a happier condition here
on earth or in some other world. In a word, he said, Follow after
goodness and it will be well with you.
To be able to understand how this simple word should be received with
such enthusiasm by the multitude, we need to bear in mind how hard the
way of escape from painful rebirths had been made by the Brahmans.
They had taught the people that salvation was possible only through
ritual and ceremony, through costly offerings to the gods, through the
payment of liberal fees to the priests, through penances and ascetic
practices.[289] Thus the way of deliverance had been made so hard that
few could follow it, and so unethical that it left the heart cold and
the conscience unsatisfied.
The situation was like that in Judea when the greatest of the prophets,
in opposition to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees who
were laying upon men’s shoulders a burden of ritualism too heavy to
be borne, declared that man finds salvation not through ritual or
sacrifice, but through humility, obedience, and love--and the people
heard him gladly and followed him, because his yoke was easy and his
burden light.
So was it in India. Buddha interprets anew to men the divine message
that all which is required of them is purity and justice and tenderness
toward all creatures. The spirit of the heavy-burdened multitude
witnesseth with the spirit of the Prophet that this is indeed a true
and divine Word; and Buddhism, with its ethical enthusiasms and fresh
hopes, marks a new era in the moral evolution of the peoples of the
Eastern world.
[Sidenote: Monasticism as an
ethical expression of Buddhism]
In explaining the different degrees of moral attainment possible to
the Buddhist, we spoke of the monastic ideal of virtue. This part of
Buddhist ethical theory has left a deep impress upon practical morality
in all those lands into which the faith of the Buddha has spread.
Monasticism has been, and is still to-day, just such a dominant factor
in the moral life of all Buddhist communities of eastern Asia as it was
in the moral life of medieval Christian Europe.
The causes that fostered the upgrowth of the system in the East were
essentially the same as those that fostered its development in the
West. Among these causes a prominent place must be assigned that
feeling of world-weariness to which we have already more than once
referred, a feeling evoked by the burden and ache of existence. It was
this predisposition of spirit that caused the doctrine of renunciation
of the world preached by the disciples of Buddha to appeal with such
persuasion to multitudes throughout all the Eastern lands.
We may stop to note but one of various points of difference between
Buddhist and Christian monasticism. The latter, in general, recognized
the ethical value of labor. This feeling found expression in various
forms of activity among the monks, particularly in agricultural labor
and in the work of the scriptorium. It was this which not only helped
to keep life in the Western monasteries morally wholesome for a period,
but which also made the monastic system such an efficient force in
the conquest and redemption of the waste lands of Europe and in the
upbuilding of Western civilization in the early medieval age. Now
Buddhist monasticism never recognized the moral value of work.[290]
Useful labor had no place among the requirements of the monastic ideal.
Here doubtless is to be sought one cause of that lamentable moral
degeneracy into which the monastic communities soon fell in almost all
the lands whither Buddhism was carried by the missionary zeal of its
early converts.
[Sidenote: Practical effects of
the animal ethics of Buddhism]
We have seen that under the Buddhist system the whole animal and insect
world is brought within the domain of ethics. Buddhist morality has
gone to a greater extreme here than any other ethical system, excepting
that of Jainism. The inculcating of this sympathy with all living
creatures has developed one of the most attractive traits of the Hindu
character.[291] But the extreme emphasis laid upon this branch of
ethics by Buddhism, Jainism, and modern Brahmanism or Hinduism has had
practical consequences of a very serious nature. The scruple in regard
to killing animals, even harmful creatures, has cost India millions
of human lives. It has been a contributory cause of the country being
overrun with dangerous animals, such as tigers and venomous snakes,
which destroy many thousands of human beings annually, and has even
fostered the propagation of forms of life which are now known to be
effective agents in the spread of infectious diseases like the bubonic
plague.[292] Nothing is surer than that at this point the ethics of
Buddhism must sooner or later feel the modifying influence of Western
science.
[Sidenote: The Buddhist spirit of
toleration]
As an efficient force in promoting a spirit of the broadest toleration,
Buddhism holds a unique place among the great religious and ethical
systems of the world.[293] An edict of the Buddhist Emperor Asoka,
dating from the third century B.C., inculcates the practice of
toleration in these words: “A man must not do reverence to his own sect
by disparaging that of another man for trivial reasons. Depreciation
should be for adequate reasons only, because the sects of other people
deserve reverence for one reason or another.”
The spirit of this imperial edict has been obeyed wherever the word of
the Buddha has prevailed. “There is no record known to me,” writes Rhys
Davids, “in the whole long history of Buddhism, throughout the many
centuries where its followers have been for such lengthened periods
supreme, of any persecution by the Buddhists of the followers of any
other faith.”[294]
[Sidenote: Disesteem of the
military life]
Like Confucianism, Buddhism in its spirit and its ethical teachings
is, as we have seen, absolutely opposed to the spirit of militarism
in every form. Doubtless it has been a potent force in fostering
among the peoples of eastern Asia an anti-military spirit and in
creating a disesteem for the warlike qualities of character.[295]
From one land--the Tartar land of Thibet--it has banished absolutely
the war spirit and practically war itself.[296] “It has taken all the
fierceness out of the Mongols,” and thus rendered useless the Great
Wall built to check their raids into China.[297]
[Sidenote: Softening effects on
national character of Buddhist
teachings]
Buddhism has been well characterized as the incarnation of sympathy
with suffering. Inculcating a morality of gentleness, instilling
tenderness toward every living thing, it has exercised a softening
influence upon the spirit and temper of every race that has received
its teachings. We have in the preceding chapter noted its humanizing
effects upon Japanese morality.[298] Even in India, where after a
comparatively short period of supremacy it yielded sway again to
Brahmanism, it left significant traces of its brief dominance in the
deepened humanitarianism of the restored creed of the Brahmans, and
in certain of those traits and dispositions of the native races which
render truthfully descriptive the term “gentle Hindu.” “The land of
meekness and gentleness,” were the words used by a native Hindu[299]
at a recent Lake Mohonk Conference to express the ethical character of
India.
[Sidenote: Historical significance
of the ethical unity created by
Buddhism]
There is deep significance for the moral evolution of the human race
in this ethical propaganda of Buddhism. For just as Christianity has
created an ethical unity among the nations of the Western world, so
has Buddhism created a certain ethical unity among the races of the
Eastern world. The historical importance of this lies in the fact that
these two ethical systems, though differing in form and content, are
in spirit essentially the same: both are moralities of universalism;
both teach the brotherhood of man; both exalt the gentle[300] and
self-denying virtues; both enjoin self-conquest; both inculcate the
duty of universal benevolence.
Because of this moral kinship, the ethical conquests of Buddhism--and
there is not a land in the Far East that has not felt its
influence--are in a degree supplemental to those of Christianity in
the West, and are thus an important step in the creation of the ethical
unity of the world. India and Japan are both nearer to us ethically
to-day than they would be, were it not for the modifying influence
of Buddhist teachings upon the ethical spirit and temper of their
peoples.[301]
CHAPTER VIII
THE ETHICS OF ZOROASTRIANISM: AN IDEAL OF COMBAT
I. PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS WHICH CREATED THE ETHICAL TYPE
[Sidenote: Religious dualism]
In view of the mixed good and evil in the world, thinkers of antiquity,
outside of Israel and before the rise of the Stoic philosophy in
Greece, could not conceive the universe as being set in motion and
directed by one God infinite at once in power and goodness. Even the
most penetrating intellect of Greece faltered in his search for unity:
“We cannot suppose,” says Plato, “that the universe is ordered by one
soul; there must be more than one, probably not less than two--one the
author of good, and the other of evil.”[302] The seers of Israel alone
reached with perfect conviction the height of the great argument, and
announced confidently that He who is the author of the good in the
world is the author likewise of the evil: “I form the light and create
the darkness; I make peace and create evil,” are the words which the
prophet Isaiah puts in the mouth of Yahweh.[303]
The religious thinkers of Persia never reached this lofty viewpoint. It
seemed to them, as it seemed to the Greek philosopher, that at least
two deities must have been concerned in the creation and ordering of
the universe. They believed in the existence of two great powers: a
good being, Ahura Mazda, the creator of light and of all beneficent
things; and an evil being, Ahriman, the author of darkness and of all
baneful creatures. Between these two powers they conceived to be going
on a fierce struggle for the mastery, in which ultimate victory was
assured to the good Ahura.[304]
This Persian world philosophy reacted favorably upon the moral
character, and, as we shall see further on, contributed to create in
ancient Persia a deep consciousness of the eternal distinction between
good and evil, a profound sentiment of duty, and an active, strenuous
morality.[305] It is when contrasted with the world philosophy of
Brahmanism and Buddhism that the ethical value of this dualistic
philosophy of the old Persian thinkers is best disclosed.
[Sidenote: Conception of the
character of the supreme god,
Ahura Mazda]
While it is true that the moral qualities attributed by a people to
their gods are nothing more nor less than the moral qualities possessed
or revered by this people themselves, still it is also true that the
moral nature thus given to the gods reacts powerfully upon the ethical
life of their worshipers and tends to mold their moral character after
the heavenly type. In a word, celestial morality is at once effect and
cause.
In the case of no other people of antiquity, except the people of
Israel, did the conception of deity exercise a greater influence upon
morality than in that of the ancient Persians. The supreme being,
Ahura Mazda, was conceived, as we have already noted, as the creator
of the light and of all good things, as the god of righteous order
and benevolence. He was the lover of truth. Truth was the innermost
essence of his being, as love is the innermost essence of the God of
Christianity. Farther on we shall see how this conception of deity
formed the mold in which was cast the Persian ideal of moral excellence.
[Sidenote: The ethical character
of Mithra]
Ahura Mazda was the god of the sky. As time passed, Mithra, the
god of the sun, gradually came into greater prominence and finally
quite eclipsed the at first supreme deity, Ahura. As the solar god
he appropriated the ethical attributes of the sky god and became
preëeminently the god of light, the champion of truth, and the avenger
of lies. He it is who, when not deceived, establisheth nations in
victory and strength.[306]
It was from this solar deity that Zoroastrianism in the later
pre-Christian centuries was called Mithraism, under which name, as we
shall see, it entered the Greco-Roman world and there became a chief
competitor with Christianity for the control and guidance of the moral
life of the European nations.
[Sidenote: Doctrine of the
sacredness of the elements--fire,
earth, and water]
The principle of Persian world philosophy which, next after that of
the divided government of the universe, had probably the greatest
consequences, and those not wholly favorable, for Persian morality,
was the principle of the purity and sacredness of the elements--fire,
earth, and water. From this principle or belief were deduced endless
ritual requirements whose aim was to preserve these elements from
pollution, or to restore their purity after defilement, and thus one
large division of the moral code embraced mainly artificial duties,
duties which had no vital relation to natural morality, that is, to
conduct deriving its sanction from the natural feelings of moral right
and wrong.
[Sidenote: The personality of a
great reformer, Zarathustra]
As the great moral systems of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity,
and Mohammedanism bear each the impress of the moral consciousness of
some great teacher, so is it with Zoroastrianism. For the moral ideal
of Persia, while doubtless largely the creation of the ethical feelings
and convictions of the Iranian race, developed through many centuries
of race experiences, nevertheless bears the unmistakable imprint of
a unique personality. That the Zarathustra of tradition represents a
real historical personage, there can hardly be longer a reasonable
doubt.[307]
The time of Zarathustra’s mission probably falls in the first half
of the sixth century B.C. He thus belongs to that era in the history
of antiquity when, at various centers of culture, reform movements
announced the opening of a new epoch in the moral evolution of the
human race.[308] The sum of what we may believe to have been his moral
teachings was that man’s full duty is purity and sincerity in thought,
word, and deed, and an untiring warfare against evil.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The essence of the
moral life]
The distinctive character of the Persian moral ideal was determined
by the Persian dualistic world philosophy. The essence of the moral
life is a struggle against evil. The good man is the strong fighter
with Ahura against Ahriman and all his creations. There was no
place in the ideal for those ascetic virtues--celibacy, fasting,
self-mortification--which conferred sainthood in India.[309]
The married state was regarded as superior to the unmarried: “He who
has children,” says the Zend-Avesta, “is far above the childless
man.”[310] Fasting was condemned as ungodly, for “no one who does not
eat has strength to do heavy work of holiness”;[311] the well-fed man
can fight better than the one who lessens his vitality by fasting, can
withstand the cold better, “can strive against the wicked tyrant and
smite him on the head.”[312] The Zoroastrians regarded Christianity, in
the form in which they knew it, with disapproval, because it exalted
celibacy and made fasting a virtue.
This moral ideal which made life a strenuous battling for the right
was, after the ideal of the Hebrew prophets, the loftiest developed by
the ancient world. As we shall see immediately, it tended to make the
morality of the ancient Persians “a morality of vigor and manliness.”
[Sidenote: Truthfulness the
paramount virtue]
Among the special virtues making up the moral ideal, the highest place
was assigned the virtue of veracity. It is noteworthy how this virtue
was, if not created, at least fostered by the Persian conception of the
supreme god, Ahura Mazda, whose symbol was the light.[313] As Ahriman
was the god of deceit and lies, so was Ahura the god of sincerity and
truth. This thought of deity made truthfulness a supreme virtue, for
man must in all things take for his model the good spirit on whose side
he battles.
Various testimonies bear witness to the high place assigned in the
scale of virtues to veracity. There was to be no liar among those
persons whom the Persian Noah (Yima) was commanded to bring into the
great underground abode, that the earth might be repeopled with a
superior race after the deadly cold of the long winter.[314] The
punishment provided in the Zend-Avesta for false swearing was terrible.
The very first time one knowingly tells a lie unto Mithra (the god
adjured in taking an oath), “without waiting until it is done again,”
he shall be beaten on earth with twice seven hundred stripes, and below
in hell shall receive punishment harder than the pain from the cutting
off of limbs, from falling down a precipice, from impalement.[315]
What is especially noteworthy here is that Zoroastrian morals
recognize the universality of the law of truthfulness and require that
contracts made even with the unfaithful be faithfully kept: “Break
not the contract,” says the sacred law; ... “for Mithra stands for
both the faithful and the unfaithful.”[316] Even more sacred than
the engagements of kinsman with kinsman are the engagements between
nations, for while a contract between members of the same group is
thirtyfold more binding than one between two strangers, a contract
between two nations is a thousandfold more binding.[317] Here is raised
a standard of international morality to which modern statesmen and
diplomatists have not yet attained.
[Sidenote: The duty of industry;
the ethics of labor]
Industry was another cardinal virtue of the Zoroastrian ideal of
character. Labor was enjoined not only as honorable but as a sacred
duty. Wedgwood endeavors to show how this virtue was the outgrowth of
the Persian conception of the origin of the universe. In Indian thought
the world is not a creation, the work of a divine Creator; it is an
emanation from an impersonal, unconscious, primal principle. But in the
Persian world-view the universe is conceived as the work of a deity who
labors to give it form and shape. This conception of God as a worker
reacted powerfully upon the ideal of human excellence. Man must imitate
this divine virtue of labor. He must become a co-worker with the good
Ahura Mazda. Thus was labor idealized, and all work, even the most
lowly, made a sacred thing.[318]
There is in this view doubtless an element of truth, but it is probable
that this duty of industry and thrift upon which such emphasis is laid
in the Zend-Avesta was in the beginning taught and enforced by the
limited area of fruitful soil and the necessity of careful irrigation
and tillage, and that only later the virtue thus engendered received
the sanction and support of religion. We may infer this from the fact
that agriculture was the most sacred of occupations. “He who sows
corn,” says the Zend-Avesta, “sows righteousness.”[319] To sow corn,
grass, and fruit; to water dry ground and to drain ground that is too
wet--this is the duty of man.[320]
[Sidenote: Animal ethics]
The Zoroastrian code, like the _Laws of Manu_, gives a large place to
man’s duties toward the lower animal creation. But the animal ethics
of the Iranian lawgiver are much more reasonable than those of the
Hindu legislator. The Buddhist, as we have seen, is enjoined to spare
every living thing; there is no distinction made between useful animals
and dangerous beasts and noxious reptiles. To such an extreme is this
regard for all life carried that agriculture, though a permissible
because a necessary occupation, still is looked upon with disfavor for
the reason that the plow injures the beings living in the earth.[321]
On the other hand, the Zoroastrian code distinguishes between
beneficent and baneful creatures, declares the first to have been
created by the good Ahura and the latter by the evil Ahriman, and
makes it the duty of the good man to protect and treat kindly all
useful animals, and to destroy all baneful creatures, including noxious
plants, such as weeds and brambles. Hence tilling the soil is praised
as an especially holy occupation, since the plow destroys the thistles
and weeds sown by the evil-disposed Ahriman.
[Sidenote: Duty of protecting the
purity of the elements]
Another important department of Persian ethics was based on the idea of
the holiness of the elements--fire, earth, and water. Any defilement
of these was a sin, in some cases an unpardonable sin. For instance,
burying the corpse of a man or of an animal in the earth, and not
disinterring it within two years--“for that deed there is nothing that
can pay; ... it is a trespass for which there is no atonement for ever
and ever.”[322] Equally stringent were the prohibitions against the
pollution of the holy elements fire and water, through casting into
them any unclean matter.[323]
We shall perhaps best understand the moral value of such duties as we
have to do with in this division of Persian ethics, if we compare them
with those duties of the Christian code--Sabbath observances--which are
based on the idea of the holiness of a certain portion of time. The
ethical feelings evoked in the one case are akin to those evoked in the
other.
[Sidenote: The judgment of the
dead; the soul the judge of the
soul]
In the Persian judgment of the soul after death we have the most
profound and spiritual conception of the rewards and punishments of
the hereafter that has found expression in the ethical teachings of
any people. The soul is conceived as being judged by itself. Upon its
departure from this life the soul of the faithful is met by a beautiful
maiden, “fair as the fairest thing,” who says to him: “I am thy own
conscience; I was lovely and thou madest me still lovelier; I was fair
and thou madest me still fairer, through thy good thought, thy good
speech, and thy good deed.” And then the soul is led into the paradise
of endless light. But the soul of the wicked one is met by a hideous
old woman, “uglier than the ugliest thing,” who is his own conscience.
She says to him: “I am thy bad actions, O youth of evil thoughts, of
evil words, of evil deeds, of evil religion. It is on account of thy
will and actions that I am hideous and vile.” And then the soul is led
down into the hell of endless darkness.[324]
The remarkable thing about all this is that this profound and spiritual
conception of “a mental heaven and hell with which we are now familiar
as the only future state recognized by intelligent people” should
have found expression at the early period when the faith of the
Zend-Avesta was formulated. “While mankind were delivered up to the
childish terrors of a future replete with horrors visited upon them
from without, the early Iranian sage announced the eternal truth that
the rewards of Heaven and the punishments of Hell can only be from
within. He gave us, we may fairly say, through the systems which he has
influenced, that great doctrine of subjective recompense, which must
work an essential change in the mental habits of every one who receives
it.”[325]
III. THE PRACTICE
[Sidenote: Effects of the moral
ideal upon the Persian character]
In setting for man as his chief moral task a courageous warfare
against evil, the Zoroastrian ethics produced a certain exaltation of
character, and inspired strenuous activity motived by a deep sense of
duty. It created, or concurred with other causes in creating, “a race
of zealous Puritans,” a strong, self-reliant people, who disdained all
asceticism and indolence.[326] Fasting, as we have seen, was regarded
as a crime because it weakens the body and unfits one for active
exertion.
It is instructive to place the masculine ideal of Persia alongside
the feminine ideal of Buddhist India and note the different effects
of these strongly contrasted standards of goodness upon the races
accepting them as the measure and rule of rational conduct and duty.
The Buddhist ideal, as we have seen, is made up largely of the gentler,
contemplative, passive virtues, the virtues of the recluse and the
ascetic. Its issue in character is quietism. In opposition to this, the
Zoroastrian ideal inspires sturdy, virile, active virtues, the moral
qualities of the reformer, of the toiler and the fighter. The natural
effect of the ideal was to confirm in the Persians all the seemingly
original strong ethical qualities of the Iranic race.
[Sidenote: Persian veneration for
the truth]
We have seen that one of the chief requirements of the Zoroastrian
code was truthfulness; man must be veracious even as Ahura Mazda is
veracious. Various testimonies assure us that in respect to this virtue
there was in ancient Persia a commendable conformity of practice to
theory. The feeling for the beauty and nobility of truthfulness was
much more fully developed among the Persians than among any other
people of ancient or modern times. They were a truth-revering and a
truth-speaking people. Lying was the great crime. To lie, to deceive,
was to be a follower of Ahriman, the god of lies and deceit. Hence
lying was regarded as a species of treason against Ahura Mazda. “The
most disgraceful thing in the world,” affirms Herodotus, in his account
of the Persians, “they think, is to tell a lie; the next worse is to
owe a debt, because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to
tell lies.”[327] In his report of the Persian system of education
he says, “The boys are taught to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak
the truth.”[328] I was not wicked, nor a liar, is the substance and
purport of many a record of the ancient kings. Rawlinson adduces
this as evidence of their veneration for truthfulness. “The special
estimation in which truth was held among the Persians,” he says, “is
evidenced in a remarkable manner by the inscriptions of Darius, where
_lying_ is taken as the representative of all evil. It is the great
calamity of the usurpation of the pseudo-Smerdis, that ‘then the _lie_
became abounding in the land.’ ‘The Evil One (?) invented _lies_ that
they should deceive the state.’ Darius is favored by Ormazd, ‘because
he was not a heretic, nor a _liar_, nor a tyrant.’ His successors are
exhorted not to cherish, but to cast into utter perdition, ‘the man who
may be a _liar_, or who may be an evildoer.’ His great fear is lest
it may be thought that any part of the record which he has set up has
been ‘_falsely_ related,’ and he even abstains from relating certain
events of his reign ‘lest to him who may hereafter peruse the tablet,
the many deeds that have been done by him may seem to be ‘_falsely_
recorded.’”[329]
The Persian kings, shaming in this all other nations ancient and
modern, kept sacredly their pledged word;[330] only once were they ever
even charged with having broken a treaty with a foreign power.[331]
That truthfulness was a national virtue of the Persians is further
attested by the fact that Herodotus represents them as always relying
implicitly upon every tale told them by the lying Greeks whom they
had taken captive. It never seemed to occur to them that even an
enemy could be guilty of so awful a blasphemy as lying. It was this
trait which led to their undoing at Salamis by the unscrupulous and
mendacious Themistocles.[332]
[Sidenote: Influence of the ideal
upon Persian history]
That exaltation of character which we have remarked as springing
naturally from the moral dignity with which man was invested by being
made an associate of the good Ahura in his struggle with the wicked
Ahriman may be noticed especially in the aims and undertakings of
the Persian monarchs in the period before the moral decadence of the
Iranian civilization set in, and while the strength of the ethical
appeal of the Zoroastrian ideal was yet unimpaired. This appears in
all their records, which make the aim of their conquests to be the
overthrow of the powers of evil and disorder and the setting up of
a kingdom of righteousness in the world. The inscriptions of Darius
I read like the letters of the Puritan Cromwell. Indeed, just as it
was the masculine moral ideal of English Puritanism which helped to
make England great, and strong to play her part in the transactions
of modern times, so we may believe it was the strenuous moral ideal
of Zoroastrianism that helped to make Persia great, and strong to
play her great rôle in the affairs of the ancient world. In truth,
the ideal is still an unexpended force in history. It seems to have
given immortality to the people that it inspired; for it can hardly be
doubted that it is largely owing to their active practical morality
that the Parsees in India, the representatives to-day of the old
Zoroastrian faith, constitute such a dominant element in the Indian
communities of which they form a part.[333]
CHAPTER IX
THE MORAL EVOLUTION IN ISRAEL: AN IDEAL OF OBEDIENCE TO A REVEALED LAW
I. THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF HEBREW MORALITY
[Sidenote: Introductory: Israel’s
historic task a moral one]
To the pious Hebrew the rainbow, which to the esthetic Greek was merely
the beautiful pathway of Iris, the messenger of Olympus, was Yahweh’s
bow hung out from the dark retreating thundercloud as a sign of
righteous anger spent and the pledge of a divine covenant and promise.
In this ethical interpretation by the Hebrew spirit of this portent
is foretokened the history and mission of ancient Israel. It was her
allotted task to interpret in ethical terms the phenomena of the world
of nature and the drama of human life and history. And it was her happy
lot to become the teacher to mankind of the truth of an alone and
righteous God, and to be the creator of a moral ideal which is to-day
the highest ethical standard of all the races of the Western world, and
the most vital moral force at work in universal history.
In the short account which we shall give of Hebrew morality we shall
adopt a mode of treatment somewhat different from that followed in
describing the moral systems of the peoples already passed in review,
for the reason that in the case of the ancient Hebrews the historical
material is sufficiently abundant to enable us to trace step by
step the development of the ethical ideal and to watch the gradual
clarification of the moral consciousness of the race.[334] Hence,
after speaking of the religious ideas which formed the basis of the
moral code, we shall sketch briefly the evolution of the rudimentary
morality of the tribal age of the nation into the high ideal of the
prophets of the later time.
[Sidenote: The conception of
deity; monolatry and monotheism]
We have seen how the Persian view of deity molded Persian morality. In
a still more decisive way did the Hebrew idea of God, of his character
and his relation to Israel and the world, shape and mold the moral
ideal of the race.[335]
When the Hebrews in the second millennium before Christ appeared in
history, they were in possession of a stock of ideas concerning the
gods which was, in all essentials save one, altogether like that held
by their Semitic kinsmen of the various lands of southwestern Asia. The
single essential point of difference between their religious belief
and that of their neighbors was this: the nations about them were
polytheists; they were monolatrists; that is, the Hebrews, while they
believed in many gods, worshiped only one god, their tribal god Yahweh.
As Stade expresses it, “the old Israelite was a theoretical polytheist,
but a practical monotheist.”[336]
There is scarcely need that we add in qualification of this, that when
the Hebrews first appeared in history they were not all monolatrists.
The multitude were then, and for a long time thereafter, polytheists.
All that can be affirmed is that in the earliest times of their history
there were among them teachers of monolatrism, teachers who inculcated
the duty of worshiping a single god, the patron and champion of the
nation.
Through what experiences and under what tuition these teachers of
Israel made the passage in thought from polytheism to monolatrism we
need not now inquire. For our purpose we need simply note the fact and
emphasize its supreme historical importance. It marks the beginning of
a divergent evolution in religious belief and ethical conviction which
in the lapse of time was to lead Israel far apart from her Semitic
kinsmen, and make her the standard bearer of a universal religion and
a universal morality. For monolatry was with the prophets and seers
of Israel only the first step toward monotheism, the doctrine that
there is only one God, the Universal Father. This idea of deity was
not reached much before the time of the Second Isaiah. Along with
this later view of Yahweh there came the thought and conviction that
he is a God of absolute righteousness. This conception of God and of
his character was, as we shall see, an idea charged with the deepest
significance not only for the ethical development in Israel but for the
moral life of all mankind.
[Sidenote: The belief in a
supernaturally revealed law]
After this conception of Yahweh, first as a jealous tribal deity
and later as the sole God and Universal Father, the belief in a
supernaturally revealed law wherein all the duties of man were made
known was the most potent force in molding the moral ideal of Israel.
It was this belief which made the chief duty of man to be unquestioning
obedience to the divine commandments; for the revealed law was the
measure of duty--what it enjoined was right, what it forbade was wrong.
This investiture of an outer law, conceived to be of supernatural
origin, with sovereign authority over man’s every act, and the
subordination to it of the inner law of the individual conscience, had
consequences of vast importance for the ethical evolution not only
in ancient Israel but also among all the peoples whose moral ideal
was essentially an inheritance from her. For where the full duty of
man is made to consist in obedience to the minute requirements of an
external law there is inevitably created a morality made up largely
of artificial ritual duties, and as intelligence grows and the moral
consciousness deepens and clarifies, there necessarily arises a
conflict between this conventional morality and the natural morality
of the human reason and conscience. In such a conflict, in this way
created, within the moral life of Israel centers the dramatic interest
of her moral history.
[Sidenote: Special ground of the
Israelites’ feeling that obedience
to the law was their highest duty]
There was a special reason why the Israelites felt that their first
duty was absolute obedience to the revealed will of Yahweh. They
possessed a tradition which told how their fathers were serfs in the
land of Egypt; how Yahweh, through his servant Moses, had intervened in
their behalf, and with a strong arm and with mighty signs had brought
them up out of the land of bondage; and how at Mt. Sinai he had entered
into a covenant with them in which he pledged to them his powerful
protection on condition of their fidelity in his worship and obedience
to all his commandments.
This belief was the germ out of which grew most of what was unique in
the ethical development of Israel.[337] It played exactly the same
part in creating and molding the religious conscience of Israel that
the Christian’s belief in the descent of the Son of God into the world
and his voluntary death to effect man’s deliverance has had in molding
the religious conscience of Christendom. As we advance in our study we
shall see how largely the moral consciousness of the Israelites was a
creation of this belief in a most sacred covenant between Yahweh and
their fathers at the “Terrible Mount” in the wilderness.
[Sidenote: The rite of sacrifice]
We have seen that religion on the lower levels of culture consists
largely in sacrifice; that is, in gifts or offerings either to the
spirits of the dead or to the gods. The religion of the ancient Hebrews
did not differ in this respect from the religion of other peoples
in the same stage of culture.[338] But the evolution of the rite of
sacrifice among the Israelites differs from its development among all
other peoples in that, under the influence of the Hebrew spirit, the
rite was gradually reduced to symbolism and spiritualized. In this
process it underwent the most remarkable metamorphoses. Beginning with
meat and drink offerings from man to God, it ends with God giving
himself a sacrifice for man. The system thus transformed became the
great inspirer of ethical sentiment and a unique vehicle of moral
instruction.
[Sidenote: The vagueness of the
belief in an after life]
The Israelite’s thought of death and of the after life also reacted
powerfully upon his moral feelings and colored all his ethical
speculations; for, like the conceptions held of God, the notions
entertained of man’s lot after death, as we have seen in the case of
the ancient Egyptians, has far-reaching consequences for the moral life.
Now the Hebrew conception of the future state was the same as the
Babylonian. Sheol, like the Babylonian Arallu, was a vague and shadowy
region beneath the earth, a sad and dismal place which received without
distinction the good and the bad. The same fate was allotted all who
went down to the grave: “The small and the great are there; and the
servant is free from his master.”[339] There was no return there for
good, or for evil: “But the dead know not anything, neither have they
any more a reward.”[340] Memory and hope were there dead: “For in death
there is no remembrance of thee.... They that go down into the pit
cannot hope for thy truth.”[341]
We shall see later how this vague and feebly held idea of the future
life reacted upon the evolution of the moral consciousness in Israel,
how deeply it influenced the troubled ethical speculations of the more
thoughtful minds of the nation, and how it inspired theories of the
moral order of the world which have not yet lost their power over the
thoughts and the conduct of men.[342] We need in this place merely to
point out how it was the absence of a clearly defined belief in a life
of rewards and punishments in another world that created, or helped to
create, the Messianic ideal, one of the most fruitful conceptions, in
its ethical outcomes, that ever entered into the mind of man.
II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL IDEAL
_1. The Development up to the Exile_
[Sidenote: The primitive moral
code]
The history of Hebrew morals is the record of a long and slow
evolution. The primitive code with which the development began was
the code of Semitic nomadism. It was essentially the same as that
which to-day governs the conduct of the practically unchanged kinsmen
of the Hebrews, the Bedouin of Arabia and neighboring lands. It was
the morality of the kinship group.[343] The principle of communal
responsibility, which affords the key to a large part of the moral
history of Israel, had not yet been challenged as unethical, and
blood revenge was a most sacred duty. The circle covered by the moral
feelings was still narrow; there was practically no sentiment of duty
or obligation toward tribes or nations outside the group of tribes
constituting the people of Israel. The conception of Yahweh as a
jealous national god prevented the growth of feelings which might have
formed the basis of a true international morality. The wars which the
Israelites waged against their enemies were wars of ruthless slaughter
and rapine.
This rudimentary morality is summarized in the Decalogue,[344] for the
Ten Commandments are indisputably of a high antiquity. One mark of the
primitive character of this legislation is the negative form of the
commandments.[345] Where there is need of the “thou shalt not,” the
moral life is still on a low plane. The aim and purpose of the law
thus worded are restraint and repression. There is a wide interval in
moral chronology between the morality of the Ten Words and that of the
Sermon on the Mount. In this earlier code there is only the slightest
recognition of the truth that the truly moral life consists not in
refraining from evil but in doing good. The nomads of the desert for
whom these negative commands were framed, forbidding mostly crude,
coarse crimes, were evidently a long way yet from that level of moral
attainment where the only law is the law of love and liberty.
[Sidenote: The moral anarchy of
the age of the Judges]
That period of transition which marks the passage of the Israelite
tribes from the nomadic pastoral life of the desert to a settled
agricultural life in Palestine may be instructively compared with that
transition period in the history of Europe which followed the migration
of the German tribes and their settlement in the provinces of the
disrupted Roman Empire. It was an epoch characterized by the rapid
decay of the clan and tribal organization, with an accompanying loss of
the rude virtues of the nomadic and pastoral life, and the acquisition
of the vices of the civilized or semicivilized communities among which
they had thrust themselves and whose lands they had forcibly seized.
Especially upon the religious system, which in Israel was ever closely
bound up with morality, was felt the reaction of the new environment.
Many foreign elements adopted from the Canaanite peoples were
incorporated with it, while the national god Yahweh, as conceived by
the popular imagination, tended to become sanguinary, capricious, and
unjust. He became eminently a god of war, and is for his people right
or wrong. Thus a chief bulwark of morality was impaired. The result was
a moral interregnum. The old standards and rules of conduct lost their
sanction. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.[346]
[Sidenote: Prophetism: its
different elements]
The necessities of the situation called into existence the monarchy
(about 1050 B.C.). Then followed the disruption of the kingdom (about
953 B.C.). The significant matter in the moral domain during the
period of the united and the divided kingdom[347] was the appearance
of teachers called prophets or seers, men who were believed to speak
the word given them by Yahweh. This emergence of prophetism in Israel
is beyond controversy one of the most important phenomena in the moral
history of the world.
There were in this prophetism various elements.[348] First, it
contained a nomadic element; that is, some of the prophets were men
who looked backward to the simple pastoral life of the desert as the
ideal moral life. They regarded civilization as the sum of all evils.
Their reading of history was, in the words of Wellhausen, that “as the
human race goes forward in civilization, it goes backward in the fear
of God.” Second, there was in it a socialistic element. These prophets
were the first socialists. Theirs was the first passionate plea for
the poor, the wretched, and the heavy-burdened. Third, it contained a
predictive element. The prophets were regarded as seers, as foretellers
of future events. Fourth, there was in this prophetism an element of
pure intuitional morality which was in irreconcilable antagonism to all
legal ritual morality. Fifth, it contained a monotheistic element. The
later prophets were distinctively teachers of the doctrine that there
is only one God, beside whom there is no other.
Of these several elements the predictive, or prophetic in the popular
sense, has been given such undue prominence that Hebrew prophetism
in the minds of many stands for little else than a supernatural
forecasting of future events. But, in truth, this is the element of
least importance. In the words of Kuenen, the business of the prophets
was “not to communicate what shall happen, but to insist upon what
_ought_ to happen.”[349] They were preachers of individual and social
righteousness. It is this ethical element, forming the very heart and
core of their message, which makes the appearance of prophetism in
Israel a matter of such transcendent importance for universal history.
Our main task in the following pages of this chapter will be to point
out this moral element in the message of the prophets, to show how the
conception of Yahweh was by them moralized, and how the morality they
inculcated became purer and more elevated as the centuries passed,
till the evolution culminated in the lofty teachings of the Prophet of
Nazareth.
[Sidenote: The beginnings of
historical prophetism: Elijah and
Elisha]
The real history of Hebrew prophetism opens with the appearance in
the northern kingdom, about the beginning of the ninth century B.C.,
of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. It was the moral degeneracy
of the times of the monarchy, the inrush of the hateful vices of
civilization,--the greed of land[350] and of wealth, the cruel
inequalities of the new society, the selfish luxury of the rich, the
harsh oppression of the poor, the forgetting of men’s kinship, the
substitution of the worship of other gods for the sole worship of
Yahweh,--it was all this which called out the vehement protest of these
teachers of social justice and national righteousness.
It was, however, a very different prophetism from that of the later
seers of Israel which was represented by these early teachers. There
was in it a large nomadic element. Its representatives looked back to
the times of the simple pastoral life of the fathers as the Golden Age
of Israel. They hated civilization, that grossly material civilization
which Israel, under the lead of an idolatrous and luxurious court, was
now adopting from the surrounding nations, and looked upon it as “the
sum of all evils.” They were, furthermore, monolatrists rather than
monotheists. They believed in sacrifice; but sacrifices must not be
offered to strange gods--only to Yahweh. They were fanatical in their
zeal for the worship of Israel’s patron God; but even here there was
an ethical element, for in their view the triumph of the worship of
Yahweh over that of the Baals meant a triumph of the simple, severe,
desert morality over the voluptuousness and the nameless vices of the
Canaanite civilization.
This early prophetism, in a word, was a sort of Puritanism. Renan
calls it “this terrible prophetism.” It was fierce, cruel, fanatical,
intolerant, like English Puritanism. Indeed, it can best be studied
in this modern seventeenth-century prophetism, which was essentially
a revival of it. But notwithstanding the imperfect character of
this early prophetism, because of the true ethical element it
contained,[351] its appearance in Israel and its successful fight
against a sensuous idolatry was a matter of vast moral import, for
here in this narrow, intolerant monolatry is the real historical
beginning of that long religious-ethical development which lends chief
significance to the story of Israel, and constitutes a main interest
of the history of European civilization. In the words of Renan, “The
prophetism which struggled under Ahab and triumphed under Jehu is ...
upon the whole the most decisive event in the history of Israel. It
forms the commencement of the chain which, after nine hundred years,
found the last link in Jesus.”[352]
[Sidenote: The moral advance
represented by Amos (760 B.C.) and
Hosea (738–735 B.C.)]
The second link in this chain was formed by the prophets Amos and
Hosea, who delivered their message about the middle of the eighth
century. Amos was the earlier. There is in his message the note of
true prophetism. His thought of Yahweh is that he is a God who hates
iniquity and loves righteousness. What angers him is not idolatry or
the worship of other gods, but social wrongs and injustice--wickedness
in every form. He is angry with Israel[353] because there has been
stored up violence and robbery in the palace;[354] because of the
luxury and self-indulgence of the rich; because of the treading upon
the poor and the taking from him burdens of wheat; because of the
taking of bribes and the turning aside of the poor in the gate from
their right;[355] because of the falsifying of the balances by deceit
that the poor may be bought for silver and the needy for a pair of
shoes.[356] And what pleases Yahweh is not fast days and sacrifices,
but justice and righteousness: “I hate, ... I despise your fast
days,”[357] declares Yahweh. “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and
meat offerings, I will not accept.”[358] “But let judgment run down as
water and righteousness as a mighty stream.”[359]
A generation later the prophet Hosea repeats the same message; namely,
that what angers Yahweh is moral evil--lying, swearing, stealing, and
killing. He puts in the mouth of Yahweh these words: “For I desire
mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt
offerings.”[360]
There is here a notable ethical advance over the word to Israel of the
prophets of the preceding century. The thought of Amos and Hosea that
it is social wrongdoing that angers Yahweh is indeed no new thought,
for we meet with this conception of the moral character of God in the
teachings of the earlier prophets; what is new is the emphasis which is
laid upon it. Here we reach ethical monolatry;[361] ethical monotheism
lies not far in the future.
[Sidenote: The ideal of the
brotherhood of nations and
universal peace]
The morality of Amos and Hosea infolded the germ of ethical
cosmopolitanism. The conviction that the government of Yahweh is
founded on absolute justice and righteousness led to the conviction of
its ultimate universality, “for right is everywhere right, and wrong
is everywhere wrong.” The political situation in the Semitic world at
this time fostered the thought thus awakened. The predominant fact in
international relations in the latter half of the eighth century was
the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In its expansion it had already
engulfed many of the smaller states of western Asia, and Assyria had
become a world power. Political unity suggested now, as it did when
Rome had established a world empire, religious and ethical unity.
Yahweh, Israel’s God of justice and right, is the suzerain of all other
gods and peoples. He will establish a world-wide kingdom, and all
nations shall acknowledge his righteous rule.
As representatives of this broadening vision we have the great prophets
Isaiah and Micah, who, proclaiming the universal reach of the law of
right and justice, held aloft a noble ethical ideal of the brotherhood
of nations and universal peace. Seers by virtue of their conviction of
the absoluteness, the oneness and sovereignty, of the moral law, they
foretold the coming of a time in the last days when all the nations of
the earth should form a federation under the suzerainty of Israel with
Jerusalem as the world capital: “Out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge among the
nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more.”[362]
This is the first distinct expression in Hebrew literature, or in that
of any race, of the idea of the brotherhood of man and a federated
world. The lofty ideal has never faded from the eyes of men. It has
inspired all the noblest visions of world unity and peace through
the war-troubled ages, and is in the world of to-day the source and
spring of much of that ethical idealism which with prophetic faith
and conviction proclaims a federated world, with the nations dwelling
together in peace and amity, as the one divine event toward which all
history moves.
With this lofty ethical universalism in the teachings of Isaiah and
Micah was joined a simple personal and social morality of the human
heart and reason. These prophets were at one with Amos and Hosea in
proclaiming that what Yahweh delights in is not sacrifices and the
observance of new moons and Sabbaths, but cleanliness of life and
services of love. Hear Isaiah as he repeats the words of the Lord: “I
delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats....
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.... Cease to
do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”[363] And listen to Micah:
“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high
God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a
year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams and with ten
thousands of rivers of oil?... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[364]
[Sidenote: The prophetic spirit
creates a unique ethical
literature]
The prophets of the eighth century were the first of the literary
prophets; that is, the first of those who employed literature as
the vehicle of their message to Israel. Hence here our attention is
called to a matter of supreme significance for universal morality--the
ethicalizing of the mythology and traditional history of the Hebrew
people.
It was during the age of the kings that the mass of cosmological myths
and legends borrowed from Babylonia,--doubtless largely through contact
with Assyria,--the traditions of the patriarchs, and the story of the
sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus, all of which had been transmitted
from the foretime orally or in writing, was worked over and edited
afresh, in which process it received the indelible stamp of the deeper
and truer moral consciousness of this later age. For though probably
little of this work was done by the prophets themselves, it was done
by men who wrote under the inspiration of the new thoughts of God and
of his moral government which had been awakened in the souls of the
great teachers of Israel. The polytheistic elements of these myths and
traditions and their grosser and more archaic immoralities were pruned
away, while at the same time they were given a monotheistic cast and
a truer morality was breathed into them. In a word, all this literary
material was censored by the growing moral consciousness of Israel.
The outcome was the creation of a literature absolutely unique in its
moral educative worth.
Thus the remolded and moralized Chaldean account of the creation of the
world and the beginnings of human history came to form the basis of
the opening chapters of Genesis, whose influence upon Hebrew morality,
through molding Israel’s idea of the character of Yahweh and of his
relations to man, it would hardly be possible to exaggerate. Also the
tradition of the Exodus, given now its final form and received by the
later generations of Israel as an historically true account of the
experiences of their fathers, left an ineffaceable impress upon the
mind and heart of the Hebrew nation, determining largely their ideas
as to their chief moral obligations as the chosen and covenanted
people of Yahweh. It was this tradition of their heroic past which was
the inspiration of the moral strivings of the nation. Furthermore,
all this literary material, thus reshaped and colored by the growing
monotheistic ideas of the teachers of Israel and bearing the stamp
of their gradually deepening moral consciousness, and in this form
transmitted to the Aryan nations of the West, was destined to become
one of the most important factors not merely in the religious but
especially in the moral life of the European peoples.
[Sidenote: The ethicalizing of
pagan festivals and cults]
Just as the myths and traditions, in part borrowed from neighboring
peoples and in part transmitted from Israel’s own foretime, were
transformed and moralized by the ethical genius of the Hebrew spirit,
so were the institutions and festivals borrowed by the Israelites
from kindred Semitic peoples, and particularly from the Canaanites,
transmuted and moralized.[365] Permeated by the ethical spirit of
Israel’s great teachers and transformed into moral symbols, these
originally nonethical agricultural cults and festivals were given a
distinct educative value.
Among these pagan institutions thus moralized was the festival or rest
day of the Sabbath.[366] Filled with ethical meaning and consecrated
to a religious-moral purpose, this originally pagan lunar festival was
made a most important means of moral instruction and discipline.[367]
This borrowing and moralizing by Israel of this festival has an almost
exact parallel in the later borrowing and moralizing by the Christian
Church of the pagan festival of the winter solstice, which has given
Christendom one of its most beautiful anniversaries, one which takes
precedence of all others in its power to evoke the tenderest altruistic
sentiments.
As with the Sabbath, so was it with all the festivals which the
Israelites, after their settlement in Palestine and during the period
when they were passing from the nomadic to the agricultural life,
adopted from the Canaanite peoples among whom they were dwelling. All
of these in the course of time were turned from their original purpose,
were cleansed of immoral and sensuous elements, and were thus made the
means of awakening moral feelings and developing moral character.
This transforming power of the ethical genius of Israel finds a true
historical parallel in the esthetic genius of ancient Hellas, which,
receiving from every side elements of art and general culture, inspired
them all with the beauty and energy of her own spirit.[368] “Israel,”
as Cornill finely says, “resembles in spiritual things the fabulous
King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold.”
[Sidenote: The dual morality of
the Deuteronomic code]
The effect of the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and
the carrying away into captivity of the flower of the Ten Tribes was to
put an end to prophetism in the North and to make Judah in the South
the center of the movement which had such significance for the moral
life of the world.
During the century and a half that passed between the fall of the
northern kingdom and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian
King Nebuchadnezzar, only one great prophet appeared in Judah. This was
Jeremiah, who prophesied in the reign of King Josiah, just a little
time before the Captivity.
It was during the reign of this king that there appeared a book which,
excepting the Gospels of the New Testament, has had a greater influence
upon the general evolution of morality than any other book ever
written. This was a work known as the Book of Deuteronomy, that is, the
repetition of the law. Before the discovery of the Laws of Hammurabi
this was the oldest known code of laws.
The book contains much archaic material--traditions, customs, judicial
decisions, laws, and rituals--manifestly handed down from the earliest
times in Israel, with additions made at the moment of its appearance,
and all bearing plainly the stamp of the spirit and temper of these
later times. Hence it comes that there are two moralities embodied
in the work--an atavistic ritual morality and a progressive social
morality.
[Sidenote: The ritual ethics of
the code]
In that part of the code which has to do with the ethics of ritualism
the dominant motive of the editors or compilers springs from a dread
and abhorrence of idolatry, like the dread and abhorrence of heresy
in medieval Christendom. Yahweh will divide his worship with no other
god. Israel had gone after other gods and Yahweh had given her into
the hands of the Assyrians. A like fate awaited Judah if she served
any other than him: “Ye shall not go after other gods, or the gods
of the people which are round about you, lest the anger of the Lord
be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the
earth,”[369] is the first commandment with threatening.
Fear that Yahweh would do unto Judah as he had done unto Israel
awakened the conscience of the nation. Idolatry was suppressed; the
high places on which incense was burned unto the Baals were defiled,
and the altars and the images of the strange gods were broken down and
ground into dust.
This reform movement practically ended the long struggle which had
gone on now for six hundred years and more between polytheism and the
rising monotheism of the people of Israel. But unfortunately while
the monotheistic element of the religion of Yahweh was brought out by
the reform in sharper outline, the ethical element was obscured. The
religion that was now made the exclusive worship was really little
more than a pagan cult. It consisted in the careful keeping of feast
days and the observance of the rites and sacrifices of the Temple--an
inheritance largely from the heathen nations around about Israel.
Nothing could have been more opposed to true prophetism. It was the
triumph of reactionary ritualism.
This victory of ritualism has exerted an almost incalculable influence
upon the development of morality from the time of King Josiah down to
the present day. The immediate effect upon prophetism in Judah was most
lamentable. “Deuteronomy simply confirmed the belief that religion
was concerned with ritual rather than with morality.”[370] And so the
outcome of the promulgation of a written revealed law was, in the words
of Wellhausen, “the death of prophecy.”[371]
But this fatal effect was not felt at once. In the dark days of the
Exile, now just at hand, there was a revival of true prophetism; but
after the return from the Captivity, as we shall see, the prophetic
spirit was almost stifled by the rigid legalism of the Temple cult.
And it was this same Deuteronomic law which, in the hands of medieval
inquisitors, stifled awakening prophetism in Europe and delayed for
generations true moral reform after the stirring of the European mind
by the Renaissance.[372]
The intolerant spirit of this narrow, rigid religion of ritualism
found specially sinister expression in Israel’s war ethics. Instead of
promoting international amity and good will, it deepened intertribal
prejudices and hatreds and intensified the barbarities of war. “Thou
shalt save alive nothing that breatheth;”[373] “thou shalt smite them
and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor
show mercy unto them,”[374] were the commands to Israel regarding the
nations round about her who were the worshipers of other gods than
Yahweh.
Thus religion was made an active principle of international savagery.
It made it, in the words of Cheyne, “difficult, if not impossible,
... to love God fervently without hating a large section of God’s
creatures.”[375] Under the influence of the fierce ordinances of the
Deuteronomic code the war practices of the Israelites became more
ferocious and savage than those of any other nation of antiquity,
unless it be those of the Assyrian kings. Their enemies, who were also
the enemies of Yahweh, they smote with the utmost fury, putting to the
edge of the sword men, women, and the little ones, and taking as booty
the cattle and the spoils.
[Sidenote: The social ethics of
the code]
But, as we have said, there were two spirits striving together in
this strange Deuteronomic code. In opposition to this spirit of stern
fanatical intolerance there was a spirit of tender sympathy for the
unfortunate, the poor, and the oppressed.[376] Along with this priestly
morality, based on a certain conception of Yahweh and of his relations
to Israel, there was another wholly different morality--a social
morality whose chief sanctions were the natural impulses and sentiments
of the human heart and conscience.
This code of social ethics bears witness to a progressive development
of the moral consciousness in Israel. The ethical advance is
unmistakably registered in various ameliorations effected in the crude
customary law of earlier times. One of the most noteworthy of these
mitigations concerned the primitive blood revenge. In common with other
peoples in the kinship stage of culture, the early Hebrews in their
pursuit of blood vengeance made no distinction between intentional
and unintentional homicide. The regulations of the Deuteronomic code
regarding the so-called cities of refuge[377] bear witness to a growing
power of moral discrimination; for these cities are made inviolable
sanctuaries whither might flee the manslayer who had slain his neighbor
unawares and hated him not in time past.[378]
Especially is the humanitarian advance shown in the provisions of
the code which relate to the poor, the debtor, and the bondsman. We
meet here some of the most humane regulations to be found in any of
the codes of antiquity. Social morality is almost made to consist in
consideration for the poor: “If there be among you a poor man ...
thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him”--so the law enjoins--“and
shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need.”[379] Things that
were necessities to the poor man were not to be taken as security
for a loan: “No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to
pledge.”[380] If a garment be taken as security, this must be returned
before night, in order that the man may sleep in his own raiment.[381]
The widow’s raiment must not be taken in pledge at all.[382] The wages
of the poor and needy must be promptly paid: “At his day thou shalt
give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is
poor, and setteth his heart upon it.”[383]
The law goes even further in its humane endeavor to prevent the
oppression of the needy. The loaning of money in ancient times was
in general a very different thing from similar money transactions
in this commercial and industrial age of ours. Those seeking loans
were the very poor, who were forced to borrow to meet domestic
necessities. Under such conditions the taking of interest would
naturally be denounced, and those who did so would come to be regarded
as extortioners, and robbers of the poor. Hence the prohibition, “Thou
shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; ... unto a stranger thou
mayest lend upon usury.”[384]
This legislation, well adapted to the times and the conditions of the
society for which it was enacted, became centuries later, through its
adoption and attempted enforcement by the medieval Church, a source of
grave mischief. It constituted a heavy drag for centuries upon the
industrial development of European civilization.
The same spirit of tenderness toward the portionless and needy is shown
in the provision concerning the ingathering of the harvest: “When thou
cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in
the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it; it shall be for the
stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.”[385] This tender
consideration for the poor speaks from one of the most beautiful of
Bible pictures--that of the Moabitess Ruth gleaning in the fields
after the reapers, who “let fall some of the handfuls of purpose for
her.”[386]
The social conscience awakening in Israel, to which the above
regulations and commandments bear witness, finds further expression in
the provisions of the code effecting ameliorations in the lot of the
unfortunate bondsman. The master is enjoined to see that the Sabbath
is observed by his slave as well as by himself and his family, and the
reason assigned is the humanitarian one--“that thy manservant and thy
maidservant may rest as well as thou.”[387] And a limitation was set to
the time that a person could be held in bondage: “And if thy brother,
an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee
six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from
thee.”[388] Furthermore, the law is solicitous respecting the welfare
of the bondsman even after emancipation: “And when thou sendest him
out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty. Thou shalt
furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy threshing floor,
and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath
blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.”[389]
To these ameliorative measures effect is sought to be given through
a revival of memories of the past. The masters are enjoined to be
compassionate to their bondsmen because they themselves had been worn
and bruised in bondage: “Remember,” says the lawgiver, “that ye were
bondsmen in the land of Egypt.”[390]
_2. The Morality of the Prophets of the Exile_
[Sidenote: The effects of the
Captivity upon the moral evolution
in Israel]
We have reached now a turning point in the moral history of Israel.
Speaking of the effects of the Exile upon the inner life of Israel,
Renan uses these words: “Twice it was the fate of Israel to owe its
salvation to that which is the ruin of others, and to be recalled by
the crushing of its earthly hopes to a sense of its great duties toward
humanity.”
The mission of Israel, her duty toward humanity, was, as we have said,
to interpret life in ethical terms. As the story of the exilic and the
postexilic period unfolds, we shall see how the sad experiences of the
Exile purified and deepened the moral consciousness of Israel, and
prepared her for the great part she was destined to play in the moral
education of mankind.
It was the great unknown prophet of the Exile, the so-called Second
Isaiah, who wrote just after the capture of Babylon by the Persian king
Cyrus (539 B.C.), who was the representative of the essentially new
conceptions of Yahweh and of the requirements of the moral law which
characterize this ethical development.[391]
[Sidenote: Ethical monotheism at
last; religion and morality at one]
Shut out from participation in political affairs, the best energies
of the exiled community seem to have been turned to the things of the
inner life, and consequently the development in the religious and moral
spheres went on apace. The conception of God--of what is pleasing to
him and what he requires of man--was elevated and purified.
We meet now for the first time monotheism pure and absolute. Yahweh is
conceived as the only God; the gods of the other nations are no gods
at all. Some of the earlier prophets had, it is true, caught sight of
this lofty truth; but the multitude of the people certainly had no such
idea of their patron god. The prophets of the Exile are the first to
proclaim this doctrine with such emphasis as to cause it to become a
part of the indestructible religious consciousness of Israel.[392]
One cannot read the declarations which the unknown prophet puts in the
mouth of Yahweh--“Before me there was no God formed, neither shall
there be after me;”[393] “I am the first and I am the last; and besides
me there is no God;”[394] “I am Yahweh who wrought everything, who
stretched forth the heavens above, who spread forth the earth--who
was with me;”[395] “I am Yahweh and there is none beside me;”[396]
“I am God, and there is none else, I am God, and there is none like
me”[397]--one cannot read these declarations without being convinced
that they were not phrased by one to whom the idea of the unity of God
had become a commonplace, but rather by one to whom the thought was
something in the nature of a discovery.[398]
But it was not merely the idea of the oneness of deity, of Yahweh as
the sole God, that was the element of supreme significance in this
practically new thought of God. There is nothing unethical in the
belief in many gods; nor, on the other hand, is there anything ethical
in the belief that there is only one God. The historically important
thing about the monotheism of Israel is that it was ethical monotheism.
Up to the time of the Exile the multitude in Israel, notwithstanding
the teachings of the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, had
never thought of Yahweh as an absolutely just god, but rather as one
who would favor his people under all circumstances. Put in the language
of to-day, they conceived Yahweh as a partisan, who would be for his
people right or wrong. But under the discipline of the Exile the
more spiritual-minded of the nation came to accept the teaching that
Yahweh’s favor “is conditioned by a law of absolute righteousness.”[399]
This conception of God marks a turning point in the moral evolution
of humanity. It lifted a new ethical standard. It effected a union of
religion and morality. This, it is true, was not a wholly new thing in
history. In the worship of the good Osiris in Egypt these elements had
been united; in the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda they had also
been brought together; and at this very time in Greece there was an
effort being made to unite them in the worship of the Delphian Apollo.
But the union effected by the prophets of Israel was the only one
destined to have large and permanent historical consequences. Because
of the ethical content given the god idea by them, their conception
of deity constituted the most precious part of the spiritual heritage
bequeathed by Judaism to Christianity.
[Sidenote: Repudiation of
the doctrine of collective
responsibility]
The progressive clarification of the moral consciousness in Israel
disclosed by this truer conception of the divine character is further
shown by the definite and emphatic repudiation by the prophets of the
Exile of the doctrine of collective responsibility.[400]
There was an ironical proverb current in Israel, which, expressing
bitter protest against the unequal ways of Yahweh in visiting the sins
of the fathers upon the children,[401] ran thus: “The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”[402] The
prophet Ezekiel says to the people that they shall not have occasion
any more to use this proverb.[403] With clear moral vision he sees
how impossible it is that the moral government of Yahweh should rest
upon the principle of collective responsibility, and that the innocent
should be punished for the guilty. Declaring that the ways of God are
just and equal, he annuls all earlier provisions of the law by boldly
proclaiming that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,
neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.[404]
It marks a great moral advance when guilt comes thus to be viewed as
a personal and not a communal thing. But unfortunately the ground
here gained for morality was lost when the theologians of the early
Christian Church, reviving the outgrown conception of collective
responsibility, formulated the dogma that all the generations of
men--such being the solidarity of the human race--are partakers in the
sin of the first parents and under condemnation therefor.[405]
[Sidenote: The doctrine of the
sufferings of the righteous as
vicarious and expiatory]
But the decisive rejection by the deepening moral consciousness in
Israel of the doctrine that under the moral government of Yahweh the
innocent are punished for the guilty left still unsolved the problem
of the sufferings of the righteous--that problem which had at all
times so troubled the pious Israelite, and for the solution of which
so many different theories had been framed. The new teaching, or the
implication of the new teaching, that such sufferings are not penal
in character, that they are no sign of God’s displeasure with the
sufferer, while a teaching of consolation, contributed nothing to the
actual solution of the problem. But a new theory now offers a new
interpretation. This theory assumes that all transgression must be
atoned for by suffering, but teaches that this suffering may be borne
vicariously by one not the transgressor, and the guilt thereby expiated.
This idea worked itself out in the sorrow-burdened souls of the pious
exiles in Babylon. Never did acquaintance with bitter sorrow yield
sweeter fruit. The thought finds expression in Chapters LII and LIII
of Isaiah.[406] The righteous Servant of Yahweh, who is despised and
rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, is the
personified community of the pious Israelites, who are wounded for the
transgressions and bruised for the iniquities of the nation.[407]
Of all the ethical products of the troublous life of Israel, this
idea that under the moral government of the world one may vicariously
bear the burden of another’s fault and thus atone for it was the most
important in its historical consequences. Six hundred years after
the utterance of this message of consolation to the pious Israelite
exiles, the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, thus held aloft
by the Great Unknown, was incarnated, so it was believed, in Jesus of
Nazareth. Clothed in actual flesh and blood, the sweet persuasiveness
of the ideal--the nobility and divineness of suffering voluntarily
borne in the stead of another--made unwonted appeal to the heart of
humanity, and for eighteen hundred years and more, accepted as a true
symbol and interpretation of the moral order, it has been a chief
molding force in the moral life of the Western world.
_3. The Moral Life in the Postexilic Age_
[Sidenote: A ritual morality]
The chief moral fact in the postexilic period[408] was the putting
into strict practice of the Levitical and Deuteronomic law, and the
consequent triumph of ritual morality. From the establishment of this
law till the rise of Christianity, orthodox morality in Judah consisted
in the careful observance of the thousand and one minute rules and
requirements of this Temple code. The good man was he who kept the law
of the Lord.[409] All duties were in a sense religious duties; they
were acts performed simply because of the supposed divine command that
they should be performed.[410]
Such dependence as this on rules and forms and rites is of course
disastrous to all true morality. It fosters the idea that morality
consists in the performance of certain outer acts, instead of being the
attitude of the soul toward the good and the right inwardly discerned.
It substitutes an outer standard for the individual conscience.
Conscience disused loses its power of discrimination and becomes
atrophied. The ethically indifferent is made the all-important, and
thus all moral values are confused.
What confusion resulted in Israel is revealed in the denunciations
of this rigid, mechanical legalism by the Prophet of Nazareth: “Woe
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint
and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the
law, judgment, mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not
to leave the other undone.”[411] “Not that which goeth into the mouth
defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth.... To eat with
unwashen hands defileth not a man.”[412]
The Sermon on the Mount announces the awakening of the true prophetic
spirit in Israel after a sleep of five hundred years.
[Sidenote: An intolerant
nationalism]
A sinister phase of the orthodox religious-ethical system of the
postexilic age was its narrow, intolerant nationalism. To be an enemy
of Israel was what was believed to constitute wickedness, and to
excite the wrath of Yahweh, just as later in the ethics of certain
systems of Christian theology the unbeliever or pagan, merely because
of his unbelief or paganism, was regarded as wicked and as deserving
of eternal punishment. In psalms which date from this period these
enemies of Yahweh are cursed with a fierce hatred which spares not even
the children, but pronounces happy him who shall take up and dash the
little ones against the stones.[413] Nowhere in history do we meet with
a more fanatically intolerant nationalism.
[Sidenote: The relation of the
synagogue to the moral evolution]
It was only a comparatively small part of the Jewish nation whose
home was the city of Jerusalem in the later postexilic period. The
Israelite community was now widely scattered in the cities of the East
and the West. One important outcome of this, in its bearings upon the
moral life of Israel and of the nations that were to receive ethical
instruction from her, was the establishment of the synagogue.[414]
For the Deuteronomic code had made religion to be something connected
with the Temple, something separate and apart from true morality,
whose root is in human relationships. Now the Dispersion, tearing the
Israelites away from the Temple, tended to bring into prominence those
religious exercises and those duties which had nothing to do with the
Temple service. This was favorable to the religion and morality of
the prophets, as opposed to the religion and morality of the priests.
The services of the synagogue took the place of the ceremonies and
sacrifices of the Temple.[415] These services consisted in the
reading and translation of a portion of the Scriptures with comments
thereupon.[416] This meant the incoming of a new and powerful agency
in the promotion not only of the religious but also of the moral
education of humanity, for this custom “was the origin of the homily
and sermon.”[417] The synagogue was the prototype and precursor of the
Christian basilica and the Puritan meetinghouse.
[Sidenote: The new doctrine of
immortality: its ethical import]
The reëstablishment of the Law we have pronounced the chief ethical
fact in the history of Judaism after the return from the Babylonian
Captivity. And this is true if it is the history of the Jews alone that
we have in mind; but regarding the moral evolution in the world at
large there is another fact belonging to this period of even greater
importance. This was the incoming of the doctrine of immortality.[418]
We have seen that from the first the Hebrews, like the Babylonians,
held a belief in a sort of shadowy existence after death;[419] but of a
belief in personal immortality in our sense of the word, of a life of
rewards and punishments beyond the grave, there is no certain trace in
Hebrew literature until about the third or second century B.C.[420]
Different influences had concurred to create this new conception of
the hereafter and to secure for it by the end of the Greek period a
wide acceptance. First, there was what has been called the subjective
sense of fellowship with God. During this period of Israelite history
there was engendered in select souls a passionate outreaching after
divine companionship. This feeling is revealed in many a postexilic
psalm, as where the psalmist exclaims, “For thou wilt not leave my
soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one [beloved] to
see corruption.”[421] This was the divination of love like that of the
old mystic who exclaimed, “O God, if I should die, Thou couldst not
live.”[422] It was such filial love and trust as this, which found its
divinest expression in the life of “the Sublime Mystic of Galilee,”
that created in many a devout soul in Israel that larger hope which
gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.
But while it was probably deep religious feeling, the soul’s
recognition of its sonship to God, that called into existence the idea
of personal immortality, it was the ethical necessity created by a
profound faith in God’s absolute justice, an irrefragable conviction
that under the moral government of the world well-doing will be
rewarded and evildoing punished, that gained for the doctrine its wide
acceptance. That good men should be afflicted and wicked men should
enjoy prosperity, has in all ages of reflection caused questionings
and murmurings. But this ethical problem filled with peculiar unrest
the souls of the Israelites, first, because more than any other
people they felt the need of a just God; and second, because of their
lack of belief in a future life of rewards and punishments in which
the wrongs and inequalities of this life might be righted. Hence
the many different solutions of the problem which they thought out,
and through which they sought to justify the ways of God to man. So
long, however, as life practically ended at the grave, the problem
remained insolvable. But the doctrine of another existence in which
the righteous man should receive compensation for his sufferings here,
and the evil man just retribution for his deeds, offered a reasonable
solution of the problem that had so troubled the conscience of Israel.
It was this undoubtedly that caused the teaching to gain popular
currency.
The doctrine, however, was not wholly the product of the religious
and ethical development within Israel. Its growth was fostered by
various outside influences. Among these was the Persian doctrine
of the resurrection and a future life of retributive justice, with
which the Jews became familiar at the time of the Exile in Babylon or
later in the Persian period. Then again the development of the idea
was stimulated, after the third century B.C., by Greek philosophy,
particularly the Platonic.
But far more influential than either Zoroastrian teachings or Greek
philosophy must have been the thought and conviction of ancient Egypt.
After the founding of Alexandria, toward the end of the fourth century
B.C., a vast number of Jews were settled in that capital; and though
the positive evidence here is very meager, still we have a right to
something more than a conjecture that in that city Judaism was deeply
influenced by the ancient Egyptian doctrine of immortality.[423]
Under these various influences this doctrine rooted itself firmly among
the Jews, and by the time of the appearance of Christ had become a
distinctive tenet of a large and influential party among them.[424]
After the conception of a just God and the ideal of the suffering
Servant of Yahweh, this doctrine of immortality, with its correlate
teaching of future rewards and punishments, was perhaps the most
important product, in its moral consequences, of the life and ethical
experiences of ancient Israel. It exercised little or no influence, at
least no decisive influence, upon the moral evolution in Judaism, but,
adopted by Christianity, it was given new force and currency, and for
eighteen hundred years and more has been one of the great bulwarks and
sanctions of morality in the Western world.
[Sidenote: The expansion of
the moral sympathies in the
Hellenistic Age]
We have spoken of the rigid legalism and the narrow nationalistic
spirit of orthodox postexilic Judaism. But it must not be thought
that in these last days the spirit of prophetism was dead. Hidden
beneath this hard rind of legalism there pulsed a true moral life. This
life found expression in a movement toward ethical universalism. To
understand this movement we must recall the great political revolution
of this epoch.
Almost exactly two centuries after the return of the Jews from the
Babylonian Captivity, all the political relations of the Semitic East
were abruptly ended and new relations established by the conquests of
Alexander the Great. Hellenism, the most powerful solvent of history,
now came in contact with Hebrew life and thought both in Palestine
and in Egypt. The effect upon the ethical development in Judaism was
profound. With the expansion of the political and mental horizons
the moral sympathies of men were widened. The wall of separation
between Jew and Gentile was thrown down. In Alexandria and in the
many new Hellenistic cities in Asia, the nobler spirits of dispersed
Israel, casting aside their narrow racial prejudices, with enlarged
mental vision and widened moral sympathies, came to read with new
understanding their great prophets who had preached the universality of
the moral law and the brotherhood of nations.[425] Hebrew literature
registers the change. This new spirit of internationalism, of
kindness and justice even to enemies, breathes from many of the later
psalms[426] and speaks from many a passage of the so-called “wisdom
books” of the period. The allegory of Jonah embodies the liberal spirit
of this new Judaism. The great lawyers Hillel and Shammai,[427] who
laid emphasis upon social duties and human service, represented the
humanitarian phase of the age movement. Philo, the Alexandrian Jew,
represented its philosophical side. The way was being prepared for the
incoming of the ethical universalism of Christianity.
CHAPTER X
THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HELLAS: AN IDEAL OF SELF-REALIZATION
[Sidenote: Introduction]
The Greek ethical ideal, a creation of the natural feelings and
impulses of the human mind and heart uninfluenced by theological
doctrines, was one of the most imperishable products of Greek life
and thought. This conception of what constitutes good life became a
part of the Greek bequest to civilization. The modern world is thus
indebted to Greece not only for priceless elements of its intellectual
and art life, but for precious elements of its moral life as well.
Throughout the medieval age, it is true, it was the ethical heritage
from Judea that shaped and colored the moral ideal of the European
peoples, but even during that period this Semitic ideal bore the deep
impress of Greek ethics, while ever since the Renaissance it is the
ethical bequest of Hellas which has steadily become an ever more and
more dominant factor in the moral life of the Western nations. The
conscience of the modern world of science is Hellenic rather than
Hebraic.
I. INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS DETERMINING THE MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The city state the mold
of Greek morality and the chief
sphere of Greek moral activity]
The Greek city state was the creator of the Greek conscience; that is
to say, the relationships and activities of the Greek as a citizen, and
not his relationships and activities as a husband or father or business
man, determined his chief duties. Conscience was very little involved
in that part of his life which lay outside the civic sphere. It was
solely as a member of a city community, which was to the Greek what
the Church was to the man of medieval times, that he could live the
truly moral life and attain the highest virtue.
[Sidenote: The Greek view of man’s
nature as good]
The common Greek view of man’s nature was like that of the Chinese
moralists; that is, it conceived human nature as being essentially
good.[428] And this conception included the whole of man’s nature,
his body as well as his spirit. As we shall learn, this doctrine
influenced profoundly the Greek conception of what is permissible and
right in conduct. It made it seem right to give full, though regulated
and reasonable, indulgence to the bodily impulses and instincts. It
made the fundamental maxim of Greek morality to be, Live according to
nature. It left no place in Greek thought for the Oriental notion of an
antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. Hence asceticism with its
repressions of the bodily instincts and appetites, which is so common
an expression of the moral sentiment among the Oriental races, found no
place in Greek morality till after Greek culture had come in contact
with the religious and ethical systems of Asia.
[Sidenote: The idea of harmony in
the god world]
Closely connected with this idea of the essential goodness and oneness
of man’s nature was the conception of unity and harmony in the god
world. In passing from the Orient to Greece we leave behind not only
Indian pessimism, but Egyptian and Persian dualism. We leave behind
that conception of disharmony and conflict in the invisible world which
is such a characteristic phase of much of Oriental thought. We hear,
indeed, the faint echo of a prehistoric struggle between the earth gods
and the sky gods. But all now is peace. The Titans are chained, and the
gods that are the friends of men reign supreme.[429]
Just as that Oriental dualistic world philosophy exercised a vast
influence upon the moral ideals of the East and of the later Christian
world that inherited that system of thought, making the moral life
serious and strenuous, a fight against evil, so did the opposing Greek
conception of unity and harmony in the god world exert a profound
influence upon Greek morality, emptying the moral life of everything
like strenuousness and battle. It made Greek morality to be like the
morality of sensuous, joyous youth.
[Sidenote: The character of the
Greek gods]
In strong contrast to Hebrew morality, which, as we have seen, was
almost exclusively a religious one, springing, that is to say, from
certain conceptions of God’s character and of his relations to man,
Greek morality was in the main a lay or secular one. Aristotle, who
gave scientific form to Greek ethics, allowed hardly any place in the
moral code to religious duties. Yet, though the Greek moral ideal was
not based upon religion, it was influenced by it; for there cannot be
an entire separation of religion and morality. Religious beliefs, like
beliefs of every other kind, help to shape men’s ideas of what is right
and what is wrong in conduct.
The influence of the Greek religion upon Greek morality was not wholly
favorable. The attribution by the Greeks of human frailties and vices
to their gods tended to depress human morality, since men are never
better than their gods. It is true that the moral character of the gods
of any people is a creation of the moral consciousness of that people;
still, after once called into existence and enthroned, these divinities
react upon their creators and shape in a greater or less degree the
moral character of their worshipers.
But though there were elements in some of the Greek cults, particularly
in those of Dionysus[430] and Aphrodite in the later period,[431] that
were harmful to morality, still in general Greek morality found in
religion at once a restraining and a stimulating influence.
Even as early as the Homeric Age religion had become a moral force. It
is the fear of the gods even more than the fear of men which is the
motive force for rightdoing.[432] Odysseus’ request of Ilus of Ephyra
for poison with which to smear the points of his arrows is refused
through fear of the divine anger, and Priam in praying Achilles for the
body of Hector admonishes him to have reverence for the gods.
And throughout later times the gods are the guardians of morality.
They are the avengers of perjury. They are the punishers of him who
breaks the law of hospitality. Especially does Zeus, as the god of
hospitality, “take note of those who welcome and those who maltreat
the stranger.”[433] The shrines of all the gods are places of refuge
and sanctuary. The suppliant at the altar is sacrosanct. Here the hand
of the avenger of injury is stayed. “Mercy,” says Sophocles, “shares
the judgment seat of Zeus.” As the god of the suppliant, Zeus not only
protects but purifies and delivers. Thus were the high moral qualities
of mercy and forgiveness thrown into relief, and men, while taught
self-restraint, were imbued with reverence for these attributes of
character.
This high morality of the Greek religion reached its culmination in the
worship of the Delphian Apollo. In truth, the history of Delphi is
a large part of the history of Greek morality. It reflected from age
to age the deepening moral perceptions of the race. The oracle thus
stood in close relation with the great teachers of Greece. The ethical
impulse of Pythagoreanism seems to have gone forth from Delphi. Apollo
gave a religious sanction to the emancipation of the slave, and thus
promoted social morality. The slave given his freedom by his master at
Delphi became, as a freedman, sacrosanct.[434] Apollo stimulated also
political morality. Through the Delphic Amphictyony his influence was
exerted in mitigating the barbarities of war between Greek and Greek,
and in creating an Hellenic fraternity. Thus through religion was the
narrow sphere embraced by the ordinary moral feelings of the Greeks
broadened and brought to cover wide federations of cities and tribes.
Greek religion also exercised a stimulating influence upon morality
through the Mysteries, especially through those of Eleusis. The greater
number of these religious fraternities had an ethical aim--“the aim of
worshiping a pure god, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of
cultivating a spirit of brotherhood.”[435]
[Sidenote: Significance for Greek
morality of the absence of a
priestly caste]
But the most noteworthy fact concerning Greek religion in its relations
to Greek morality is this--that it was a religion practically without a
priesthood. For there never arose in Greece a priestly class like that
in Egypt, in Persia, in India, and in Judea. This is a fact of supreme
importance in the history of Greek morals. It prevented the growth
of a theocratic morality, with its artificial ritual duties and its
conservative tendencies.
It is interesting to note that it was the early rise of philosophy in
the Greek cities of Ionia that saved Hellas from the domination of
a sacerdotal caste. For at the time this philosophy arose the Orphic
doctrines were overspreading Greece. Now this was a priestly religion,
that is, a religion interpreted and administered by priests. Its
triumph in Greece would have meant the establishment of a powerful
national priesthood. This misfortune was prevented by the intellectual
and philosophical movement in Ionia. It is this fact which leads
Professor Bury to pronounce the rise of the study of philosophy in
the Ionian cities one of the most important facts in the history of
Hellas; for “it meant the triumph of reason over mystery; it led to the
discrediting of the Orphic movement; it insured the free political and
social progress of Hellas.”[436] And all this meant the keeping of the
ground clear for the upgrowth and development of an essentially lay
or secular morality, a morality that found its sanctions alone in the
human reason and conscience.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of race
election; Hellenes and Barbarians]
There was one conception common to both Greek and Jew which reacted
powerfully upon the moral system of each. This was what has been called
the doctrine of race election. The Jews believed themselves to be the
“chosen people.” The Greeks believed the same concerning themselves.
They were the intellectually elect people. All other peoples were
“barbarians.” Just as the Jewish doctrine of election excluded the
Gentile world from the pale of Jewish moral sympathies, so did the
Greek doctrine of separateness cause the Greek to shut out from his
moral sympathies the entire non-Greek world. We shall see a little
further on how this race egotism dictated large sections of the Greek
code of morals.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: Patriotism the cardinal
virtue; civic and military duties]
As we have already noticed, it was out of his relations as a citizen
that the primary duties of the Greek arose. His supreme duty was
patriotism, devotion to his city. “Good citizen” and “good man” were
interchangeable terms. And since a state of war rather than of peace
was the normal relation of the Greek cities, the military virtues held
the highest place in the ideal of excellence. “Their bodies,”--thus
Thucydides makes one of his characters speak of the citizen soldiers
of a typical Greek city--“their bodies they devote to their country
as though they belonged to other men.”[437] Thus the preëminent Greek
virtue, courage, was almost synonymous with valor in war. To throw away
one’s shield was the last infamy with the Greeks as with the Romans.
This type of character, blending the civic and the military virtues, is
presented to us with incomparable charm in Plutarch’s _Lives_. Here we
see the ideal in actual flesh and blood. It is the altruistic element
in this type of character which renders it so morally attractive.
[Sidenote: The Greek virtue of
courage a form of our virtue of
self-sacrifice]
For we should not fail to note that in the Greek enumeration of the
virtues, the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the first place in
our own moral ideal, is hidden under courage or fortitude.[438] With
us this virtue expresses itself in a great variety of forms; with the
Greeks, in one form chiefly--self-devotion on the battlefield. This
altruism, it is true, was narrow; it did not look beyond one’s own
city; but notwithstanding this limitation it was genuine altruism, for
facing death in battle, as Aristotle says, is “the greatest and noblest
of perils.”[439] This ready self-devotion of the individual to the
common interests of his city was the most attractive feature of Greek
morality. It formed the basis of Greek civilization. When this virtue
was lost the Greek city perished, and with it Greek civilization passed
away.
Among all the cities of Greece, Sparta realized most perfectly the
military virtues of the Greek ideal. The great place so long held by
her in the ancient world she won through the loyalty of her citizens
to the soldier’s ideal of obedience, courage, and self-devotion. The
conduct of Leonidas and his companions in the pass of Thermopylæ not
only had a bracing effect upon Greek character for generations, but has
never ceased, through the inspiration of example, to add to the sum
total in the world of loyalty to duty.
[Sidenote: The virtues of
temperance and justice]
To the virtue of self-sacrifice, under the guise of fortitude, or the
facing of danger or the endurance of pain in a worthy cause, the Greeks
added temperance, justice, and wisdom.
The Greek virtue of temperance or moderation was essentially the same
as our virtue of self-control or self-denial. It meant measure in
all things, the avoidance of the too much and the too little.[440]
Everything must be in fair proportion. In building a house one should
not go “beyond bounds in size, magnificence, and expense.” In conduct
likewise the mean must always be the aim. Restraint must be laid upon
one’s appetites and desires. Excessive ambition was a grave fault, as
was an undue lack of ambition.
The Greek conception of justice was this: Do no wrong, and suffer no
wrong to self or to others--with the emphasis on the latter part of the
injunction.[441] Christianity shifted the emphasis to the first part of
the commandment.
[Sidenote: The virtue of wisdom;
mental self-culture a duty]
By the term “wisdom” the Greeks covered very nearly what we mean by
mental self-culture. Now there has been a wide divergence of opinion
among different peoples respecting this matter. Primitive races can of
course have no feeling of obligation as to intellectual self-culture;
but even a people as advanced in civilization as the Romans may
have little or no conscience concerning it. Throughout a great part
of the medieval age in Europe mental culture was looked upon with
suspicion. Very few regarded it as a duty. But since the Renaissance,
that is, since the rebirth in the European world of the Greek spirit,
intellectual culture has been coming to be regarded more and more as an
urgent and imperious duty. It is to the ancient Greeks, as implied in
what we have just said, that we are largely indebted for this ethical
feeling. To the truly representative Greek the ethical imperative to
seek self-realization called especially for the development of the
mind, “his true self.” Mere intellectual curiosity, love of knowledge
for its own sake, was, it is true, one of the creative forces of Greek
intellectualism; but the ethical motive was ever near. In the Socratic
philosophy indeed it is made the dominant motive for the reason that
virtuous conduct is by Socrates held to be dependent upon knowledge,
the knowledge of things as they really are, things human and divine.
With the philosopher the gaining of this knowledge is the aim and end
of life.
[Sidenote: The development of the
body a duty; the ethical element
in Greek athleticism]
Asceticism, a chief characteristic of which is the conception that
there is something meritorious in the illtreatment or neglect of the
body, is one of the most striking phenomena in the moral history
of mankind. The Oriental peoples especially have ever been easily
persuaded, under the influence of religious ideas, that the body should
be illtreated in the interest of the spirit.
In passing from Asia to Greece we seem to enter a new ethical
atmosphere. We leave behind every trace of asceticism. We are no
longer surrounded by unkempt, gaunt, hollow-eyed fakirs, anchorites,
and monks. In Greek thought, as we have seen, there was no trace of
that Oriental idea of a warring between body and spirit. This happy
consciousness of the Greek of harmony in his own being had most
important consequences for Greek morality. It made the development of
the body, equally with that of the soul, an ethical requirement. The
outcome was Greek athleticism, one of the most attractive phases of
Hellenic civilization.
We do not mean to say that moral feeling was to the same degree active
in calling into existence Greek athleticism that religious-ethical
feeling was active in the creation of Oriental asceticism, but simply
that the ethical motive held a place among the various motives and
sentiments at work. Without this motive the Olympian games and the
other sacred festivals into which athletic exercises and competitions
entered, would never have won the place they held in Greek life and
culture. When in later times these festivals, subjected to commercial
and mercenary influences, lost wholly or in part this religious-ethical
element, then they lost also their distinctive character, and that
morally wholesome and uplifting influence which they had exercised upon
the Greek world throughout the best days of Hellas.
[Sidenote: Identification of moral
goodness with beauty]
Just as the cultured Greek brought the intellectual domain of life
within the province of morals, so likewise did he with the æsthetic.
It was not merely his æsthetic sense which was offended by ugliness
in form, but also his moral sense. To the Greek mind, to love beauty,
sensuous and spiritual, and to be beautiful was synonymous with being
good. “He who is beautiful to look upon,” says Sappho, “is good; and
who is good will soon be beautiful.”[442] “The beautiful,” comments
Wuttke in speaking of this phase of Greek ethics, “is _per se_ the
good; in enjoying and creating the beautiful man is moral.”[443] “The
‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’”--thus G. Lowes Dickinson sums up the Greek
view--“were one and the same thing; that is the first and the last word
of the Greek ideal.”[444]
This identification by the Greeks of goodness with beauty is one of
the most important matters in Greek ethics. For the conception was not
with them an inert thing. Greek civilization in all its phases was in
a great measure the expression of this conviction. The Greeks filled
the world with beautiful things because to create beauty was with them
an ethical as well as an æsthetic impulse and necessity. They felt the
holiness of beauty.
[Sidenote: Live according
to nature sums up all moral
requirements]
All the particular requirements of Greek morality, some of the most
important of which we have now briefly commented upon, are summed up
in the formula, Live conformably to nature. The idea here embodied of
what constitutes man’s full duty springs naturally from the doctrine
that man’s nature is essentially good. If that nature be good, then
virtuousness will consist in the well-rounded symmetrical development
of all the capacities of body and mind. Pindar’s profound injunction,
“Be what you are,” embodies the essence of the teachings of the Greek
moralists. They taught that man fulfills his destiny by becoming what
he is in his innermost being--by complete self-realization.[445]
III. LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: Its aristocratic
character]
A chief defect of Greek ethics was its aristocratic spirit. So many
were the classes excluded in whole or in part from the moral field
that Greek morality was almost as much a class morality as that of
Brahmanic India. Entire races and classes were as completely outside
the moral pale as is the Indian pariah. It was only the higher cultured
classes of citizens who, the moral philosophers taught, were capable
of attaining the noblest virtues and living the truly moral life. All
others were regarded as living on a semimoral or nonmoral animal plane
of existence.
[Sidenote: The exclusion of
non-Greek races from the moral
sphere]
Thus throughout a great part of the historic period the Greeks
virtually excluded all non-Greek peoples from the moral domain.[446]
They regarded these non-Hellenic folk about as we regard animals,
or as many a few generations ago looked upon the black race. They
thought it right for them to make unprovoked war upon such people and
to make slaves of those they might capture. Aristotle taught that to
hunt barbarians for the purpose of getting slaves was just as right
and proper as to hunt animals for food or sacrifice.[447] In a word,
non-Greeks were regarded as being practically outside the pale of
humanity.
[Sidenote: The exclusion of slaves]
The moral status of the slave in ancient Greece was determined by the
fact that slaves were usually barbarians.[448] Since as non-Greeks
they were already outside the moral pale, it followed naturally that
as slaves they had no standing in the court of morals. Their status
was almost the same as that of domestic animals. The Greek master
never felt that he owed any moral duties to his slaves, though kind
and merciful treatment of them was enjoined by the philosophers and
moralists. According to Aristotle, the relation of slave and master
is a purely natural one, like that of body and soul. He calls slaves
“living instruments.”
[Sidenote: The exclusion of the
domestic sphere]
Out of the family relationships arise a large part of the duties making
up the moral code of the modern Western world, while in the atmosphere
of the domestic circle are nourished many of what we regard as the most
sacred and attractive of the virtues. Now these family virtues, which
we esteem so highly, found only a very subordinate place in the Greek
ideal of character, for the reason that the family, like the clan and
the tribe, was almost absorbed by the city. In Sparta the family and
family life practically disappeared. In Plato’s ideal republic the
family is sacrificed to the state.
The status of the wife in most of the Greek cities was a low one. She
was practically one of the slaves. Ethical sentiment, as was true
of the sentiment of romantic love, seems to have been almost wholly
lacking in the marriage relation.
Infancy, in its earliest stages, was in general never brought beneath
the protecting ægis of the moral sentiment.[449] In the practice of the
exposure of ill-formed, weak, defective, or unpromising newborn infants
the Greeks, like the Romans, never advanced much beyond the standpoint
of barbarians. This abandonment or destruction by parents of their
offspring did not offend the common conscience. Even the philosophers
and moralists saw nothing in the practice to censure. Evidence of how
general the custom was, is afforded by various tales and dramas which
turn on the rescue of the hero in his infancy after having been cast
out to die.[450] The story of King Œdipus is typical.[451]
In this connection a word must be said regarding chastity. We find
here one of the most serious defects of Greek morality. The virtue of
chastity was given a very low place, hardly any place at all, in the
Greek ideal of character. It was the undervaluing of this virtue that
without doubt was one of the contributing causes of the decline and
early decay of Greek civilization.
Another equally grave defect in the Greek moral character was lack of
respect for the aged. Save at Sparta and Athens, age was not reverenced
in ancient Greece.[452] In this respect the Greeks stood almost on a
level with most primitive races.
[Sidenote: The disesteem of
industrial virtues]
A marked characteristic of Greek ethical feeling was a deep prejudice
against manual and commercial occupations as unworthy of freemen.
Aristotle taught that there was “no room for moral excellence” in the
trades and employments of artisans, traders, and laborers.[453] Even
artists like Phidias and Polyclitus were looked upon as “miserable
handicraftsmen.”[454] Plato in his _Laws_ says: “He who in any way
shares in the illiberality of retail trade may be indicted by any one
who likes for dishonoring his race, before those who are judged to
be first in virtue; and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father’s
house,--by an unworthy occupation,--let him be imprisoned for a year
and abstain from that sort of thing.”[455] In some cities the person
who engaged in trade was disqualified for citizenship, and in others no
mechanic or field laborer could enter the place where the freemen met.
This feeling that labor is degrading came in after the Homeric Age,
with the rule of the oligarchs, and was the natural and inevitable
outcome of slavery. The effect of slavery is to make work seem ignoble
and servile, and to cause the industrial virtues to assume a low place
in the moral ideal, or to drop out of it entirely. The high place
assigned the industrial virtues in the moral ideals of ancient Persia
and Israel was due probably as largely to the subordinate place which
slavery held in those countries as to the influence of religious
doctrines and physical environment.
Another ground for the feeling was that hard, coarse work destroys the
suppleness and mars the beauty and symmetry of the body; and this to
the Greek way of thinking was sufficient reason why the freeman--to use
Plato’s phrase--“should abstain from that sort of thing.”
Still another reason for the feeling that the retail trades were
unworthy of citizens was the conviction that this kind of business had
“a strong tendency to make men bad.” The small merchants and traders in
Greece certainly bore a very bad reputation,[456] and it is probable
that the public disesteem of their occupation and the contempt in
which they themselves were held had the same sinister influence upon
them that the similar feeling in Old Japan had upon the petty trader
there.[457]
[Sidenote: Revenge reckoned as a
virtue]
In nothing did the ordinary Greek moral consciousness differ more
widely from the Christian than in the matter of forgiving injuries.
This was one of the virtues brought in by Christianity which to the
Greek mind was foolishness. To the Greek the taking of revenge upon an
enemy was a duty. A man should render himself useful to his friends
and dangerous to his enemies. The Greek orator, in order to justify
his resentment toward any one, always took pains to show that he had
been injured in some way by the person, and hence had good ground
for wishing to do him evil. Indeed, one who neglected to take revenge
upon his personal enemy was looked upon as a weak, pusillanimous
creature.[458]
But out of this virtue of revenge, paradoxically enough, arose the
virtue of forgiveness; for revenge was limited by the requirements
of the virtue of moderation or self-restraint. The person seeking
revenge for an injury must set reasonable bounds to his thirst for
vengeance. Hence when the age of reflection came there were teachers of
spiritual insight who, regarding the matter from this point of view,
saw forgiveness to be a virtue because it required in the one forgiving
great self-conquest and self-control.[459]
[Sidenote: Low estimation of
truthfulness]
Another serious defect in the ordinary Greek moral standard was the
low place assigned to the virtue of veracity. The Greeks, in marked
contrast to the ancient Persians, had only a very feeble sense of the
sanctity of the plighted word. Untruthfulness was ingrained in the
nation. The Homeric heroes were full of guile and deceit, and the
historic Greeks were little better. They had throughout the ancient
world a well-earned reputation for disregard of promises and oaths.
When it seemed to them necessary to lie in order to gain a desired end,
then lying appeared to them justifiable. Scythas, tyrant of Zancle, if
we may judge from a story told by Herodotus, was the only Greek who
kept his word to Darius. This man was in exile at Susa. He obtained
from the king permission, presumably on parole, to visit Sicily, and
honorably returned to Persia. The conduct of Scythas in this matter
must have been exceptional, for, in the words of Herodotus, “him Darius
regarded the most upright of all the Greeks to whom he afforded a
refuge.”[460]
The great moral teachers of Greece recognized this defect in the moral
character of their countrymen and sought to correct it by extolling the
virtue of truthfulness. After the Persian war a class of men arose,
historians and philosophers, whom Schmidt, because of their reverence
for truth, calls the ancestors of the modern men of science.[461]
Thucydides had the same sense of the sanctity of exactness in statement
of fact as has the historian of to-day. Socrates died rather than cloak
the truth before his judges. Aristotle said, “Friends and truth are
both dear to us, but it is a sacred duty to prefer the truth.”[462]
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION
[Sidenote: The morality of the
Homeric Age]
The historical starting point of the moral evolution in Greece is the
morality of the Homeric Age. This morality we find incarnated in the
heroes of the time, Achilles and Odysseus, for, as Wundt observes, “the
inmost moral convictions of a people are shown far more plainly in the
character of its heroes than in its gods.”[463]
The qualities of character with which, as worthy of admiration, the
poet invests his heroes show that, notwithstanding the great advance
already achieved in many of the arts of life, in morality the Greeks
of this age were still in some respects on a level with savages.
Thus the poet extols the “good Autolycus” for his skill in thievery
and perjury.[464] But stealing and lying, as with uncivilized people
generally, to be proper and right, must be adroit and “for the
good of friends and the harm of enemies.” Piracy was an honorable
occupation.[465] The bodies of enemies slain in battle were maltreated,
as is the wont of savages.[466] Conceptions of deity were crude and
unethical, the gods being represented as capricious, profligate,
partial, and unjust.
But there was a sound core in this morality. Clan virtues were firmly
inwrought in character. The virtue of loyalty to comrades was strong;
the ethical qualities of courage and self-devotion for the common good,
and of hospitality to strangers were well developed; and the domestic
virtues of chastity and constancy in woman are portrayed in such a way
as to show that, if not common, they were at least held in high esteem
and reverence.
[Sidenote: Reprobation by the
philosophers and later poets of
the Homeric tales of the gods]
From the Homeric Age onward there was a progressive purification of the
moral feelings. One evidence of this ethical progress is found in the
repudiation by the later moral consciousness of the primitive myths of
the gods. These tales, as we have just noted, were coarse, sensual, and
immoral. The philosophers of the sixth and following centuries, and
the poets of this later time, denounced these stories as unworthy and
unethical conceptions of deity. Pythagoras is said, upon his return
from Hades, to have reported seeing there the souls of Homer and Hesiod
undergoing punishment for what they had said of the gods. Pindar purges
the tales of their grosser immoral elements. Others sought to relieve
the poets of the charge of impiety by reading the myths as allegories.
The Sophists and Stoics moralized them, giving them an ethical aim
and purpose.[467] Plato, in reprobating what Hesiod says of Uranus,
declared it “the greatest of all lies in high places.” He would strike
out from the poets all passages in which they told these lies about the
gods and heroes, before allowing the boys and men to read them.[468]
In the hands of the later Attic tragedians the whole traditionary
religious mythology was spiritualized and given a deeper ethical
content and meaning.
This purifying of the Greek moral consciousness finds an exact parallel
in what is taking place in the modern Christian world respecting the
conceptions of deity found in the early chronicles of the Hebrew Bible
and transmitted as a religious bequest to the European peoples. These
ideas of God are rejected by the truer moral consciousness of to-day
as the crude notions of a gross and morally immature age. Just as this
modern rejection of these unworthy primitive conceptions of the divine
character register our own moral advance, so does the rejection, by
the later Greek thinkers and teachers, of the Homeric and Hesiodic
conceptions of the gods register the advance in ethical thought in
Greece during the interval that separates the era of these poets from
the Solonian and Platonic Ages.
[Sidenote: Ethical significance
of the transition from the
continuance to the retribution
theory]
In an earlier chapter we spoke of the continuance theory of life after
death, and of the retribution theory as marking an advance upon this in
ethical feeling.[469] At the opening of the historical period in Greece
we find the primitive unethical continuance theory in existence, but
in a state of transition into the retribution theory. The early Greek
Hades, like the Babylonian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol, was a place
where moral distinctions were not recognized. The same phantom life
was the lot of all alike who went down to the world of shadows. The
Elysian Fields, it is true, had already been created, but these were
simply a sort of aristocratic heaven, a “Greek Valhalla,” the abode of
the great heroes of the race;[470] and Tartarus also had been called
into existence, but this was a prison house only for those who had
incurred the special enmity of the gods. The fables of Tantalus, Ixion,
and the Danaïdes show that the belief in an after life had no ethical
significance for the masses.[471]
But already in Pindar these ideas of the after life, through virtue of
an ethical necessity, have undergone great changes.[472] Just as the
poet moralizes the Homeric conception of the gods, so does he moralize
the Homeric conception of the underworld. Alongside the continuance
theory we find now the retribution theory. The life beyond the grave is
conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. The Elysian Fields have
been “opened to moral worth,” and a tribunal, called into existence
by a growing moral consciousness like that which created the Egyptian
Judgment of the Dead, has been set up, and Rhadamanthus apportions the
destiny of souls according to their merit and demerit.[473] From the
Persian war on, the life after death had ethical significance for all
men, and not simply for exceptional cases. In the literature there are
allusions in growing numbers to the retribution awaiting the wicked and
the blessedness in store for those “unstained with vice.”
In Plato this moral evolution attains a stage almost identical with
that reached by medieval Christian ethics. We find in the _Republic_
a threefold division of the realm of the dead corresponding closely
to the Schoolmen’s purgatory, heaven, and hell.[474] Punishment is
conceived as having for aim and end, in all save cases of abominable
and incurable wickedness, the purification of earth-stained souls.
All these modifications in the topography, the classifications, and the
arrangements of the underworld, like the similar changes effected by
the modern spirit in the medieval conception of hell, were the work of
a gradually clarifying moral sense, and bear witness to the progressive
development of Greek ethical thought between the Homeric and the
Alexandrian Age.
[Sidenote: The evolution of the
doctrine of divine envy into that
of Nemesis]
The early Greeks held a doctrine known as the Envy of the Gods. They
imagined that the gods were envious of the great and prosperous. Hence
they thought it was the envy of the gods which brought about the
undoing of the great and powerful. Their prayer for a friend enjoying
an unusual run of good fortune was, “May the gods not become envious.”
We find this doctrine embodied in the Herodotean story of Crœsus,
king of Lydia, whose long career of unbroken and dazzling prosperity
ends at last in dreadful reverses and sudden downfall.[475] The same
belief colors the advice which Herodotus represents Artabanus, the
uncle of Xerxes, as giving the king, who was meditating an attack on
the Greek cities. The immoderate ambition of the king, in view of the
envious nature of the gods, had awakened the apprehension of the old
and experienced counselor, and he labored to dissuade the king from
engaging in so vast a project. “Dost thou not notice,” said he, “how
the lightning smites always the highest buildings and the tallest
trees. Thus often the mighty host is overthrown by lightning sent by
the jealous gods; for the gods are jealous of mortals, and will allow
no one unduly to exalt himself.”[476] There is here no suggestion of an
ethical element. The envious gods overthrow things simply and solely
because they are big and tall and cast them into the shade.
At a still later period the Athenian general Nicias gives memorable
expression to this belief in his speech to his disheartened troops
before Syracuse. He bade them take cheer from their wretched plight
because the envious gods must certainly be disarmed by the sight of
their woeful condition and would now pity and help.[477]
But alongside this unethical doctrine of the Envy of the Gods the
Greeks held another, which seems to have been simply a modification
and outgrowth of the earlier crude conception of deity. This was
the doctrine of Nemesis. There was here full recognition of the
vicissitudes of human life. The great and the overpowerful are indeed
destroyed by the gods,--there was no denying the fact,--but not
merely because they are great, but because their greatness and their
prosperity has made them self-confident, insolent, overbearing. In
their blind arrogance they have overstepped the limits of moderation;
hence their downfall wrought by the gods.
It was under the spell of this belief that Herodotus wrote his history
of the Persian wars, although, as we have seen, he loved to rehearse
stories which illustrated the doctrine of the envious nature of the
gods. His narrative is in truth a great historical drama illustrating
the moral order of the world and teaching the impressive lesson of
how the gods punish presumptuous pride and overvaulting ambition. The
historian prepares his pious readers for the final catastrophe by
showing in vivid portrayal the transactions at the Hellespont. The
swift current of the strait has broken the bridge of boats laid upon
the waters by Xerxes. The all-powerful and audacious king orders that
the sacred Hellespont be scourged with three hundred lashes, that
fetters be cast into the rebellious waters, and that they be branded
as a slave is marked with branding irons. All this is done, and the
treacherous waters are cursed with blasphemous words.
Now follows quickly the tragic issue at Salamis of the vast
undertaking, and the return passage of the Hellespont a few months
later by the humbled and fugitive king. All this is the work of
Nemesis, the punisher of those who have lifted up their hearts in
insufferable pride and arrogance.
It is not alone in the dramatized history of Herodotus that we are
able to trace the moral effects of the Persian wars in bringing into
the foreground of the Greek consciousness the conception of Nemesis as
the vindicator of the moral government of the world. “After the battle
of Salamis,” in the words of the historian Abbott, “the instability
of human greatness and the punishment of ‘insolence’ echoes as an
undertone through all Greek thought.”[478]
This deepened moral feeling of the nation found expression both in
art and in the drama. The order given by the Athenians to Phidias to
carve a statue of Nemesis as a memorial of the war was a sanction
of that interpretation of the Persian overthrow which made it the
work of the avenging goddess. But the fullest expression of this new
ethical sentiment is found in Athenian tragedy.[479] Æschylus was the
representative of this moral awakening and advance. The doctrine of
Nemesis colors all his dramas. He was the first to give to the legend
of Niobe, originally merely a tale of the envy of Apollo, an ethical
meaning as an instance of “retribution for presumptuous sin.”[480] His
imperishable tragedy _Prometheus Bound_ makes the sufferings of the
Titan to be but the just penalty of his presumption and self-will. His
_Agamemnon_ depicts with tragic intensity the awful vengeance with
which the implacable goddess punishes unnatural crime. His _Persians_
teaches how Nemesis humbles insolent pride and “Zeus tames excessive
lifting up of heart.”
In the later Thucydides we meet with the same teaching concerning the
moral government of the world. In a memorable passage of his _History
of the Peloponnesian War_ the historian becomes the moralist and gives
his reader a tragic illustration of the workings of the law of Nemesis.
Thucydides is approaching the chapter in his history which depicts
the terrible catastrophe which befell the Athenians in Sicily. He
skillfully foreshadows the coming tragedy by preluding his narrative
of the Sicilian Expedition with an account of the arrogant and wicked
conduct of the Athenians in driving the Melians from their island home
and adding the stolen land to their own empire.[481] This high-handed
crime, like the impiety of the presumptuous Mede at the Hellespont,
arouses the avenging Nemesis. The reader forecasts the future, and
in the cruel fate of the Melians reads the doom of the Athenian army
before Syracuse.
This moralizing of the primitive unethical conception of the gods as
envious and unjust, and the evolving therefrom of the morally advanced
doctrine of Nemesis, is an instructive illustration of how, as time
passed, Greek ethical feeling was deepened and Greek ethical thought
was purified and elevated through intellectual progress and the
teachings of experience.[482]
[Sidenote: Further moralization of
the doctrine of Nemesis]
There was a still further evolution of Greek ethical thought along
the line traced above. The mutations and tragedies of life,--terrible
reverses of fortune, sudden loss of reputation and friends,
irremediable ruin following great prosperity,--these things are by a
truer moral insight recognized as the sign neither of the envy nor of
the righteous anger of the gods, but of the divine pity and love.[483]
“The wholesomeness of punishment for the wrongdoer himself is the
crown of Æschylean ethics.”[484] Phidias taught the same lofty truth
through carving the myth of Prometheus Unbound on the throne of his
Olympian Zeus. It spoke, as no other scene wrought there, of the moral
significance of suffering, of divine mercy and deliverance.[485] And
Plato’s philosophy accords with the Æschylean teaching that “Zeus has
put in suffering sovereign instruction.” “Then this must be our notion
of the just man,” he says, “that even when he is in poverty or sickness
or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work
together for good to him in life and death.”[486]
In this ethical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human life, of
the miscarriage of ambitious plans, the wrecking of high hopes, the
Greek thinkers reached at last the same elevated point of view that was
attained by the great prophets of the Hebrew race.[487]
[Sidenote: The amelioration of war
rules and practices]
In the ethics of war a similar though less marked development in moral
feeling is traceable. Aside from the relapse into the practices of
savagery under the malign influence of the Peloponnesian War, there
was throughout Greek history a slow but steady amelioration of the
primitive barbarities of warfare. In the Homeric Age moral feeling had
hardly begun to exercise its influence in humanizing war and in setting
limits to the rights of the conqueror. The Greeks of Homer were in
some respects almost on the level of savages in their war practices.
The life of the captive was in the hands of his captor, and he might
be slain without offense to the common conscience. Women and children
were, as a matter of course, appropriated by the conqueror or sold
into slavery. Homer relates as something to be gloried in, how his hero
Achilles dragged the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. Such an
act of savagery evidently stirred in the poet’s listeners no feelings
of reprobation.[488]
In the historical period the mitigation of the barbarities of war was,
after the protection of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a chief
object of the celebrated Amphictyonic League. The oath taken by the
members of the league included the following engagement: “We will not
destroy any Amphictyonic town, nor cut it off from running water,
in war or in peace.” This was one of the most noteworthy efforts in
antiquity to lay restraint upon the primitive license of war. Limits
are set to the rights of the conqueror. War begins to have rules.
From the words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Platæans at
the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we gather that at that time
the common sentiment of Hellas condemned the slaughter of prisoners of
war.[489] At Athens this sentiment had found embodiment in the laws,
which forbade the slaying of war captives. But under the demoralizing
influences of the long and bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens,
the little gain which had been made in the humanizing of war during
the preceding centuries was lost. Prisoners of war were sold into
slavery or killed without the least offense being given to the numbed
conscience of Hellas.[490] Even the terrible massacre, toward the end
of the war, of the four thousand Athenian prisoners at Ægospotami, by
the Spartan Lysander, awakened no protest in Greece at large.[491]
Never has “the moral damage of war” had a more tragic illustration.[492]
During the century following the Peloponnesian War, however, there
seems to have been a positive advance in this domain. In this period
the grosser atrocities of war were in a measure mitigated by a growing
humanitarian sentiment. But all efforts to humanize war seem to have
been limited to wars between Greek and Greek. From first to last in
Greek history war against barbarians was waged practically without the
least mitigation of its primitive barbarities. It was the practice of
Alexander the Great in his campaigns in Asia to massacre the men of
non-Greek cities taken by assault, and to sell the women and children
as slaves. We hear no protest, even on the part of the philosophers,
against these atrocities so long as it is non-Greeks who are the
victims of them.
But though the efforts of the Greeks to regulate and limit the rights
of the conqueror were confined to wars of Greek against Greek, still
these efforts are significant as a sign of an awakening ethical
sentiment in this domain. This is a prophecy of a future day, distant
though it be, when the growing conscience of mankind shall have
rendered wars between civilized nations an impossible crime.
[Sidenote: Efforts to prevent war
by arbitration]
The common Greek conscience never condemned war in itself. There never
sprang up in Greece an agitation like the Peace Movement of to-day in
Christendom. How deeply ingrained in the Greek mind was the conviction
that war is a part of the established order of things is shown by the
fact that their treaties ending open hostilities were ordinarily drawn
for a limited term of years. They were merely truces, as though peace
were only an incident in international relations.
Even the philosophers regarded a state of war as the normal and natural
relation of Hellenes and barbarians. Aristotle, as we have seen,
taught that barbarians might, without moral scruple, be hunted like
wild animals.[493] Plato had no word of condemnation of war by Greek
against non-Greek. But the Greeks had an uneasy feeling respecting the
rightfulness of war between Greek and Greek; and there came a time when
the best-instructed conscience of Greece positively denounced wars
of this kind. Plato condemned wars between Hellenes and Hellenes as
unnatural.[494] This feeling had a kind of restraining influence upon
the Greek cities, and there are many instances of arbitration in Greek
history. Sometimes a single person of eminence acted as mediator; but
oftener some city or league like the Delphian Amphictyony was chosen
as the arbitrator. In the Hellenistic Age the Roman Senate frequently
undertook the commission of arbitrating quarrels. The cities concerned
were sometimes bound by oath or by a deposit of money to abide by the
decision. Oftener, however, the decisions rendered, like those by the
Hague Tribunal of to-day, depended for their execution upon the good
will and honor of the states concerned. There are instances recorded
where one or both of the parties refused to abide by the judgment of
the arbitrator.[495]
Various motives, it is true, were at work in these arbitration
treaties, but the ethical motive was certainly operative to a greater
or less degree. There was not lacking the feeling, vague though it may
have been, which was later given explicit expression by Plato, that
war between Greek and Greek was wrong and a crime against Hellenic
civilization.
But the most interesting and instructive of all the measures taken
by the Greeks to limit wars among themselves or to fence them away
from a given district was the consecration, by common consent and
agreement, of the land of Elis--wherein was situated the sacred
Olympia--to perpetual peace and the establishment of a truce of forty
days, embracing the festival period of the Olympian games, during which
it was sacrilegious for one Greek city to make war upon another. With
true vision the philosopher-historian Laurent sees in the little land
of Elis, inviolable as a temple, a prophecy of the time when the whole
earth shall be consecrated to perpetual peace--an ideal toward which
humanity unceasingly advances.[496]
[Sidenote: Socrates and his
relation to the moral movement]
From no other personage in history, aside from the founders of
universal religions, has there flowed such a stream of moral influence
as issued from the life and teachings of Socrates, the son of
Sophroniscus. All the chief ethical systems of the Greco-Roman world
were the development of germs found in his doctrines. The Cyrenaic and
Eleatic, the Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean, the Platonic, Neoplatonic,
and Aristotelian systems had their sources here. The Stoic and
Neoplatonic systems contributed important elements to early Christian
ethics, while the Aristotelian system exercised a profound influence
upon the scholastic ethics of medieval times. In the contribution
which these various systems, especially the Stoic, have made to the
world’s common fund of ethical thought and feeling is found in large
part the measure of the ethical debt which modern civilization owes to
Hellenism.
Socrates’ aim was to replace the artificial conventional conscience
of his contemporaries by a natural rational conscience; in other
words, to replace customary communal morality by reflective individual
morality.[497] His fundamental doctrine was that virtue is dependent
upon knowledge; indeed he almost or quite made knowledge and virtue one
and the same thing. He maintained that one can no more see the right
without doing it than one can see a proposition to be true without
believing it. Therefore without knowledge--insight--there can be no
true virtue.[498]
But clearness of vision requires the purification of the intellect, the
getting rid of all false intellectual and moral notions; hence the aim
and purpose of Socrates’ unique method of cross-examination was to show
his interlocutor the baseless and mutually contradictory character of
his inherited chance-acquired ideas and beliefs, and to bring him to
that self-knowledge which is the beginning of real knowledge.[499]
This practical identification by Socrates of knowledge and virtue, this
doctrine of his that it is impossible that one should not will to do
that which he sees to be good and right, overlooks the saddest and yet
most certain fact of human experience, namely, that perversity of the
human will which causes man though seeing the good to choose the evil.
But it is a theory of human nature which, in the case of such happily
constituted souls as Socrates, in whom the authority of conscience is
sacrosanct and inviolable, is nearly or quite accordant with fact.
With such persons to see an act to be right is to do it. With them
dissonance between knowledge and volition is a moral impossibility.
Right here, however, a just criticism may be made of the Socratic
philosophy. It is true that without self-knowledge, without the
fulfilling of the Delphian requirement, “Know thyself,” one cannot be
truly moral. But neither Socrates nor the Greek philosophers in general
recognized that this self-knowledge comes through right living rather
than through right thinking. As Goethe discerningly observes, man comes
to know himself not through reflection but through conduct: “Do your
duty and thou wilt know what thou art.”[500]
And for the common moral life of the world there is a profound
teaching in this Socratic doctrine which makes knowledge the spring
of virtue.[501] There is in knowledge, in insight, in the clear
recognition of the relation of man’s highest good to virtue, an
impelling force and authority. As the world advances in true knowledge,
it will advance in true morality. The Renaissance is ever the precursor
of the Reformation. It is this fact which should make optimists of
us all, for the unceasing advance of the world in knowledge is well
assured.
In the ethical system of Socrates we have a good illustration of
the truth that great men are the product of their age. With all his
originality and profound spiritual insight, Socrates could not and did
not rise much above the plane of the common moral consciousness of his
contemporaries. He stood on essentially Greek ground. His morality was
the morality of his time and place. In his practical code of morals
he made the Greek virtue of self-control or moderation a cardinal
virtue; he laid the Greek emphasis upon the civic virtues, dying
rather than disobey or evade the decree of his city; he entertained
the common Greek ideas respecting the family and the domestic virtues;
he saw nothing to disapprove in the life of the hetæra; he viewed the
beautiful from a standpoint wholly Greek, almost identifying beauty
with goodness; he was thoroughly Greek in the aristocratic tendency
of his ethical teachings, making the practice of true virtue the
prerogative of the cultured class alone; he had the ordinary Greek
conscience in regard to slavery; and he never detached himself from
that narrow Greek prejudice which saw in the Hellenes the elect race.
He never proclaimed, as did many a later Greek and Roman moralist, the
essential unity of the human race.
[Sidenote: Plato and his ethical
system]
Socrates made virtue and man’s moral nature the subject of philosophic
reflection. His pupil, Plato, systematized his master’s teachings, and,
reducing these and the common ethical notions of his time to scientific
form laid the basis of the science of ethics.
Plato agreed with Socrates in teaching that to know the good is
necessarily to seek it. He accordingly makes wisdom the first of the
virtues, by wisdom meaning insight, the clear recognition of what
constitutes the highest good. Issuing from this primary virtue of
wisdom, like a stream from a fountain, are the virtues of courage,
temperance, and justice.
From wisdom comes courage, for perfect knowledge of good and evil casts
out fear; and moderation, for knowledge of higher and lower, of the
penalty that awaits all excess, leads to prudence and self-control; and
justice, for knowledge of one’s relations to one’s fellows creates
consideration for the rights of others. Plato here simply systematizes
and reduces to scientific form those various virtues which the common
Greek conscience recognized as constituting moral excellence.
Particularly noteworthy is Plato’s doctrine that virtue in the state is
the same as virtue in the individual. There is need of emphasis being
laid anew upon this teaching at the present time, when the disciples of
Machiavelli would give fresh vogue to the doctrine of a double standard
of morality, one for the individual and another for the state. The
modern world might well sit at Plato’s feet and learn that virtue is
ever one and the same, and that the moral law can no more be traversed
with impunity by a nation than by a single individual.
In many of his ethical teachings Plato anticipated and deeply
influenced Christian doctrines. He has been called the precursor of
the Fathers of the Church. “His ideas on virtue,” as Denis observes,
“take us far from Greece and antiquity; they seem addressed rather
to the saints and anchorites than to the citizens of Sparta and
Athens.”[502] His doctrines that the way of approach to God is through
contemplation; that withdrawal from the turmoil of public life is a
furtherance of the true life; that the body is a “prison house” of the
soul; that the soul is immortal and that there awaits it in the after
life recompense for deeds done in the flesh; that expiation for sin is
an ethical necessity; that punishment is not a deterrent and restraint
but a remedy that restores to health the sin-diseased soul[503]--all
these ideas and principles were in exact accord with the Christian
moral consciousness, and through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the
Church came to enrich and reënforce the ethical system of the monastic
and the papal Church of the medieval age.
Perhaps what is the most admirable of Plato’s teachings is embodied in
this petition: “And may I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would
that they should do to me.”[504] The significance of this lies in the
fact that it is a prayer, and that the petitioner asks that he may be
of sound mind when he reflects on what he would like to have others do
to him.
Yet notwithstanding the loftiness and nobility of much of Plato’s
ethical thought, still, like Socrates, he stood almost wholly on
Greek ground. His ethics is scarcely more than a justification of
the common Greek morality of his time. He destroys the family in the
interest of the state; he approves of the exposition of ill-formed,
unpromising infants; he makes morality to be a class thing--only select
and cultured souls are with him capable of genuine virtue. He accepts
slavery as a necessary institution of the state; he practically shuts
out the non-Greek world from the sphere of morality;[505] and with
the common Greek he believes that to do evil to one’s enemies is an
imperative duty.[506] Nor does Plato, like Hebrew seer, rise high
enough above the general Greek viewpoint to discern the great law of
moral progress, and to prevision the historical goal--ethical world
unity.
[Sidenote: Aristotle and his
ethics]
Aristotle makes Plato’s classification of the virtues the basis of
his well-rounded system of ethics. In one important respect, however,
he differs from Plato; he did not believe that knowledge of the right
necessarily leads to its practice. He recognized the fact that man
though knowing the good often perversely follows evil.
The great defect of Aristotelian ethics is its failure to rise to the
ethical conception of collective humanity. In the moral inequality
of men, which he assumes as the presupposition of his ethics, he even
exaggerated the common Greek view. He divided men so rigorously into
classes with varying grades of moral capacity that his moral system was
ethically like the caste system of the Indian Brahmans. To affirm the
moral equality of men seemed to him to be a species of treason against
the true humanity, a crime against Greek civilization.
According to Aristotle the slave was a being so morally different
from the freeman as to constitute practically another species. He was
not wholly incapable of virtue, but could practice only such servile
virtues as obedience and humility. The last, though a virtue in a
slave, was in a freeman an unworthy weakness.
Barbarians were slaves by nature. Hence it was right for the Greeks
to make war on them and reduce them to slavery, because “for that
end they were born.”[507] Plato had in his _Laws_ accepted slavery
as a political necessity; Aristotle proclaimed it as a part of the
natural order of things. This doctrine had far-reaching historical
consequences. Aristotle’s declaration that slaves are merely animated
instruments, are men incapable of virtue, worked as powerfully in
destroying ancient slavery as the _obiter dictum_ of Chief Justice
Taney of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott
case, that negro slaves have no rights which the white man is bound to
respect, worked for the destruction of negro slavery in the Southern
states. For, as Professor Denis says, by pushing too far the argument,
by founding slavery on natural right, Aristotle provoked thought and
protest, and led the Stoics to reject with indignation his theories
and to proclaim the moral equality of master and slave, of Greek and
barbarian.[508]
Aristotle’s ethics exercised very little influence either upon the
actual moral life or the ethical speculations of antiquity; but in the
medieval time it came to exert a profound influence upon Christian
ethics.[509] The schoolmen made it the trunk into which they grafted
Christian morals--with incongruous results, as we shall see later.
[Sidenote: Decay of the Greek city
state and the accompanying decay
of the Greek ideal of character]
The political revolution in Hellas in the fourth century B.C. had deep
import for Greek morality. That century saw the triumph of Macedonia
over the Greek cities. This meant the triumph of despotic monarchy
over city democracy. This revolution in the political realm meant a
great revolution in the realm of morals, for the reason that, as we
have seen, the old Greek ideal of excellence was largely based upon the
relation of the individual to the state. With the loss of Greek liberty
the very basis of the Greek ideal of character was removed, and the
virtues of the type tended to disappear.[510]
In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was
little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship
which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The
virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were
no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but
those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary
soldier. In Plutarch’s _Lives_, out of the twenty heroes and worthies
whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the
virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived
after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these[511] were men whose
characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which
the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the
Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes
of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city
state.
But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes
contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the
Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt
society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality.
The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral
contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to
Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied
into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber.
And still another contributing cause of the moral decline in Hellas was
the sudden acquisition of vast individual and social wealth through the
conquest and exploitation of the East. The morals of no age or people
have been proof against suddenly acquired riches. One explanation of
this is that new and untried sources of pleasure, most often illicit
sensuous pleasure, are opened up, and the temptation to selfish
indulgence is irresistible, coming as it does before self-restraint, in
the face of these unaccustomed solicitations, has become a habit.
Still another cause of the moral degeneracy of the age, one which we
shall have occasion to speak of more at length a little further on,
is to be sought in the fact that the period was one of transition in
religion as well as in politics and social relations. Greek morality
was, it is true, based in the main upon the old system of independent
city life. Yet Greek morality was in a way braced by religion and even
in part based upon it. Now in the Alexandrian Age the religious system
of Hellas was undergoing a process of disintegration. Men were losing
faith in their ancestral gods. Philosophic skepticism was widespread.
Inevitably this movement in the religious realm caused all that part
of the moral system dependent in any degree upon the old religious
doctrines and teachings to weaken and crumble away.
[Sidenote: Ethical products of
the Hellenistic Age: Stoicism and
Epicureanism]
There were, however, two ethical products of the Hellenistic Age which
render that period one of the most important of all epochs in the moral
evolution of humanity. These were Stoicism and Epicureanism. At first
blush it may seem strange that out of the same environment there should
arise two systems of life and thought so strongly contrasted. But both
of these systems are perfectly natural, indeed inevitable, products
of an epoch, such as the Alexandrian Age was, of transition and moral
decadence. In such times strong, self-reliant, deeply moral natures
ever seek refuge in the philosophy and creed of Zeno, while those of
less sturdy faith in the moral order of the world, of a less strong
sense of duty, turn to the philosophy and creed of Epicurus.
Springing up in Greece as an offshoot of the Socratic philosophy just
after the death of Alexander, Stoicism became the creed of the select
spirits of the age. The crowning virtues of the moral ideal it held
aloft were self-control, imperturbability, the patient endurance of the
ills of life. Amidst the wreck of worlds one must stand unmoved and
erect.
In the very rigid restraint it placed upon the appetites, passions, and
emotions the Stoic ideal of character differed widely from the ordinary
Greek ideal. It approached here the ascetic type.[512] However, in
general the Stoic type of character was closely related to the historic
ideal of the Greek race. The Stoics adopted the fundamental maxim of
classical Greek morality, namely, that man should live conformably
to nature. They possessed the common Greek consciousness in the light
esteem in which they held the family relations and duties. They were
aristocratic in their moral sympathies and looked upon the multitude
with disdain. They regarded the gentler virtues, compassion and
forgiveness, as weaknesses, and ranked humility as a virtue only in the
slave.
Because of the weak sense of duty possessed in general by the Greeks,
the Stoic ideal of character did not become a really important factor
in the ethical life of the ancient world till after its adoption by the
finer spirits, like Marcus Aurelius, among the Romans, to whose sense
of “the majesty of duty” the ideal made strong and effective appeal. It
never influenced the masses, but for several centuries it gave moral
support and guidance to the best men of the Roman race.
Alongside Stoicism grew up Epicureanism, which made pleasure, not gross
sensuous pleasure, but rational refined enjoyment, the chief good, and
hence the pursuit of pleasure “the highest wisdom and morality.” But
this philosophy made pleasurable feeling dependent upon tranquillity
of mind. To secure this mental repose, one must get rid of fear of the
gods and of death. These ignoble and disquieting fears Epicurus and his
disciples sought to banish by teaching that the gods do not concern
themselves with human affairs, and that death ends all for man.
Epicureanism in its moral code was at one with the common Greek
consciousness in making moderation or prudence a cardinal virtue;[513]
but it differed radically from the ordinary Greek mode of thought in
its depreciation and neglect of the civic virtues. Hence the system was
at once a symptom and a cause of the decay of the Greek city state and
of the old moral ideal which was based so largely upon it.
The philosophy of Epicurus, as we have already said, is the natural
product of an age of transition and social dislocation. It offers
an ideal of life which is eagerly adopted by those unable to combat
trouble, by those to whom duty does not appeal as something dignified
and majestic. Hence in the decadent and unsettled age of the Roman
Empire it became the rule of life of large numbers of the cultured
classes of society, and must be regarded as one of the disintegrating
agencies of Greco-Roman civilization.
[Sidenote: Advance in humanitarian
feelings and growth in ethical
cosmopolitanism]
A general view of the society of the Hellenistic world toward the
opening of the Christian era discloses the fact that the moral
evolution so long in progress has effected such changes in the Greek
moral consciousness as to render this ethical movement an important
preparation for the incoming of the moral ideal of Christianity. These
changes are especially to be observed in the growth of humanitarian
sentiment and in a broadening of the moral sympathies.
The Greeks, compared with the Romans, were naturally a humane folk.
When it was proposed to introduce at Athens the gladiatorial games,
the orator Demonax told the people that they should first tear down
the ancestral altar to Pity, a shrine which, in the words of Lecky,
“was venerated throughout the ancient world as the first great
assertion among mankind of the supreme sanctity of mercy.”[514] One
of the motives of Pythagoras in forbidding the use of meat as food
was, seemingly, to inspire a horror of shedding blood, even that of an
animal. The laws of Athens permitted no punishment more severe than a
painless death.[515]
This natural humaneness of the Greek spirit deepened as the centuries
passed. Contrasted with the Periclean Age the Platonic Age shows,
Professor Mahaffy affirms, “a greater gentleness and softness, ... a
nearer approach to the greater humanity of Christian teaching.”[516]
We have already noted this movement in the domain of war practices and
customs, where it found expression in the amelioration of the gross,
archaic barbarities of primitive warfare. In the social sphere the
progressive evolution is evidenced by the growing mildness of slavery
and the frequency of the manumission of slaves.[517]
The broadening movement ran parallel with the humanitarian. Classical
Greek morality, as we have seen, was narrow and racial. Now one of
the most important facts in the moral evolution of Hellas was the
broadening of the moral sympathies, especially during the three
centuries immediately preceding our era. This development is connected
closely with the great expansion movement which followed the conquests
of Alexander and which resulted in the Hellenization of the East.
Everywhere the Greeks came in close contact with various peoples upon
whom they had been accustomed to look with aversion or disdain. Ancient
prejudices were dispelled, race barriers were leveled, and the moral
sympathies overspread wide areas from which they had hitherto been
excluded by ignorance and race egotism.
It would doubtless be unhistorical to represent this movement as
anything more than a tendency--a dawning recognition by select spirits
of the ethical kinship of all men, and the coextension of the moral
law with the human race. It may, however, rightly be compared with
that broadening of the moral feelings which we have traced among the
people of Israel, and which resulted in a morality at first as narrow
and exclusive as that of the Greeks, widening at last into the ethical
universalism of the great teachers of the nation.
The widening movement was represented, and was given its chief impetus,
by the Stoics. The Stoic ideal of character differed from the ordinary
Greek ideal especially in its cosmopolitanism. Influenced by the spirit
of the age in which it had birth, it ignored the old distinction
between Greek and non-Greek and proclaimed the essential brotherhood
of man.[518] The Stoic regarded the world and not his native city as
his fatherland. The Cynics, whom we may regard as extreme Stoics,
looked upon city patriotism as a narrow prejudice and refused to give
love of one’s city a place among the virtues. Just as the Greek age
was merging into the Greco-Roman the broadening movement found its
noblest representative in Plutarch, “the last of the Greeks.”[519]
His chief characteristics were his broad interests and his universal
moral sympathies. He had moved far away from the common Greek
standpoint. He had emancipated himself from the tyranny of the common
Greek prejudices. Under the influences of his time he had become a
cosmopolitan. To him the Greek was no longer an elect race. His moral
sympathies embraced all mankind. His was almost a Christian conscience,
save as to the purely theological virtues.
This enlargement of the intellectual and moral outlook of the Greek
world presaged the dawn of a new epoch in the moral evolution of
humanity. It made easier for many the acceptance of the Gospel
teachings of human brotherhood and universal love. Christian ethics was
largely debtor to the cosmopolitan spirit of Greek culture, especially
as embodied in the Stoic ideal of moral excellence.[520]
To trace further this moral development in the ancient world we must
now turn from following its course among the Greeks to follow it among
that kindred people, the Romans, who, through the political unification
of the world, reënforced this growing universalism in the moral domain,
and thereby reached that ethical conception of collective humanity
which Israel had reached through spiritual intuition, and Hellas
through philosophical reflection and widening culture.[521]
CHAPTER XI
ROMAN MORALS: AN IDEAL OF CIVIC DUTY
I. INSTITUTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE DETERMINING THE EARLY MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The Roman family:
ancestor worship and the _patria
potestas_]
The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed
plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save
the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which made it such a nursery
of morality, for the cult of ancestors made the family a group of
co-worshipers about the domestic hearth. This worship purified and
braced morality, since the tutelary spirits were believed to watch over
the morals of the family and to punish wrongdoing. No impure act could
be committed in the presence of the chaste hearth fire, and no one
guilty of unexpiated crime dared to come into its presence.[522]
But it was in constituting the father the high priest of the family
group that this domestic worship exercised its greatest influence upon
early Roman morality. It gave a religious sanction to the father’s
authority and made the _patria potestas_ for many centuries a molding
force in the moral life of the Roman people.[523] A little further on
we shall see how, in the atmosphere of the home thus constituted, was
fostered in the youth the virtues of submission to rightful authority,
respect for law, and obedience to magistrates--virtues which were one
secret of the strength and triumphs of early Rome.
[Sidenote: The city state]
Next after the family the state was the most important agency in the
creation of the Roman type of virtue. We have to do here, as in Greece,
with the city state. This was the chief sphere of duty of the Roman
during his mature and active life. Consequently, just as it was the
nature of the city state which in Greece determined in large measure
what should constitute the supreme virtues and duties of the Greek
ideal of character, so was it the constitution of Rome as a city state
that, as we shall see a little later, determined what should be the
leading virtues and duties entering into the Roman ideal of goodness.
This made that ideal to be preëminently an ideal of civic duty.
“Never since the fall of paganism have the civic virtues shone out so
brilliantly.”[524]
[Sidenote: The occupations of
farming and war]
Alongside domestic and political institutions stands, as we have seen,
occupation as a creator and molder of the moral type of a people. The
two occupations of the early Latins were farming and war, and thus it
came about that in the primitive ethical type were united the sturdy
moral qualities of the peasant farmer and the heroic virtues of the
warrior. This blend produced one of the most admirable moral types of
the ancient world.
[Sidenote: The religion]
Aside from the cult of ancestors, religion among the Romans exercised
but little direct influence upon morality, for the reason that it was
mainly a method of obtaining prosperity, of averting calamity, and of
reading the future. There was in truth an almost complete separation
of religion and morality. It was only in later times that the Roman
philosophers sought in the moral character of the gods models for human
imitation. But though religion had so little to do in creating the
salient virtues of the moral type, it did reënforce the sentiment of
patriotism, since the temple was a state institution, and in various
other ways--as, for instance, in lending sanctity to oaths--quickened
and strengthened the sense of obligation and duty.
II. THE PRIMITIVE MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The ethics of the
family; the virtue of obedience]
In the bosom of the family was nourished what we may regard as the
primal virtue of the Latin race--submission to authority.[525] The
son’s subjection to the father’s authority was complete throughout
his whole existence. He could not disobey his father’s command. More
than seven centuries after the founding of Rome the Emperor Tiberius
absolved a certain person from guilt in participating in a revolt,
because it was shown that he had acted under the orders of his
father.[526]
This virtue of submission to rightful authority, of obedience to
superiors, contributed much to the military efficiency of the Roman
people. Indeed, it lay at the basis of their greatness in war. The
consul’s authority in the field was like that of the father in the
family, and obedience in the soldier was a habit, almost a religious
instinct. Thus did this virtue, which had its starting point in the
family, help largely to give the Romans the rule of the world.[527]
[Sidenote: Civic and military
virtues]
Patriotism, meaning submission, obedience, devotion to the state, was
the saving virtue in the Roman ideal of excellence. “Patriot” and “good
man” were identical terms. “Dear to us are our parents,” says Cicero,
“dear our children, our kindred and our friends; but one’s country
alone includes all our loves, for what good man would hesitate to die
if he could promote her welfare.”[528]
Since war was the normal status of society in ancient times, the moral
qualities of the Roman as of the Greek patriot were the virtues of the
soldier--obedience, courage, and self-devotion in battle. And by no
people, save perhaps the Japanese as shown in their recent history, has
the soldierly virtue of self-renunciation for the fatherland been more
exalted or more finely exemplified than by the Romans in early times.
In this ready self-devotion of the Roman hero to public interests
we have an exhibition of the altruistic sentiment in its loftiest
form, for of all forms of disinterested action, as Lecky maintains,
the self-abnegation of the ancient warrior for his city was the most
unselfish, for the reason that he made the sacrifice without any hope
of reward in another life.[529]
[Sidenote: The industrial virtues]
In early Rome there was no such prejudice against labor as unworthy
and morally degrading as we meet with at a later period. The fact that
a large body of the citizens in primitive Rome were peasant farmers
determined that the traditional virtues of this class should find a
high place in the early national ideal of character. The moral or
semi-moral qualities of the peasant, namely, simplicity, frugality,
industry, and conservatism or respect for the past, formed the
substratum of early Roman morality. It was from the primitive citizen
peasantry that came the strong, tough, moral fiber of the old Roman
character.
[Sidenote: Religious duties]
In dealing with the subject of the relation of the Roman religion to
morality we may speak of religious duties but hardly of religious
virtues, and for the reason that the aim of religion was the safety
and welfare of the state. Neglect of the temple rites and sacrifices
was believed to anger the gods, who would in their resentment bring
terrible trouble and misfortune upon the nation--for the Romans never
outgrew the conception of collective responsibility. Hence the careful
performance of religious duties was a phase of patriotism. Neglect of
these duties was antisocial conduct.[530]
In the performance of his religious duties the Roman conceived that
all that was necessary was to do the right thing, to perform the right
act, or repeat correctly the right formula; the disposition of mind and
state of heart made no difference with the result. Man’s relations to
deity were assimilated to his relations to nature. To secure a given
result in the physical world, man needs only to do the right thing, as,
for instance, to drop the seed into the ground at the right season and
the harvest follows without any regard to the state of mind or heart
of the person performing the act. This was the Roman’s conception of
his relation to the gods. Hence religion and morality were practically
separated. Religion failed to supply motives for moral action, except
in so far as it reënforced the sentiment of patriotism.
[Sidenote: Defects of the type:
(_a_) its aristocratic character]
From the foregoing brief notice of some of the chief expressions of the
moral consciousness of the early Romans we cannot fail to recognize
that their ideal of character was in many respects a very admirable
one. Its realization in actual flesh and blood gives us those heroic
characters which will live forever in Roman legend, and alongside the
Greek heroes in the pages of Plutarch. It molded men grave, earnest,
and austere, reverent toward superiors, patriotic and self-devoted to
the common good.
But the ideal had great defects. One of the most conspicuous of these
was its aristocratic character. Rome, writes Wedgwood, “accepts
consistently and logically the aristocratic theory on which ancient
society is based, and carries out the ideal of the Old World in all
its naked impressiveness.”[531] Though advancing far during a thousand
years of eventful history toward ethical universalism, pagan Rome never
actually reached this moral goal. She never recognized in practice the
moral equality of all men. There were to the very last in the pagan
Empire, classes, such as slaves and gladiators, who were practically
outside the moral sphere. Even Roman Stoicism, which was the latest
and noblest expression of the moral life of Rome, notwithstanding its
cosmopolitan tendencies, was essentially aristocratic.
[Sidenote: (_b_) Its omission of
the gentler and the intellectual
virtues]
Another defect of the old Roman type of excellence was its exclusion
of the gentler virtues--humility, tenderness, and sympathy with
suffering. The type of character fostered by the ideal was hard and
severe, even callous and cruel, proud and self-assertive. It was a type
somewhat like the Spartan, one which, when the age of reflection came,
naturally developed into the Stoic. The old Romans lacked the quality
of mercy and compassion for weakness. They seemed almost destitute of
the sentiment of pity for misfortune. Their treatment of prisoners of
war and of their slaves in the later period was marked by a repellent
brutality. The place in their amusements which the gladiatorial combats
assumed evidences their callous insensibility to suffering.
Still another defect of this ideal was that it gave little or no
place to the intellectual virtues. These ethical qualities which were
assigned so prominent a place in the Greek type of excellence, and
which since the Renaissance the Western world has come to esteem so
highly, were never greatly valued by the Romans until they came under
the influence of Greek culture, and then only by the few; hence their
intellectual life was, in general, lacking in moral impulse. Mental
self-culture was not with them, as it was with the Greeks and is coming
to be with ourselves, a moral requirement.
III. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE REPUBLIC
[Sidenote: The maintenance of the
standard in early times]
The four essential facts in the moral life of Rome as a republic are:
first, the high standard maintained in the early period; second, the
gradual widening of the moral sympathies through the influence of
conquest and advance in civilization; third, the general decline in
morals during the two centuries preceding the establishment of the
Empire; and fourth, the modification of the moral type through contact
with Greece and the Orient.
Through the legendary haze which envelops all the earlier centuries
of Rome, the one fact which stands out with comparative clearness is
the Spartan-like loyalty of the old Roman to the ideal of character
which he had conceived as the noblest and best. The legends of this
period, invented or repeated by the men of a later age, celebrate
qualities of character which we may believe really marked early Roman
life and thought. Among these virtues were patriotic altruism, absolute
self-abnegation for the common good, as illustrated by such tales as
those of the self-devotion for the Roman people of Curtius and of the
Elder and Younger Publius Decius Mus; reverence for law, as shown by
the consul Lucius Junius Brutus in the condemnation of his sons to
death for taking part in a conspiracy; and incorruptible integrity, as
illustrated by the tales of Fabricius.
Even though all these stories of the heroic age of Rome be the
invention of a later time, they at least show what at this later
(though still comparatively early) period were highly esteemed
qualities of character, just as the stories celebrating the filial
piety of Chinese heroes of the olden time show how high a place this
moral trait held in the ideal of the age that invented or repeated
these tales with a didactic purpose.
[Sidenote: The widening of the
moral sympathies]
The gradual broadening of the moral sympathies was a very important
phase of the moral evolution in Roman society up to the end of the
Republic. These sympathies embraced at first hardly more than the
patrician class, which formed the nucleus of the early Roman community.
The enlarging of the area covered by the ethical feelings was simply
one phase, and, from the viewpoint of the student of morals, the most
important phase of that political evolution which in the course of
centuries brought within the sacred pale of Roman citizenship first
the Plebeians, then the Latins, next the Italians, and finally all the
freemen of the extended Roman dominions. That is to say, this central
fact in Roman history, the expansion of the city into the world state,
was in its deepest significance, in its remote consequences, as much a
moral as a political movement. Conquest, it is true, prepared the way
for the revolution, and the concessions made by the ruling class to
the demands of the disfranchised classes and peoples were motived in
the main by political prudence and expediency. But it is equally true
that ethical sentiment worked with these other causes in determining
the course and progress of the revolution, and that one of its most
important results was the imparting of a great impulse to the widening
moral movement going on in the ancient world, and the bringing to
recognition of the principles of the moral equality and brotherhood of
men.
This great all-embracing movement in the Roman world can, we believe,
best be understood in its significance for the moral evolution of
mankind only when translated into terms of the similar movement in
modern times. We recognize the moral character, in a final analysis,
of the revolution which, during the past century, has by successive
enfranchisements admitted to a share in government and to the
enjoyment of political rights the masses in modern civilized states.
The movement has been largely ethical in its causes and still more
largely ethical in its effects. The struggle of the people has had
for aim to do away with unjust privilege and to establish equality
and justice. The most important permanent effects of the revolution
are indisputably to be looked for in the moral sphere. The incoming
of democracy, meaning as it does the investing of the individual with
dignity and worth, means the ennobling of the moral life of the world.
It is this that constitutes the real significance of the democratic
revolution and which gives it its important place in the moral history
of humanity.[532]
The same is true of that phase of the modern movement which looks
toward the formation of the world state. The forces at work here are
admittedly varied and complex, but prominent among these agencies
are the ethical. It is the broadening of the moral sympathies, the
development of a true cosmopolitanism, a deepening consciousness of
the brotherhood of men, the growth of a new social and international
conscience--it is this slow evolution in the moral realm that has laid
or is laying the true basis of the future world union. The universal
state, once created,--this need not be argued,--would inevitably react
powerfully and favorably upon the moral feelings and sympathies of men.
It was the same in the ancient world. The admission to full Roman
citizenship, through successive enfranchisements, of all the freemen of
the Roman dominions was at once the sign and the cause of a vast moral
development. As fellow citizens with equal rights and privileges, men
came to know and feel their ethical kinship. Likewise the establishment
of the world state registered a great moral advance and supplied the
conditions of a still greater progress. Had not the moral forces worked
with the Roman legions, the world union could never have been formed,
or, at least, if once formed, could never have been maintained for the
long period that it was. It is probably true that the bringing by Rome
of such a wide reach of lands under her rule did as much to awaken the
sense of the brotherhood of man as did the teachings of Hebrew prophet
or the culture and philosophy of Greece. It was certainly the political
union of the civilized world that helped to awaken in Cicero and in
the later philosophers of the Empire the conviction that the reach of
the moral sympathies should be as extended as the human race. Thus the
wide empire created by Rome was a potent influence making for ethical
universalism. Never since the unification of the ancient world by Rome
have the moral feelings of men been quite so narrow as before; never
since has the conception of human brotherhood, the ideal of a united
world, seemed so entirely a dream.
[Sidenote: Causes of the decline
in morals under the later
Republic: (_a_) the passing of the
city state]
Notwithstanding this broadening movement in the moral domain, the
last century of the Republic was marked by a great lowering of the
earlier high moral standard and by a loss of some of the chief virtues
of the primitive Roman type. There were many causes contributing to
this moral degeneracy. Among these was the decay of institutions that
had created or fostered the primitive moral type, and the growth of
others, such as slavery and the gladiatorial games, which exercised a
pernicious influence upon morality. Besides causes of this nature there
were others which were the natural outcome of the career of conquest
the Romans had led. The conquest of the world had imported into the
Roman political and social system many alien elements unfavorable to
morality, and had brought Roman civilization, on one side, into hurtful
contact with the older and morally corrupt cultures of the Orient. In
what follows we shall speak in some detail of the more important of
these agencies, which in the later preimperial period undermined the
originally sound morality of the Roman people.
A first cause of the moral deterioration was the decay of the city
constitution. We have seen that the free city state was the chief
nursery of those patriotic virtues which constituted the cardinal moral
qualities of the Roman ideal of character. But by the beginning of
the last century preceding the Christian era various causes, chiefly,
however, the mere widening of the Roman territory through conquest, had
undermined the political institutions of Rome and had converted into
mobs of the proletariat the public assemblies of citizens. The original
constitution of the city had become an empty form, and the way had been
paved for the setting up of monarchical government.
With the passing of the city state those civic patriotic virtues
which the discipline of the democratic city constitution had trained
and developed, disappeared.[533] As the Christian Church, which was
destined in the fullness of time to take the place of the city in the
minds and hearts of men and become the object and inspirer of moral
enthusiasm, had not yet come in with its new ideal of virtue, there
ensued a sort of moral interregnum, such as usually marks transition
periods in the history of states and races.
[Sidenote: (_b_) The economic
decay of the rural class]
A second cause of the moral decline is to be found in the decay of the
Italian peasantry. This economic revolution had its real starting point
in the Hannibalic War. That protracted struggle, carried on largely in
Italy itself, practically ruined the peasant class in many districts,
and their little farms were absorbed by the growing estates of the
great landholders--those _latifundia_ which Pliny later declared to
have been the ruin of Italy.
The practical disappearance of the Italian peasant farmer meant the
disappearance of those simple robust virtues, bred in thousands of
homes of the countryside, like the little Sabine farm of the Elder
Cato, which had contributed so largely to determine the type of Roman
character.
[Sidenote: (_c_) Growth of the
slave system]
The decay of the Italian peasantry was accompanied by the development
of the slave system, so that at the same time that the peasant home,
a nursery of sterling if crude virtues, was being destroyed, the
slave estate with its chain gangs and its ergastula, a very hotbed
of degrading vices, was being created. Of all the institutions that
contributed to the moral degradation of the later Republic, slavery as
it developed here must be assigned the first place of evil preëminence.
Its effects were equally debasing upon the master, the slave, and the
poor farmer. It tended to render more callous and cruel the spirit
of the master,[534] to destroy the moral character of the slave, to
undermine family morals,[535] and, by placing a stigma upon labor, to
degrade the free laborer. Thus did the institution tend to develop
in different classes of the population feelings, sentiments, and
a disposition of mind wholly unfavorable to the existence or the
development of a sound moral life in society at large.
[Sidenote: (_d_) The disesteem of
the industrial virtues]
In placing a stigma upon labor, slavery did not create a new prejudice,
but merely intensified and made more inclusive a prejudice already
existing. As we have seen, there existed in classical antiquity a
deep-rooted feeling against manual labor as morally unworthy of a
freeman. Agriculture was the only occupation which escaped this general
condemnation, and which was regarded as becoming a gentleman.[536]
Cicero declares all mechanical laborers to be by virtue of their
profession mean, the gains of hired workmen to be ungenteel, and says
that all retailers of merchandise should be despised.[537] Even buying
and selling on a large scale did not entirely escape the taint of
retail merchandizing; it was merely a little less despicable.
This general contempt for the occupations of the artisan and merchant
rendered impossible the development of industrial virtues in the
Roman masses. Torn from the soil and swept into the cities by the
movement cityward in this period, the free poor, too proud to engage
in occupations which were looked upon as degrading, were stranded in
idleness and exposed to all the demoralizing influences of city life.
Crowds of them became the dependents of the rich and formed that
despicable client class of the later Republic and the early Empire
whose abominable vices roused the anger and provoked the scorn of the
satirists and moralists of the time.
[Sidenote: (_e_) Free distribution
of corn]
A direct outgrowth of the presence in Rome of this great multitude of
the idle free poor was the evil of the corn laws. The indiscriminate
public free distribution of corn to the poorer citizens--prompted, for
the most part, not by genuine humanitarian feelings but by unworthy
political and personal motives--had a most debauching effect upon
morals. It intensified the very evil it was supposed to ameliorate. It
attracted still greater crowds of the idle to the capital, depressed to
a still greater degree agriculture in Italy,--grain for distribution
being imported in the main from Egypt and North Africa,--and
checked every tendency toward the formation of habits of industry,
self-reliance, and thrift in the lower classes. The evil attained its
climax when the largesses became an undisguised bid by the corrupt
demagogue for popular favor--the naked price paid by rich plotters
against the commonwealth for the support of the morally debauched and
fickle proletariat.
[Sidenote: (_f_) Gladiatorial
games]
The idle population of Rome had not only to be fed but to be amused.
The same motives that had led to the enormous increase in the largesses
of grain to the free poor contributed also to the multiplication
of the spectacles of the circus and the amphitheater, particularly
of the gladiatorial games, which, introduced at Rome in the third
century B.C., had now become the favorite amusement of the Roman
populace. “That not only men, but women in an advanced period of
civilization,--men and women who not only professed but very frequently
acted upon a high code of morals,--should have made the carnage of
men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for
centuries, with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts
in moral history.”[538]
But this fact is by no means an isolated or unique one in the ethical
history of mankind. The student of the history of morals is often
brought face to face with similar facts in the annals of every race and
of every age. The fact with which the moralist is here confronted is
hardly more startling than the hideously barbarous treatment of their
enemies by the deeply pious Jews; the heartless massacre at times of
their prisoners by the naturally humane Greeks; the savage severity of
the medieval inquisitors toward heretics, while in general showing the
greatest compassion and sympathy for those in pain and distress; the
atrocious cruelty of the punishments meted out to offenders against
society by the Christian governments of Europe down almost to the last
century; the callous insensibility, until just now, of modern society
to “the bitter cry of the children” of its city slums; and, above all,
the glorification of war by the professed followers of Him whose most
distinctive title is the Prince of Peace.
But just as all these startling inconsistencies and aberrations in
moral conduct may be explained, in part at least, by reference to the
effect upon the moral sympathies of tribal religion, of political
rancor and fanaticism, of false theological dogmas, and of bad bequests
of practices and conventions unreflectingly adopted by an advanced
civilization from ages of barbarism and savagery, so is it possible
in the same way to explain and render in a measure comprehensible
to ourselves the existence without protest among the comparatively
cultured Romans of such an institution as that of the gladiatorial
combats. The system was fostered by slavery and the Romans’ occupation
of war. The Roman people were originally stern and just; slavery and
war tended to make them hard and callous. Slavery created a sort of
caste morality, which excluded from the moral sphere large classes as
completely as though they belonged to the dumb-animal creation. It was
these pariah classes that contributed a large portion of the victims
of the cruel sport. The enormous quantities of human flesh and blood
required to nourish the system could have been found in no society
except in one where a considerable part of the population had been
degraded to a mere animal plane of existence and thus put practically
beyond the range and reach of the moral feelings.
Like slavery, the constant wars in which the Romans were engaged tended
to indurate their feelings and to destroy all sense of the sanctity of
human life. In what way the military life of the Romans reacted upon
their feelings and sentiments and molded even their ethical theories is
shown by the fact that the Roman moral philosophers in general defended
and approved the combats of the amphitheater on the ground that they
inured the soldier to the sight of blood and taught him contempt of
death.[539]
The effect of these inhuman spectacles upon morality was most
lamentable. They hindered the growth of humane feelings in the men,
deadened every tender sensibility of the women, habituated the
young to scenes of cruelty,[540] and developed finally the normal
impassiveness of the Roman temperament into a fierce delight in human
suffering.[541]
[Sidenote: (_g_) Decay of
religious faith]
The influence of religion upon Roman morality was never great;
still, as we have seen, the Roman’s sense of duty was in some degree
strengthened by his belief in the gods and in their general watch over
the conduct of men. Hence that growth of philosophic doubt among the
learned class which characterized the later period of the Republic,
and the transformation of religion into gross superstition among the
debased population of the cities, contributed to hasten and render more
decisive the moral decline we are tracing.
[Sidenote: (_h_) Extremes of
wealth and poverty]
The apparent teaching of history is that there is an antithesis between
wealth and morality. It is a commonplace of the records of civilization
that as a community has advanced in material prosperity and waxed rich
it has gone backward in morals. The growth in great riches of a people
has usually been the prelude to their moral degeneracy and loss of
place in the competition of races and cultures.
There ought certainly to be no antithesis between riches and morality,
any more than between intellectual culture and morality. To suppose
that there is any natural and necessary incompatibility between these
two elements of civilization is to suppose that there exists a fatal
antinomy at the very heart of the cosmic evolution.
That moral degeneracy should be the common accompaniment of a
community’s growth in wealth, springs not from the mere possession of
wealth, but in the main from its inequitable distribution. Thus far in
history, as a society has grown in riches it has become divided into
two sharply contrasted classes, the very rich and the very poor. Now
each of these extremes is unfavorable to morality. Excessive fortune
gives birth to luxury, to gross, extravagant, and unethical uses of
wealth. Particularly is this likely to be true if the elevation to
affluence has been sudden and from comparative poverty. The reason
of this is, as was long ago pointed out, that men before they have
learned self-control have placed in their hands means for the unlimited
satisfaction of every appetite and desire, and generally the desire
of such men is for indulgence in gross sensuous and sensual forms of
pleasure. On the other hand, extreme poverty is equally disastrous to
morals; for poverty means almost inevitably undue nutrition of body
and soul, and generally squalid and insanitary conditions of life that
destroy at once physical and moral health, and breed in the young and
old alike the most repellent and contagious forms of vice.
Now while at every period of Roman history we find two classes, the
rich and the poor, the extremes of wealth and poverty do not appear
until about a century before the establishment of the Empire.[542] And
unfortunately all the conditions which tend to render such inequality
of fortune especially pernicious to morals were existent at this time
in Roman society. The men into whose control came the great fortunes of
the period were generally men of servile origin, because law and public
sentiment prevented the senatorial order from engaging in trade or
commerce. These men, who had not yet outgrown the grossness and vices
of the slave class from which they had sprung, with unlimited wealth
at their command, and “without the restraint of traditions or ideals,”
were naturally prone to indulge in vulgar luxury, in ostentatious
extravagance, and in orgies of sensuality.
At the same time at the other end of the social scale were the very
poor, subjected to the debasing influences of idleness, of a grossly
immoral stage, and of the brutalizing spectacles of the amphitheater.
The relations of the large number of propertyless clients to their
wealthy patrons bred in this class the hateful vices of servility and
hypocrisy.[543]
Thus the division of Roman society into two classes, the overrich and
the very poor,--a division which is always the sign and register of
social maladjustment and injustice,--became one of the most potent
causes of that moral degeneracy which relaxed the fiber of the Roman
race and preluded the downfall of the Republic.
[Sidenote: (_i_) Demoralizing
influence of Eastern luxury and
vice]
After the conquest of the East the national character of the Romans
was subjected to a great variety of influences from Greece and the
half-Hellenized countries of the Orient. Many of these influences,
as we shall notice a little later, had a strengthening and uplifting
effect upon Roman life, especially in the upper circles of society, but
in general the new elements now imported into Roman civilization from
the Hellenistic East were hurtful to morals. Rome “sucked poison from
the Attic bloom decayed.”
It is a commonplace of history that at the time of the Roman conquest
of the East the great semi-Hellenized cities of the Orient were sinks
of moral corruption. Brought into close contact with these morally
debased communities, Roman civilization was at once infected with the
fatal virus. Streams of impurity overflowed every country of the once
moral West. The Orontes emptied into the Tiber. Oriental vices and
luxury came in as a flood. The primitive Roman virtues of frugality
and simplicity disappeared. Greek cooks, we are told, brought a higher
price than Greek philosophers.
Almost every element of the Greco-Oriental culture seemed to bear
within it the seeds of moral deterioration and decay. Greek philosophy,
pervaded in general by a spirit of skepticism, tended to unsettle
still more positively the already shaken faith of the Romans in their
ancestral gods. Roman morality, in so far as it was supported by
religious belief, was thus fatally impaired. The Epicurean philosophy,
if not--as taught by most of the Sophists--a direct incentive to
vice, afforded at least a ready apology for indulgence in coarse and
gluttonous pleasures.
The plays presented on the Roman comic stage were mostly pieces of the
Greek drama, which, in the process of adaptation to a Roman audience,
had been made coarse and dissolute. Thus the theater became one of the
most effective agencies of social corruption. In the words of Mommsen,
it was “the great school at once of Hellenism and of vice.”[544]
[Sidenote: Modifications in the
moral type itself]
A much more important fact in the moral history of the later Republic
than this lowering of the standard of conduct is the change which was
being effected in the moral ideal itself. While certain causes were
at work depressing the moral standard to the lowest point, perhaps,
that it ever touched in the long history of Rome, there were other
causes in operation which were slowly modifying the old Roman type of
character and creating a new type made up largely of new virtues. We
speak of this change in the ideal as a fact of greater significance
than that of moral degeneracy, for the reason that a decline in actual
morality, the failure of a people to live up to the best they know, is
always a superficial and transient phenomenon compared with the changes
effected by different influences in the moral type itself, since these
changes constitute the very essence of the ethical evolution.
The causes at work modifying the old Roman ideal of character were
various; but more vital than all other influences were those that came
through the contact of Rome with Greek culture and the civilizations
of the Orient. At the heart of these ancient cultures were ethical
elements of inestimable value. Among these were the Greek humanitarian
spirit and the various intellectual virtues which characterized the
Greek type of excellence; and, in the Oriental theosophic cultures,
a deeply religious spirit and the religious virtues which marked the
moral ideals of the Eastern nations, particularly the Egyptian, the
Persian, and the Hebrew. We recognize the supreme importance for the
later moral history of Rome, as well as for that of the whole Western
world, of the ethical products of the religious culture of Judea, but
we do not recognize as fully the importance of the ethical elements of
the secular culture of Greece and of the theosophic civilizations of
Egypt and Persia. But Rome’s ethical debt to these older cultures was
also indisputably great.
But since these Greco-Oriental influences which were at work modifying
the old Roman type of character had not wrought their full effects
before the close of the third century of the imperial period, we shall
reserve further comment on them, and on the new composite type they
were contributing to create, for the next division of this chapter, in
which we shall follow the trend of the moral evolution under the pagan
Empire.
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE PAGAN EMPIRE
[Sidenote: The bad bequest]
Roman society throughout the first century of the pagan Empire, as
mirrored in the literature of the period, presents a picture of
frightful moral degeneracy. This state of things was largely an
inheritance from the Republic. It was the continuation of that moral
decline which began in the second century B.C., and some of the
contributing causes of which, such as slavery, the spectacles of the
amphitheater, the free distribution of corn, together with contact with
the dissolute civilizations of the Orient, were considered briefly in
the preceding pages. Since all these causes of moral degradation were
still at work in the society of the early Empire, and as fresh agencies
of malign influence were added to them, it was inevitable that the
moral anarchy should not only continue but should grow worse.
The definitive establishment of the Empire and the passing of the
liberal institutions of the Republic changed wholly the atmosphere in
which had been nourished the virtues of Republican Rome. Political
liberty was dead, and all true civic activity, which had been the very
breath of life to the citizen of the ancient city, had come to an end.
In the new world that was forming there was no room for the exercise
of those patriotic virtues which had made the early history of Rome so
great, and had given her the rule of the world.[545]
One wholly fresh cause of moral debasement was the personal character
of several of the occupants of the imperial throne during the first
century of the Empire. The Oriental extravagancies and coarse
debaucheries which disgraced the court of a Claudius, a Caligula, or
a Nero, communicated their virus to every part of the social body.
Never did the proverb, “As court, so people,” have such justification.
At the same time the tyranny which marked the rule of more than one
of the emperors instituted a demoralizing terror like that of the
proscriptions of the Civil Wars. Under the influence of the frightful
persecutions of their order, the senatorial aristocracy, with moral
fiber now relaxed and corroded by effeminate luxury, lost seemingly
all those virtues which earlier had characterized their class, and
was transformed into a body at times sycophantic, cringing, and base
almost beyond belief. But it is doubtful if any other aristocracy which
history has known would have stood the test any better. The French
nobility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluded from
participation in political affairs by the divine-right monarchy, and
made servile dependents of the court, exhibited almost as depressing a
spectacle of moral degeneracy as did the higher Roman classes under the
more frightful tyranny of the early Cæsars.
[Sidenote: The old and the new]
But we may here profitably call to mind the words of Wedgwood to the
effect that the phenomenon of moral decay, although the most striking,
is not the most significant fact in the moral history of a race or of
an age. “The fact that an old ideal is perishing,” remarks this writer,
“must always be a stronger or at least a more obvious moral influence
than the fact that a new one is coming into life.... A death is more
impressive than a birth.”[546]
What in this reflection claims our attention here is the implied truth
that the passing of the old means the coming of the new. At the base of
the falling leaf there is always a new-forming bud. It is not otherwise
in the moral world. Unless the forces of the moral life have become
fatally impaired, the decay of an old ideal of excellence is ever
accompanied by the growth of a new and better one. And it was so in the
Rome of the early Cæsars. The Roman ancestral ideal of character, with
its attractive civic and heroic virtues, was indeed falling into decay
and passing away, but a new and better ideal of goodness was slowly
forming and winning the allegiance of the select spirits of the age.
[Sidenote: The three periods in
the moral history of Rome]
Lecky distinguishes in the moral history of pagan Rome three periods
characterized “by the successive ascendancy of the Roman, the Greek,
and the Egyptian spirit.” Up to near the end of the Republic the moral
ideal was essentially Roman; during the first and second centuries of
the Empire it was characterized by the dominance of the humanitarian
and cosmopolitan spirit of Greece; while in the third and last century
of the pagan Empire it was marked by the ascendency of the Egyptian
spirit of religious reverence.[547] In the immediately following pages
we shall consider the second of these periods.
[Sidenote: Modifying influence
on the Roman ideal of the Greek
spirit]
Already at the time of the establishment of the Empire the two great
civilizations of classical antiquity had been in close contact for a
hundred years and more. The elements of Greek culture which reacted
most powerfully upon Roman society were the purely intellectual and
the ethical. History has fully recognized the debt of Rome to Greek
intellectualism, but it has not so fully recognized her ethical debt
to Hellenism. Yet it was the contribution made by Greece to the
new-forming moral ideal of the Roman world which was probably the most
historically important element of the Hellenic bequest. This ethical
inheritance of Rome from Greece was second only to her ethical heritage
from Judea.
It was largely through the medium of Greek literature and Greek
philosophy, particularly the Platonic and the Stoic, that the ethical
Greek spirit, characterized by its humanitarian and cosmopolitan
sympathies, exerted its modifying influence upon the Roman moral
consciousness and gradually changed it into something very different
from what it was at first. This influence can best be traced in Roman
literature and the imperial legislation.
[Sidenote: Evidences in literature
of the softening of the moral
feelings]
The two great changes in the moral type consisted, as Lecky observes,
in the greater prominence accorded the benevolent or amiable virtues,
and in the broadening of the moral sympathies.[548] The effect of the
action of the humanitarian Greek spirit upon the old Roman ideal of
character was to soften its harsher features and to cause the heroic
virtues to yield place, in a measure, to the benevolent qualities, that
is to say, to those virtues which in the course of three centuries
or more, largely under Hebrew-Christian influences, were destined to
assume a dominant place in the accepted ideal of moral excellence.[549]
Cicero, Vergil, Juvenal, and Seneca may be considered the truest
representatives of this new-forming social conscience. Cicero,
writing just at the end of the Republic and after Rome for more than
three generations had been under the influence of Greek culture and
philosophy, exhibits unmistakably the effect upon the Roman character
of the comparatively humane and gentle spirit of Hellas. In his
treatise _De Officiis_, “concerning duties,” in which he interprets
and enlarges for the benefit of his son Marcus the ethical work of the
Greek philosopher Panætius, he gives his sanction to moral doctrines
which could hardly have been approved by a Roman moralist before Rome
had felt the influence of the ethical spirit of Greece. The work is a
glorification of the virtues of pity, gentleness, and benevolence.
The softening movement finds another representative in Vergil. His
great poem is in its ethical spirit more Greek than Roman. In the
“transformation of the goddess of lawless self-pleasing love into a
goddess of a maternal compassionate love,” Wedgwood would have us see
summed up the change in moral feeling of the classical world during
the centuries that separated the age of the _Iliad_ from that of the
_Æneid_.[550]
Juvenal,[551] too, applauds the moral qualities of pity and tenderness.
“His moral tone appears to unite the spirit of two different
ages.”[552] Seneca denounced the gladiatorial games as inhuman and
degrading. He constantly lays emphasis upon those amiable virtues
which belong rather to the Greek than to the Roman ideal of moral
excellence.
[Sidenote: Ethical theory finds
embodiment in practice]
Nor was this moral evolution confined to ethical theory; these precepts
of the moralists found generous embodiment in practice. Especially
was the age of the Antonines a benevolent age, one in which all kinds
of charities abounded. Respecting private benefactions in this period
Professor Samuel Dill asserts that we may well doubt whether they were
less numerous and generous than at the present day, and that “there has
probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded
as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right
to share.”[553] These numerous gifts and legacies assumed the form of
baths, theaters, libraries, markets, colonnades, aqueducts, fountains,
temples, basilicas, and other monuments of utility or adornment.
The motives which led to all this public giving were of course mixed,
just as are the motives of givers of to-day, but we may without much
hesitation assume with the historian Dill that they sprang largely
from genuine altruistic feeling, from a recognition of the true uses
of wealth, and from a sense of the duty of the rich to the poor and
dependent--from the same motives, in a word, that a century or two
later were to cover these same lands with churches and monasteries and
oratories.[554]
[Sidenote: The broadening
movement: ethical universalism as
the outcome of the world empire
and of Stoicism]
The second important ethical movement in the pre-Christian Roman world
consisted, as we have seen, in the widening of the moral sympathies.
The two most efficient causes of this movement were the establishment
of the world empire and the ascendancy at Rome of Greek philosophy,
particularly the philosophy of the Stoics.
Never before in the history of the world down to our own day were there
so many forces and circumstances making for cosmopolitanism in life
and thought as in the age of the early Cæsars. The growth of the little
city state of Rome into a world state had made all freemen actually or
potentially citizens of the world. The political unity of the world had
awakened the consciousness of a moral unity. In thought and feeling
many select souls recognized themselves as brothers of all other men.
It was not merely the world-wide reach of the Roman rule that promoted
the growth of this cosmopolitanism, but contributing largely to it
were the policies of the imperial government, many of whose agencies
and institutions made directly and powerfully for the development of
a sentiment of universal human kinship. The unification of the world
on its physical side, by the creation of the splendid Roman roads and
the facilities thus provided for world-wide trade and travel, had the
same broadening effect upon the moral feelings that modern railways,
steamboats, and telegraphs have upon the ethical sympathies of our own
day. Furthermore, the practically autocratic authority of the Emperor
tended to destroy class distinctions by reducing all to the same level
of servitude, to obliterate national boundaries, and to weaken race
prejudices. Then also, as the capital of the world, Rome had become,
as a center and creator of cosmopolitan life, a second Alexandria.
The character, too, of the slaves, drawn now largely from the East,
and often superior in culture to their masters, tended to blur the
distinctions between classes based on outer conditions, and to suggest
the doctrine of equality in the sphere of the spirit. The army, also,
recruited from every race and land in the Empire, and from the outside
barbarian world as well, with the legions raised in one country serving
in another, was a liberalizing agency, and a most effective one in
breaking down race barriers and in widening the mental outlook and the
moral sympathies of the traveled legionaries.
The second great cause of the enlarging of the moral feelings was the
influence of the Greek spirit. Indeed, this broadening movement was in
large measure the effect of the action of the cosmopolitan spirit of
the Stoic philosophy upon the originally narrow spirit of Rome.[555]
Evidences in literature of this widening of the moral horizon multiply
from Terence in the second century B.C. to the age of the Antonines.
The familiar sentiment of the poet, “I am a man and nothing human is
alien to me,”[556] although we know nothing as to the response this
evoked in the readers of Terence, may fairly be accepted as evidence
that the new spirit of cosmopolitanism was already at work in Roman
society. But the first clear sustained note of universalistic morality
comes from Cicero in his treatise _De Officiis_,[557] to which we
have already referred. The author says much about the Law of Nature
and of the society and community of the human race. One should, in
imitation of Hercules, even at the cost of great labor and pain, give
succor and aid to every one, whoever he may be, for this is consonant
with nature.[558] In destroying Corinth Rome was guilty of a great
crime.[559] The human race forms a universal society, by virtue of the
bond of reason and speech; therefore we are to do good to all men--but
liberality should begin at home.[560] “The love of humanity,” he says,
“which has its beginnings in the love of parents for their offspring,
binds together first the members of the family; then, gradually
reaching out beyond the domestic circle, embraces successively
relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens; next broadens to
include allied nations; and finally comes to embrace the whole human
race.”[561]
Two generations later, in the reign of Nero, Seneca enjoined the
same cosmopolitan morality. He declared all men to be citizens of a
universal commonwealth, and inculcated the lofty sentiment, “Man should
be sacred to his fellow man.” Epictetus in the same age preached a
like doctrine of human fraternity, and taught that a man should regard
himself not as a citizen of this or of that city, but as a citizen of
the world.
But it is in the _Meditations_ of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius that we
find the most emphatic declaration of this Stoic doctrine of the unity
of mankind and the universal reach of the moral law. As envisioned by
the emperor-philosopher the whole world is a single state and all men
are fellow citizens. “My city and country,” he says, “so far as I am
Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world.”[562]
Again he muses: “The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; and wilt not thou
say, Dear city of Zeus?”[563] Every man, he declares, should remember
that every rational being is his kinsman, and that “to care for all men
is according to man’s nature;”[564] for “men exist for the sake of one
another.”[565]
In what measure these moralists and philosophers whom we have quoted
really represented their times it is of course impossible to say; but
probably we would not be wrong in assuming that they appealed to a
certain public sentiment, and that the doctrines they taught evoked
consenting response from the moral consciousness of more than a few in
every rank of Roman society.
[Sidenote: The Stoic doctrine of
the Law of Nature and its ethical
influence]
The doctrine of the Law of Nature, upon which such emphasis was laid
by the Stoic philosophers, had such consequences for the evolution of
Roman morals and so great an influence upon the moral philosophers of
later times, particularly upon the speculations of the philosophers of
the eighteenth century, that we must in the present connection endeavor
to gain some idea of what the Stoics meant by this phrase, and the
ethical value of the conception.[566]
The Law of Nature is merely the Stoic designation of a law which,
under other names, all the ages have revered as the supreme law of
the universe. It is practically the law of conscience, the inner law
written on the hearts of men.[567] It is that law which is in the
background of our consciousness when we say, “We must obey God rather
than man.” It is that holy law which came to Hebrew prophet as the
word of Jehovah. It is that inviolable law which Antigone feared to
break, “a law not proclaimed by men, and which lives not for to-day
nor yesterday, but evermore.”[568] It is what the Supreme Court of the
United States in a recent decision calls “the rule of reason,” that
inborn sense of what is reasonable and just.
This Law of Nature being thus the expression of what is most
constituent and essential in man as man, it necessarily results that
there is a large common element in the customs and the rules of conduct
of all peoples who are in the same or nearly the same stage of culture;
hence the substantial conformity between the Law of Nature and the Laws
of Nations. The conformity, however, is not perfect. The moral task of
humanity is to make it perfect.
It is of course the ethical imperative of the Law of Nature which has
rendered it such a revolutionary and reconstructive force in history.
During the medieval period it was seldom invoked because the Church
and not the normal human reason was regarded as the supreme authority
in the domain of morals. But after the Renaissance and the Reformation
had proclaimed the autonomy of the individual spirit and the ultimate
authority of the individual conscience in the realm of moral right and
wrong, then came naturally an appeal from the rules and conventions of
society to the unwritten Law of Nature; hence the prominence it assumed
in the writings of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who
prepared the way for the French Revolution.
But what it concerns us now to notice is merely the influence of this
conception of a Law of Nature on the moral development in the later
period of the Roman Empire. A fundamental principle of the law, as
apprehended by the Stoics, is that men are born free and equal. If
this teaching be received as axiomatic, it is easy to understand
its importance for morality. Tried by this touchstone, many social
institutions, such for instance as slavery, are shown at once to
be contrary to nature, and hence opposed to natural justice. The
acceptance of this Stoic doctrine by the Roman jurists caused the
Roman law, as we shall see immediately, to be molded in opposition to
servitude and in the interest of freedom.[569]
[Sidenote: Influence of Stoicism
as an ethical force on Roman
government and law]
In its moral influence Stoicism worked in the Roman world more like a
religion than a philosophy. In truth it was a missionary philosophy.
It created in a remarkable measure moral enthusiasm. “In the Roman
Empire,” declares Lecky, “almost every great character, almost
every effort in the cause of liberty, emanated from the ranks of
Stoicism.”[570]
In the first place it presented an ideal of monarchy which powerfully
influenced Roman imperialism.[571] It made the prince “the shepherd of
his people.” It taught that the sole aim of the ruler should be “the
good of his subjects.” The effects of these teachings were evident in
the rule of more than one of the pagan emperors. The blessings which
the reigns of Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and others of the
“good emperors” brought to the Roman world are to be attributed in
large measure to the influence upon these rulers of the doctrines and
ideals of Stoicism. In the beneficent rule of these Stoic emperors the
ideal of Plato and Dion was realized; the philosopher was upon the
throne. Only in the effects of the teachings of the philosophers of
the eighteenth century upon the Enlightened Despots of that period do
we find a like illustration of the influence of philosophy upon the
possessors of absolute power.
The enlightened and humane spirit of Stoicism was felt especially
in the law.[572] It was the Stoic doctrine of the natural equality
of all men that worked most effectively in this domain. Many of the
disabilities placed upon woman by the earlier law were removed;
children were emancipated in a measure from the now unreasonable
authority of the father;[573] and the slave was placed under the
protection of the law and safeguarded against the worst brutalities of
a cruel master.
[Sidenote: Amelioration of slavery
under the pagan emperors]
The mitigation of the lot of the slave constitutes so important a
phase of the moral evolution of the pre-Christian period that we must
consider it here apart and in some detail. The causes of this moral
reform were various. Among the most efficient agencies were Stoicism
and the other Greek philosophies.[574] Then the character of many of
the slaves themselves, the equal or superior often of their master in
intelligence and culture, won for the class respect and consideration.
Furthermore, the great number of freedmen, who constituted a very large
element of the free population of the Empire,[575] tended to create a
public sentiment favorable to the slave. Having had, like Epictetus the
Stoic, acquaintance with the bitterness of bondage, they knew how to
pity the bondsman.
Already in the first century of the Empire all the chief leaders of
moral reform taught that the slave is the equal of his master in
capacity for virtue.[576] Dion Chrysostom condemned hereditary slavery
as contrary to the Law of Nature and hence wrong. He is thought to have
been the earliest writer in the Roman Empire to take this advanced
moral ground.[577] Seneca proclaimed the obligations of the higher law:
“Although our laws,” he says, “permit a master to treat his slave with
every degree of cruelty, still there are some things that the common
law of life forbids being done to a human being.”[578] Cruel masters,
he adds, are hated and detested.
The growing sentiment of tenderness for the slave found significant
popular expression in the reign of Nero. A certain prefect of the
city having been murdered by a slave, the Senate, in accordance with
ancient usage, adjudged to death the entire household of slaves, four
hundred in number. Sentiment in the Senate itself was divided, some of
the senators voting against the proposal, while the people gathering
in seditious crowds threatened to prevent by force the carrying out of
the edict. A body of soldiers was necessary to overawe the populace and
secure the execution of the slaves.[579]
A little later we see these growing humanitarian feelings reflected in
the imperial legislation. Hadrian took away from masters the ancient
right willfully to kill their slaves; and Antoninus Pius made the
killing of a slave, _sine causa_, murder. The edicts of other emperors
effected further mitigations of the law, so that the slave code of
the later pagan Empire is characterized by a humaneness of spirit
that places it in strong contrast with the callousness of the code of
earlier times.
Additional evidence of the increased humanity of the age is afforded
by the numerous manumissions of slaves.[580] The motives that prompted
such action were undoubtedly mixed, one self-regarding motive being
the ambition to have a great retinue of clients;[581] but the dominant
motive is unquestionably to be sought in the growing humanity of the
age.
It is noteworthy that the greatest alleviations of slavery were
effected before the influence of Christianity was felt. The Christian
emperors added almost nothing to the laws of the pagan Empire
ameliorating the lot of the slave, and the Christian bishops in general
fell behind Seneca in advocacy of the cause of the bondsman. The
emphasis laid by the Church upon a future life where the poor and the
oppressed of this world should receive compensation for their wrongs
and sufferings here, caused the Christian teachers to regard earthly
rank and outer conditions of life as of little moment.[582]
[Sidenote: Ethics of the
persecution of the Christians by
the pagan emperors]
While considering the steady expansion of the moral sympathies and the
growth of humanitarian sentiment in the pagan Empire, we are confronted
by the startling fact that the best of the emperors, those most closely
identified with the legislation embodying the new spirit of humanity
and justice, were among the most severe and persistent persecutors of
the Christians.
This apparent moral paradox is the same as will again confront us in
the medieval age in connection with the Inquisition and the cruel
persecution of heretics and dissenters by a Church which was based on
the principle of universal love, and which exalted to the highest place
in its ideal of goodness the qualities of gentleness and pity.
The paradox in each case is, however, such only in seeming. The
persecution of Christians by pagans, and of heretics by Christians,
was practically the inevitable issue of certain ideas and beliefs
which became the premises of moral conclusions. In neither case does
the act of the persecutor necessarily imply moral turpitude.[583]
The persecution of the Christians by the pagan emperors sprang in
the main from the belief--in connection with the idea of corporate
responsibility--that the welfare of the state was bound up with the
careful observance of the rites of the temple.[584] It was thought that
the neglect of the temple service by any single member of the community
awakened the resentment of the gods toward all the members alike. If
the Tiber overflowed its banks, the people were ready to believe that
the calamity had been brought upon the city by the neglect of the new
sect to offer the customary sacrifices to the gods, and the cry arose,
“The Christians to the lions!” In a word, the refusal of the Christians
to participate in the common worship was looked upon as a crime, as a
species of treason against the state, and was punished as such.[585]
[Sidenote: Stoic teachings
Christian in tone and sentiment]
As we are now approaching the time when a new moral ideal, that of
Christianity, is to displace the old classical ideal of character,
it will be both instructive and interesting to note to what degree
this ideal which was passing away had, in theory if not in practice,
under the varied influences to which it had been subjected through the
centuries, become assimilated to this new ideal of excellence.[586]
The nobility of forgiveness was taught by many of the pagan
philosophers with Christian insistence. Cicero regarded repentance as
perhaps sufficient to stay the hand of chastisement, and declares that
nothing is more laudable than clemency and willingness to forgive.[587]
Marcus Aurelius would repress even the first risings of resentment
for injury: “When one is trying to do thee harm, continue to be of a
kind disposition toward him, gently admonish him, and calmly correct
his error, saying, ‘Not so, my child; we are constituted by nature for
something else; I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring
thyself, my child,’--and show him by gentle tact and by general
principles that this is so.”[588]
And again: “It is royal to do good and to be abused”[589]; “be gentle
toward those who try to hinder or otherwise trouble thee.”[590]
“The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like [the
wrongdoer].”[591] Epictetus quotes with approval Pittacus, one of the
Seven Wise Men, in these words: “Forgiveness is better than revenge,
for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge the sign of
a savage nature.”[592]
Purity and sincerity of thought is inculcated by Marcus Aurelius. “A
man should,” he says, “accustom himself to think of those things only
about which if one should suddenly ask, What hast thou now in thy
thought? with perfect openness thou mightest immediately answer, This
or that; so that from thy word it should be plain that everything in
thee is simple and benevolent.”[593]
Seneca taught that adversity has moral uses: “God does not pamper
the good man; he puts him to the test to prove him, he hardens him,
and thus prepares him for himself.”[594] Trust in Providence and
resignation is inculcated by Marcus Aurelius in many passages in which
he teaches that one should accept with all his soul everything which
happens to him as his portion assigned by God. He trusts in Him who
governs; he says to the universe, “I love as thou lovest.”[595] He
accepts death with perfect resignation whether it be extinction, or
birth into another life: “To go away from among men is not a thing to
be afraid of, for the gods, if there be gods, will not involve thee in
evil.”[596] But death may be extinction. If so, well; for “if it ought
to have been otherwise, the gods would have ordered it so.”[597]
Strangely Christian in tone are the reflections of Marcus Aurelius on
the transitoriness of earthly life: “What belongs to the soul is a
dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.”[598]
The duty of godlikeness is enjoined by Epictetus: “He who seeks to
please the gods must labor as far as in him lies to resemble them. He
must be faithful as God is faithful, free as He is free, beneficent
as He is beneficent, magnanimous as He is magnanimous.”[599] Marcus
Aurelius sums up the duty of man in love to his fellows and in
following God;[600] and Plutarch declares that “man can enjoy no
greater blessing from God than to attain to virtue by the earnest
imitation of the noblest qualities of the divine nature.”[601]
[Sidenote: Some divergences
between Roman and Christian ethics]
But while in many of the teachings of the leaders of moral thought in
the later Roman Empire, as shown by the above quotations, we find a
near approach to Christian ethics, or a perfect accordance therewith,
still it is a fact that must not be overlooked or minimized that in
other of their teachings in which they represented more truly the
popular conceptions of right and wrong, they as conspicuously diverged
from the Christian ideal.
We have heard some of the moralists, particularly the Stoic Marcus
Aurelius, condemning the spirit of revenge and extolling forgiveness
as a virtue; but in general the Stoics as well as the followers of
other schools had not advanced beyond the common conscience of the
time in regard to the permissibility and even duty of returning injury
for injury. Cicero unequivocally approved the taking of revenge for
injuries received;[602] only the person injured should avenge himself
equitably and humanely.[603] Again he says that justice requires that
no one should do harm to another, “unless in requital of some injury
received.”[604] Even the gentle Plutarch, who may be regarded as
representing the composite ideal of character which was forming in
the first century of the Empire through the union of Greek and Roman
ethical ideas and feelings, declares it to be a virtue to make one’s
self disagreeable to one’s enemies.
Tyrannicide, which in general is condemned by the modern conscience,
was given by the Roman moralist, as by the Greek teachers, a place
among the greatest of the virtues. Cicero deems it a meritorious act to
slay a tyrant on the ground that he is but a “ferocious beast in the
guise of a man,”[605] and declares that of all illustrious deeds the
Roman people regard tyrannicide the most laudable.[606] Consistently he
extols the killing of the Gracchi.[607]
Pity or compassion for suffering, which is assigned such a high place
in the Christian type of character, was regarded by the Roman moralists
as a weakness, even a vice; not but that they extolled clemency in the
ruler, but they distinguished between this sentiment and that of pity.
Seneca declared pity to be a vice incident to weak minds. “The wise
man,” he said, “will dry the tears of others but will not add his to
theirs. He will not pity those in distress, but will relieve and aid
them.”[608]
Suicide, which to the modern conscience appears a censurable act, was
by most of the Roman moralists regarded with unqualified approval,[609]
provided the person committing the act had a strong motive for doing
so. Epictetus said, “The door is open”; but added this admonition, “Do
not depart without a reason.”[610] But almost any circumstance which
made life hard or a burden would justify the act; “The house is smoky,
and I quit it,” calmly remarks the Stoic Emperor Aurelius.[611] Seneca
says, “The eternal law has decreed nothing better than this, that life
should have but one entrance and many exits.”[612] He thinks the gods
must have looked on with great joy when Cato, with the world fallen
into Cæsar’s power, drove the sword into his own breast. That in his
view was “a glorious and memorable departure.” By such an act a man
raises himself to the level of the gods.[613]
Suicide was at its height in the early Empire. This is to be
explained by the teachings of the Stoics--among whom suicides were
numerous[614]--and the unbearable tyranny of the imperial régime. Not
till Christianity came with its teachings regarding the sacredness
of human life and the duty of resignation was there any essential
change in the general attitude of the ancient world toward the act of
self-destruction.[615]
[Sidenote: The insufficiency of
Stoicism as a moral guide for the
masses]
The composite Greco-Roman ideal, in which Stoicism had united the best
elements of the Greek and the Roman type of character, while it did
serve as a guide to the moral strivings of select souls, was wholly
unfitted to give support to the moral life of the masses or to awaken
in them moral enthusiasm. There were in Stoicism two serious defects
which made it impossible for it to become the guide and rule of life
for the multitude. First, it was too intellectually exalted and cold
to make appeal to the common people. The Stoics, in the suppression
of the feelings and emotions,--“they made solitude in the heart and
called it peace,”[616]--cut themselves off from all sympathy with the
masses, with whom feeling is ever the larger part of life. Second,
Stoicism failed to give due place to the religious sentiment. Belief
in the ancestral Roman gods had, it is true, been undermined, but the
religious feeling of awe and mystery in the presence of the Unseen was
deeper and more universal than ever before. Man, in the fine phrase of
Sabatier, is incurably religious.
The ideal of character which shall appeal to the masses must be an
ideal whose requirements make full recognition of the rightful claims
of human affections and of the religious instinct of mankind. The
mystical and religious East contributes to the ideal created by the
interaction of the Greek and the Roman spirit those elements which
neither of the classical cultures could supply.
[Sidenote: The Orient contributes
new elements to the moral life of
the West]
From the first century of our era, Rome was in close contact with the
Orient, as long before she had been in contact with Greece. And just as
the Greek spirit had profoundly influenced the moral ideal of Rome, so
now was the spirit of the Orient to effect even greater changes in her
ancestral standard of character.
As philosophy mediated between Rome and Greece, so did religion mediate
between Rome and the Orient. It was through the religions or cults
of Egypt, Persia, and Judea that the ethical forces of the ancient
cultures of the East were brought to bear on Roman life and thought
and conduct. In the present connection we shall speak only of the
influences which went forth from Egypt and Persia, and point out in
what way they gave an added impulse to that ethical movement going on
in the Roman world which finally culminated in the triumph of the creed
and moral ideal of Judea.
[Sidenote: The contribution of
Egypt; the worship of Isis]
And first we note the relation to this ethical evolution of the
worship of Isis and Serapis, the chief imported and modified cults of
the ancient civilization of the Valley of the Nile. In this worship
religion and morality were joined in a way practically unknown to the
priestly colleges of Rome. “The Egyptian,” says Lecky, “... bowed low
before the divine presence. He veiled his eyes, he humbled his reason,
he represented the introduction of a new element into the moral life of
Europe, the spirit of religious reverence and awe.”[617]
Forming an important part of the body of ideas which constituted the
basis of this religious feeling, was the doctrine of a life after
death. This was a doctrine which was common to all the Oriental
religions with which we have here to do,--the Isiac, the Mithraic,
and the Christian,--but a doctrine which, aside from the initiates of
the Orphic, the Eleusinian, and like Mysteries, was practically new
to the classical world. It was this doctrine which helped greatly to
secure for these religions or cults such wide acceptance in the Roman
world,--for the Roman world, old, worn, and weary, was yearning for
assurance of another and better life,--and which largely explains the
moral influence they exerted upon the nations of the West.[618]
For more than five hundred years the worship of Isis particularly found
ardent devotees in the West. The general effect of the cult upon its
followers was to cause the active, heroic qualities in the old Roman
ideal of character to be overshadowed by the passive contemplative
virtues, and to impart a religious, ritual character to the moral code.
Expiatory and purification rites formed a large part of the duties of
the worshiper of the Egyptian goddess.[619]
[Sidenote: The contribution of
Persia: Mithraism]
The influence of Egypt upon the religious-ethical life of the West was
reënforced by a like influence from Persia, which came through the cult
of Mithra.[620] This worship came into Europe by the way of Asia Minor.
Its missionaries were seemingly Oriental recruits in the Roman legions.
It came bearing many accretions gathered in its passage through the
west Asian lands, and yet with all the characteristics which marked
the old Persian religion as a religion of combat and strenuousness,
of moral striving and moral achievement.[621] During the last three
centuries of the Empire the cult spread widely in the Western lands,
taking deep root especially in the frontier regions of the Danube and
the Rhine, and in the remote province of Britain.
This incoming of Mithraism had special significance for the reason
that Mithra, as the god of light, was invested with certain moral
qualities symbolized by his physical attributes. He was the god of
truth and purity. It was this moral element in the cult, in connection
with its doctrine of a future life,--the promise and hope of which
was dependent upon purification, inward as well as ceremonial, from
all earthly stains and impurities,--which in a measure met and
satisfied the yearnings of the age, and which, in the great religious
and ethical propaganda that marked the later centuries of the Roman
Empire, rendered the religion of Mithra the most formidable rival
of Christianity in its great competition with the various Oriental
religions and cults for supremacy in the hearts and consciences of
men.[622]
[Sidenote: Relation of the
Egyptian and Persian propaganda to
that of Christianity]
But the pagan priest no more than the pagan philosopher could
effect the moral renovation of ancient society. Like the moral
propaganda carried on by Cynic, Stoic, and Neoplatonist missionaries
and preachers, these efforts of paganism to effect its own moral
regeneration failed, perhaps because these pagan cults lacked what
Christianity possessed--“the dynamic of a great personality.” Yet these
efforts were not without influence upon the ethical development of the
Western nations. In two ways the Egyptian and Persian propaganda was a
preparation for the moral revolution effected by Christianity: first,
it helped to give morality a religious basis, which it did not have in
classical antiquity; and second, it taught men to seek in deity and not
in themselves the pattern of moral excellence.[623] Thus did Egypt and
Persia, through the mediation of religion, contribute important ethical
elements to Greco-Roman civilization, and thereby help to give a fresh
impulse and a new trend to the moral evolution of the Western world.
CHAPTER XII
THE ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY: AN IDEAL OF RIGHT BELIEF
[Sidenote: Ethical import of the
Christianization of Rome]
The establishment of Christianity, in its Greco-Judaic form, as the
favored religion of the Roman Empire by the edict of the Emperor
Constantine is rightly regarded as one of the most important events
not only in the history of the Empire but also in that of the Western
world. What made this act, or rather the religious revolution it
registered, of such transcendent importance was the fact that the
ascendancy of the new religion meant the ascendancy of a new moral
ideal; for Christianity, unlike Stoicism, did not merely act upon
the old classical ideal of excellence to modify and remold it, but
superseded it by another made up largely of a wholly different set of
virtues.
It was this new ethical element thus introduced into Greco-Roman
civilization which was the most dynamic of the forces active in the
transformation of the ancient into the medieval world. The new ideal
re-created ethically the Roman world and made Europe for a thousand
years and more--until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century called
forth again the ethical thought and feeling of classical antiquity--in
moral conviction and striving an extension of Asia.
A prerequisite to an intelligent study of the history of this new moral
ideal is a knowledge of the beliefs and theological doctrines out of
which it arose; for this ideal has through the centuries followed the
fortune of these beliefs and teachings. In the immediately following
pages we shall indicate what were some of the most influential of these
ideas and doctrines.
I. RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND THEOLOGICAL DOGMAS MOLDING THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The doctrine of a moral
law supernaturally revealed]
Among the doctrines of Christian theology freighted heavily with
ethical consequences was that of a moral law supernaturally
promulgated. This was essentially an Oriental conception, a heritage
of Christianity from the Hebrew past, and a conception quite alien in
general to the manner of thinking of the Greeks and Romans, with whom
morality, as we have seen, was a civic and secular and human thing, an
expression of man’s essential nature, that is, an outcome of the human
reason and conscience.
This doctrine exercised an immense influence upon the moral
evolution in the Western world. First, it displaced naturalism with
supernaturalism in ethics. The whole history of morals records no
revolution more momentous than this. Second, it made rigid large
sections of the moral code and thus tended to impart for an historical
epoch a certain immobility to the religious-ethical side of European
civilization.
[Sidenote: The teaching of the
unity of God and of his universal
fatherhood]
Another idea found in this body of religious doctrines, an idea rich
in ethical consequences, was the conception of God as one and as the
Universal Father. We have seen that the great defect in primitive
morality was the limited range of the moral feelings. The circle of
moral obligation was bounded by the clan, the tribe, the city. This
resulted in large part from the notion that each kin group had an
origin and ancestry different from that of every other. One group
thought themselves to be the offspring of Zeus; another proclaimed
themselves to be the descendants of Heracles; and still another
believed themselves to be the children of Mars. So long as this view
of men’s origin and descent prevailed there could arise no conception
of their spiritual relationship and ethical oneness. Tacitus merely
expressed the common opinion of the ancient world when he declared
absurd the doctrine that all men are brothers.
But from the doctrine of the common fatherhood of God there arises
naturally the conception of the essential brotherhood of men. The
apostle’s declaration, “We are the offspring of God,”[624]--phrasing
the teachings of the Master in terms understood by the men to whom he
spoke,--announced the opening of a new era in the moral development of
the race. The proclamation of this practically new thought[625] meant,
at once in ethical theory and sooner or later in actual practice, the
widening of the narrow class and race circle of moral obligation to
include all tribes and peoples.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of a
future life of rewards and
punishments]
Greco-Roman morality was influenced but slightly by a belief in a
life after death. The vision of the other world was in general too
indistinct for it to exert any decided influence upon the conduct of
men.[626] The conception of Hades, though it did undergo with the lapse
of time a process of moralization, was never so far ethicalized as to
have a positive moral value.
But by Christianity the other world was lifted into such prominence as
it had had in the life and thought of no people of antiquity except
the Egyptians, and immortality was declared to be the destiny of every
human soul. With the classical peoples it was the city which had been
conceived as eternal. This transference of immortality from the city
to the individual had vast import for morality.[627] What contributed
to render it of such ethical importance was the fact that the after
life was conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. A heaven
of ineffable and everlasting bliss and a hell of unutterable and
everlasting torment were laid open to the eyes of men, and became the
tremendous sanctions of the new moral code promulgated by Christianity.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this teaching
upon the moral life of the European peoples, especially during the
medieval centuries of faith. To make this life transitory, vain, and
worthless, and life in another world the only real life, is to cause
the transvaluation of all moral values, and to change fundamentally
conceptions of what is rational and right in conduct.
[Sidenote: The teaching of the
sanctity of human life]
Springing naturally from the foregoing conceptions of man’s origin and
eternal destiny is the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of human
life. In no respect do Christian teachings contrast more sharply with
pagan conceptions than in this regard. In the Greco-Roman view value
did not attach to man as man. To the Greek way of thinking it was
the Greek freeman alone who possessed the full capacity for virtue
and the rights of manhood. In the common Roman view only the Roman
citizen was regarded as dowered with the full faculties and rights of a
human being. The slave was looked upon and treated as belonging to an
inferior order of existence.
The Christian doctrine of man’s divine sonship and of his eternal
destiny gave infinite worth to every human life, and, investing man as
man with an inviolable sanctity, worked effectively in widening the
range of the moral sympathies and in bringing within the scope of the
moral law all classes and conditions of men. It checked infanticide,
which in the pre-Christian world had been very generally practiced
without the least moral scruple; it suppressed the gladiatorial games
in which the lives of men were placed on a level with those of the wild
beasts with which they fought; it helped to make suicide, which the
Romans looked upon as a noble mode of departure from life, a crime; and
contributed to mitigate the lot of the slave and finally to help lift
him into freedom.
[Sidenote: The dogma of the fall
of man and hereditary guilt]
The view of man’s moral nature taught by the Founder of Christianity
was simple and natural. It is embodied in the parable of the prodigal
son. Man may go wrong, but he has ever the capacity, and, when he comes
to himself, the desire, to return to the right way.
In direct opposition to this view of man’s nature and deepest
preferences as being essentially good, we find elaborated in early
Christian theology the dogma that the first man, though created
upright, fell through disobedience and transmitted to all his
descendants a nature wholly evil and a total incapacity for doing good
or even desiring the good. And not only was man thus attainted by the
primal disobedience, but all nature became accursed.
This dogma of the fall of man is one of the most influential
conceptions in the moral domain ever entertained by the human mind.
It was the germ from which was developed the larger part of Christian
theological ethics.[628] For out of the dogma of ancestral sin and
total depravity sprang naturally and logically the doctrines of the
atonement, imputed righteousness, and salvation through faith. The
moral history of the Christian centuries we shall find to be largely
the history of the influence of this doctrine upon men’s conceptions
of their religious obligations and duties. As with the passage of
time and the incoming of evolutionary science the belief in this
teaching decays, we shall find men’s idea of what constitutes duty in
the religious sphere undergoing a great change, and shall see acts,
observances, and states of mind once regarded as supremely virtuous and
indispensable to salvation now looked upon as morally indifferent or
even positively wrong.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of the
sacredness of the Sabbath]
Christianity inherited from Judaism the belief in the sacred character
of the Sabbath day. This belief created one of the most important of
the religious duties of the Christian. It determined how one seventh
of all his time should be spent. The history of the observance of
this Sabbath as holy time, and the changed moral value attached to
such observance as times and beliefs have changed, forms a chapter
of the greatest suggestiveness to the student of the evolution of
morals, since this chapter epitomizes and repeats the entire history of
ceremonial or ritual morality.
[Sidenote: The personality of the
Prophet of Nazareth[629]]
But far more influential than all these inherited Jewish beliefs
and doctrines of speculative theology in molding the moral ideal of
Christianity, in all that renders it superior to the moral ideals of
the other great religions of the world, as well as in all that it
possesses of permanent ethical value for humanity, has been the simple
appealing story of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Nazareth.[630]
Those elements of the ideal which are based on speculative theological
doctrines have changed as these doctrines have changed with the
world’s advance in general intelligence and with the deepening and
clarifying of the moral consciousness of men; while those elements
derived from that wonderful personality, from that life of unbounded
tenderness and love and self-forgetting service, have been given an
ever higher and more dominant place in the world’s ideal of goodness.
In the eloquent words of the historian Lecky: “It was reserved for
Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through
all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men
with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all
ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the
highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice;
and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that
the simple record of three short years of active life has done more
to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of
philosophers and the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been
the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in Christian life.”[631]
II. THE MORAL IDEAL
[Sidenote: Orthodoxy, or
correct religious opinion, the
indispensable saving virtue[632]]
Before the end of the third century, under the influence largely
of the speculative Greek spirit, what was to be essentially the
historical creed of the Church had been practically formulated and the
corresponding moral code brought into existence.[633] In the creation
of this standard of goodness which was to give guidance for an epoch to
the moral life of the European peoples, it was the theological doctrine
of the moral value of faith, which came practically to be defined as
“the acceptance of the dogma of the Trinity and the main articles
of the creed,” that determined the precedence and subordination of
virtues and duties.[634] Correct belief was made an indispensable
virtue. Without this there could be no salvation.[635] On the other
hand, unbelief, doubt, error, even honest error, in religious matters
was declared to be in the highest degree sinful. This conception that
belief is a virtue and doubt a sin was destined, since it imperils
freedom of thought, to have momentous and sinister consequences for the
intellectual and moral history of Europe.
[Sidenote: The virtue of charity
or love]
Just as the theological dogma of the ethical value of religious
opinions has made correct belief theoretically the saving virtue in
Church ethics, so has the personality of Jesus, his teachings and his
self-sacrificing life as mirrored in the gospel records, made love and
service of others, in multitudes of souls, practically the supreme and
controlling motive of life. It was the emphasis placed by primitive
Christianity on this virtue, and the persuasion to its practice
afforded by the example of the Master, that for the first two centuries
of the new era--until the emphasis became changed from right living
to right opinion--lent to the moral life in the Christian communities
of the Empire such sincerity, purity, and elevation as have marked no
other period in the history of the Church.
But orthodox theology has never allowed that charity, though combined
with perfect uprightness of life and expressed in noblest acts of
self-abnegating service of humanity, is a saving virtue unless
associated with correctness of religious belief and the outgrowth
of it. This opposition in the bosom of the Church itself between
theological and natural morality has created a great dualism in the
moral history of all the Christian centuries, like the dualism in
ancient Hebrew history caused by the opposition between the morality of
ritualism and the morality of prophetism.
[Sidenote: The body of secondary
virtues]
Alongside the primary Christian virtue, whether this be regarded as
correct belief or as charity, were grouped a cluster of secondary
virtues, such as humility, meekness, gentleness, compassion for
weakness, resignation, and renunciation of the world. What is
especially noteworthy respecting this body of moral qualities making up
the Christian ideal of excellence is that all these were virtues which
in general were undervalued or held in positive disesteem by the Greeks
and Romans.[636] Indeed it was made a matter of reproach to the early
Christians by the pagan opponents of Christianity, that its virtues
were all servile virtues--the virtues of the slave.
It was undoubtedly this character of the new ideal which caused it,
in the primal age of Christianity, to make such strong appeal to the
common people, to the despised and lowly, to the broken and humble in
spirit, in the aristocratically graded society of the ancient world.
[Sidenote: Creation of specific
types through modifications of the
general ideal]
The Christian ideal of excellence has fulfilled itself in many ways;
that is, different types have arisen through the shifting in rank of
the virtues constituting the ideal, through the incorporation of pagan
elements, through racial influence, and through the reaction upon the
ideal of the changing intellectual, political, and economic environment.
Generally these specific forms of the ideal have been created by an
exaggerated enthusiasm for one or another particular virtue of the
standard, which has caused this special virtue so to overshadow all the
others, save the indispensable one of correct belief, as to bring into
existence a distinctive Christian type. Thus through the exaltation
of the virtue of chastity there arose in the early Church the ascetic
type of excellence, which for several centuries inspired unbounded
moral enthusiasm and drew away into the desert and into the seclusion
of the cloister great multitudes of both men and women; later, through
the reaction upon the Church of the pagan and barbarian world it had
nominally converted, and through the incorporation into the ideal of a
number of heathen virtues, there came into existence a composite type
of character--a combination of the virtues of the saint and the virtues
of the hero--known as the chivalric ideal, which colored the events of
European history from the ninth to the fourteenth century; and still
later, through the suppression of some of the distinctive virtues of
the Roman Catholic type of excellence and a fresh emphasis laid upon
others, there was created the Protestant type of moral character, which
has given a special cast to the theological morality of a large section
of modern Christendom.
[Sidenote: Limitations and defects
of the ideal]
That we may better be prepared to follow intelligently the various
phases of the moral history of the Christian centuries, to the tracing
of which the remaining chapters of this volume will be devoted, there
is need that to the brief description we have now given of the chief
virtues making up the ideal which was to give guidance to the moral
life of the European peoples, we add a word concerning its limitations
and defects, since these negative qualities of the ideal have exercised
an influence scarcely less decisive than its positive qualities in
making the history of the Christian world what it has been--a history,
on the whole, of inspiring moral progress, yet a history of moral
losses as well as of moral gains.
The first limitation of the ideal which we notice is its practical
exclusion of those civic, patriotic duties and virtues which had
been so highly esteemed by both the Greeks and the Romans. Man was
henceforth to be the citizen of no earthly city, but of a heavenly
city whose builder and maker is God. We can easily understand how this
new conception of life, which transferred all its chief interests to
another world, which substituted the Church--symbolized in accordance
with the modes of thought of the time as “the city of God”--for the
ancient city state as the object of moral enthusiasm and self-devotion,
should leave no place for those civic, military, and heroic virtues
that had constituted the very soul of the morality of classical
antiquity.
A second limitation of the ideal is its neglect of the intellectual
virtues, which by the Greeks had been assigned such a high place in
their ethical standard.[637] The slighting of this important domain of
ethics by Christian theology arose naturally from its exaltation of
faith above reason, and from its assumption that in the revealed word
the Church was already in possession of all knowledge really essential
to man’s welfare and salvation.[638]
But the chief defect of the ideal, the lamentable historical
consequences of which we shall witness later, is, as we have already
pointed out, in its making the acceptance of all the articles of a
given creed an indispensable virtue. In assigning orthodox belief
this place in the ideal of moral goodness, theological ethics has
marred Christian morality by fostering the faults of intolerance and
intellectual insincerity. This dogma inspired in the Church, as soon
as it became powerful, a persecuting spirit, and made Christianity for
centuries something altogether alien to its real genius and spirit--one
of the most intolerant of the world’s religions. At the same time
this dogma, by making religious unbelief and nonconformity a sin so
heinous as to be worthy of death by the most exquisite torture, and
of everlasting punishment in the hereafter, discouraged intellectual
veracity and open-mindedness, and fostered the vice of insincere
conformity, which, more than any other fault, has marred Church
morality from the end of the early age of the martyrs to the present
day.
[Sidenote: Conclusion]
In the following pages we shall follow the fortunes of this ethical
ideal through medieval and modern times. We shall trace the modifying
influence upon it of the different and changing elements of the
civilization of which it has formed a part, and shall note the reaction
of the ideal, in its successive types, upon the history of the passing
centuries.
CHAPTER XIII
MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE OF CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM
I. CONCEPTIONS OF LIFE AND HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT PRODUCED THE
ASCETIC IDEAL
[Sidenote: General fostering
causes of asceticism]
Before the close of the third century the development in the Christian
communities of the East of asceticism, the germs of which were
immanent from the first in Christianity, had given a remarkable trend
to the moral movement inaugurated by the new religion. We shall gain
a sympathetic understanding of this phase of Christian ethics only
as we bear in mind the conceptions of life and of the world, and the
historical conditions which in general tend to foster the development
of the ascetic ideal of goodness.
Asceticism, a definitive characteristic of which is renunciation of the
world and all earthly pleasures, springs from various roots. Sometimes
it grows out of a dualistic world philosophy, which, holding matter to
be an evil creation and “the corruptible body a load upon the soul,”
teaches the meritoriousness of the suppression, in the interest of the
spirit, of all bodily impulses and appetites.
Sometimes it arises from inequitable and oppressive conditions of
society, which have made life for the enslaved and impoverished masses
so joyless and wretched as to create an inappeasable yearning for
deliverance from its intolerable burdens.
Again, it springs from a world philosophy, which, because of its vivid
vision of another world of eternal realities, undervalues and reduces
to nothingness this earthly life and all its relationships.
Still again, it may spring from the soil of a morally decadent
civilization, for, unless the sources of spiritual life have been
wholly destroyed, from a debasing sensuality and dissoluteness that
rob life of worth and dignity there is ever sure to come a reaction--a
reaction expressing itself in an extreme emphasis laid upon the worth
and meritoriousness of world renunciation.
[Sidenote: Fostering causes of
Christian asceticism: (_a_)
certain Christian teachings]
Now in the case of Christianity there was, in the early Christian
centuries, an unusual concurrence of causes and conditions conducive to
the growth of asceticism. First, there were virile germs of asceticism
in the teachings of the new religion. It taught that the things of the
spirit are the only abiding realities. It caused this earthly life to
shrink into insignificance and to disappear as it opened to the eyes of
faith the infinite perspectives of another world. The Master said: “He
that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal....
Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot
be my disciple.” And to the young man who asked him what he should do
to inherit eternal life, he replied, “Sell all that thou hast, and
distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and
come, follow me.” He seemed to set the relationships of the spiritual
life above the most intimate of earthly relationships when he declared,
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife,
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.” He taught the worthlessness of earthly riches
compared with the treasures of the spirit, and declared that the rich
should hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
The disciples and near followers of the Master spoke in like manner.
These teachings tended directly and powerfully to cause men to regard
this earthly life as fleeting and valueless, and to esteem those as
choosing the better and worthier part who, breaking all earthly ties
and suppressing all natural affections and desires, sought in the
solitude of the desert or the quiet of the cloister to win the life
eternal.
[Sidenote: (_b_) The social and
moral state of the Greco-Roman
world]
These seeds of Asian asceticism fell into a soil well fitted to nourish
them into a vigorous growth. The doctrine of world renunciation was
one easy of acceptance by the age in which Christianity arose,[639]
for the world into which primitive Christianity entered was a senile,
disillusioned, morally corrupt, and life-weary world.
It was an aged and disillusioned world. The great races of the East and
the West, which had been the pioneers in human culture, were now old.
They had lost the youthful zest of life. It was the disillusionment of
age that predisposed the minds of men to an acceptance of the doctrine
of deliverance through self-denial and renunciation of the world.
And this old world was morally corrupt. The vice of ancient
civilization in its senility was sensuality. Christian asceticism was
in part a recoil from this dissoluteness which denied the worth and
majesty of life.[640]
And because it was a sensual world it was a life-weary world. The
prevailing mood of society of the Greco-Roman Empire at the time of the
great propaganda of Christianity was one of satiety and weariness. It
was a favorable moment to preach contempt of the world and all earthly
things.
Thus did the state of decrepitude and moral decadence into which
the cultured communities of the ancient world had fallen, help to
develop into a spirit of absolute world renunciation the spirit of
unworldliness which characterized primitive Christianity.
[Sidenote: (_c_) The Platonic
philosophy]
Still another influence which contributed to give direction and force
to the ethical movement of the age was the Platonic philosophy. There
is in this philosophy an ascetic element. Plato taught that a life of
contemplation aloof from society is the highest and the truly blessed
life. This teaching was one of the formative forces in the creation of
the monastic ideal.
II. THE IDEAL AND ITS CHIEF TYPES
[Sidenote: The two types of
the ascetic ideal: (_a_) the
anchoretic; (_b_) the monastic]
The moral ideal of Christian asceticism is, in its essential elements,
the same as the ascetic ideal of other religions. Its leading
requirement, after that of right belief, is, in comprehensive terms,
world renunciation. In the early Christian period with which we have
here to do, the ideal presented two types, the anchoretic and the
monastic. The anchoretic or eremite conception of the perfect life
was complete renunciation of the world with all its domestic, social,
business, and political ties, and a life in the desert, apart from all
human companionship, spent in ceaseless vigils, prayer, and meditation.
He who followed this mode of life with the utmost rigor, who suppressed
every natural desire,--desire of family and wealth and reputation
and pleasure,--and tamed his body by fasting, scourging, and other
austerities was looked upon as a saint and was regarded with peculiar
homage and veneration.
Throughout the third and much of the fourth century in all the
countries of the Orient where Christianity had spread, the anchoretic
ideal was regarded as the highest and most meritorious type of the
Christian life. But as the ascetic enthusiasm overspread the lands of
the West, various influences, such as climate and race temperament,
caused the ascetics in general to avoid the solitary life, and,
gathering in communities, to subject themselves to rules and the
oversight of superiors. After the legislation of St. Benedict (480–543
A.D.) this quickly became the prevailing mode of life for ascetics.
Thus came into existence the monastic system with its distinctive
ideal of character, which added to the virtues of the eremite ideal
the virtue of obedience or humility and abated somewhat its bodily
austerities. This ideal was destined to exercise for centuries a
profound influence upon the religious ethical evolution of the European
peoples.
Both types are mirrored in _The Lives of the Saints_,[641] the
characteristic literary product of the earlier medieval time. This
species of literature, a creation of the pious inventiveness of the
monks, was steeped in the spirit that pervaded hermitage and cloister.
The tales illustrate many sides of the life of the recluses, but are
chiefly valuable in showing what acts and practices were regarded as
constituting the most meritorious and morally excellent life.
[Sidenote: The moral standard for
the ordinary life]
The ascetic life was not binding upon all. It could not, of course,
become the universal mode of life. It was a sort of extra service,
which secured extra merit for him who rendered it.[642] It is true that
the ascetic ideal absorbed a vast amount of the moral enthusiasm of the
age, nevertheless it was a standard of moral attainment for the lesser
number; for the larger body of Christians there was the less exacting
ideal of excellence which could be realized in the ordinary life in
the world. He who practiced the common domestic, social, and business
virtues, who accepted the creed of the Church, paid tithes to the
priest, and was faithful in the performance of all required religious
duties, was accounted a good man, and had the approval of his fellow
men and the approbation of his own conscience.
III. THE CHIEF MORAL FACTS OF THE PERIOD
[Sidenote: Introductory]
In the present division of this chapter it will be our aim merely
to indicate the essential facts in the moral history of the earlier
medieval centuries. Some of these facts will serve to show in how
remarkable a manner the age was dominated by the monastic conception of
good life, while others will simply reveal the historical outworkings,
in its more general manifestations, of the new conscience brought into
the world by Christianity.
[Sidenote: The ideal of the saint
and that of the hero: “Dialogue
between Oisin and St. Patrick”]
As a prelude to the brief review proposed we shall do well to consider
for a moment the contrariety between the new ideal of the Christian
monk and the old ideal of the pagan hero as this oppositeness emerges
in the so-called “Dialogue between Oisin and St. Patrick.”[643] This
poem discloses most impressively the vast revolution which the incoming
of Christianity effected in the moral feelings and judgments of men.
Oisin, “the blind Homer of Erin,” is represented as in his old age
entering into a controversy with the saint respecting the relative
merits of the monk’s and the hero’s conception of worthiness. The
dialogue runs as follows:
ST. PATRICK. Oisin, long is thy slumber, arise and listen to the
psalm; forsaken is thy activity, forsaken thy strength, yet wouldst
thou delight in battle and wild uproar.
OISIN. My swiftness and my strength have deserted me since the Fenii,
with Fionn their chief, are no longer alive; for clerks I have no
attachment, and their melodies are not sweet to me.
* * * * *
O Patrick, hard is thy service, and shameful is it for you to
reproach me for my appearance; if Fionn lived, and the Fenii, I
would forsake the clergy of the cross.
* * * * *
Patrick, pray thou to the God of heaven for Fionn of the Fenii and
for his children, making entreaty of the prince, whose equal I have
never heard of.
ST. PATRICK. O learned man, I desire not strife with thee, but I will
not make request to heaven for Fionn, for all the actions of his
life were to be in love and to urge the sounding chase.
OISIN. If you were to be in company with the Fenii, O clerk of clergy
and of bells, not for long wouldst thou be able to give heed to the
God of truth, and serve the clergy.
ST. PATRICK. ... Oisin, the remainder of your life is short, and
badly will you fare if you despise the clergy.
OISIN. Small is my esteem for thyself and clergy, O holy Patrick of
the crozier: I have greater regard for Fionn, the white-handed king
of the Fenii, but he is not near me now.
Mournful I am without his hounds bounding, and his dogs all around
me; if they and their agile hero were alive, Patrick, you would
have to fear rebuke from me.
ST. PATRICK. In that way did you and the Fenii of Erin forsake
heaven: you never submitted to religion, but ever put confidence in
strength of limbs, and in battles.
OISIN. Were Fionn alive, and the Fenii comely and warlike, with their
hounds running propitiously, they would seem to me more majestic
than those who dwell in heaven.
ST. PATRICK. Desolate are the Fenii, without slumber or liberty in
the house of torment, for never in any way did they render service
to the Holy Father.
* * * * *
OISIN. Fionn delighted in strokes upon shields, in conquering heroes,
and hunting on hills; the sound of his dogs in toil was more
melodious to me than the preaching of clerks in church of bells.
* * * * *
ST. PATRICK. It is because his time and delight were taken up by
pleasures of the chase, and the array of warlike hosts; and because
he never thought about God, that Fionn of the Fenii is in thralldom.
He is now shut up in torment; all his generosity and wealth do not
avail him now, for lack of piety toward God, for this he is in
sorrow, in the mansion of pain.
OISIN. Little do I believe in thy speech, thou man from Rome with
white books, that Fionn the generous hero is now with demons and
devils.
* * * * *
O Patrick, doleful is the story: Fionn the hospitable to be under
locks! heart without malice and without aversion, heart stern in
defense of battle.
ST. PATRICK. However great the number of troops fighting for Fionn,
he did not act the will of God above: his crimes are above him in
pains of fire, forever in anguish.
OISIN. It is plain that your God does not delight in giving gold and
food to others: Fionn never refused strong or weak, and shall he
receive hell for his abode!!!
ST. PATRICK. However much he may have divided gold and venison, hard
are his bonds in the den of pains: no glimpse of light for him, no
sight of brightness such as he first received from God.
* * * * *
OISIN. Patrick, inquire of God if He remembers the Fenii when alive:
ask if, east or west, He ever saw men better in conflict.
Or did He observe in His own country, although it is high above
us, for sense, for conflict, or for strength, any man good in
comparison with Fionn?
* * * * *
Patrick, I am wretched, a poor bard, ever changing residence,
without power, without activity, without force, journeying to mass
and altars.
Without good food, without getting wealth and booty, without play
in athletic games; without going a-wooing and hunting, two objects
for which I always longed.
Without reciting deeds of champions, without bearing spear; alas! I
have lost Osgur and Fionn, and I am left standing like a withered
tree, out under injury.
ST. PATRICK. Cease, O Bard! Leave off thy folly; you have as yet said
but little in favour of yourself: think of the torments that await
you; the Fenii are departed, and ere long you will go likewise.
* * * * *
OISIN. I will not obey you, O Patrick, though great your creed and
faith. I own without lie that firm is my belief that the devil will
be your portion.
* * * * *
I would rather return to the Fenii once more, O Patrick, if they
were alive, than go to the heaven of Jesus Christ, to be forever
under tribute to Him.
ST. PATRICK. O withered Bard, thou art foolish; thou wouldst not pay
tribute to any one if thou wast in the heaven of Jesus Christ, nor
wouldst thou witness battle and uproar.
OISIN. I would rather be in Fionn’s court harkening to the voices of
hounds every morning, and meditating on hard-fought battles, than
in the court of Jesus Christ; that is certain.
* * * * *
It was easier for me to obtain without fail both meat and drink in
Fionn’s court than in thy mansion, and in the dwelling of the Son
of God, O Patrick, not generous in dividing.
* * * * *
ST. PATRICK. It is better for thee to be with me and the clergy, as
thou art, than to be with Fionn and the Fenii, for they are in hell
without order of release.
OISIN. By thy book and its meaning, by thy crozier and by thy image,
better were it for me to share their torments, rather than be among
the clergy continually talking.
* * * * *
Ah! Patrick, your religion may be great; but I have not, up to this
day, witnessed among ye dinner nor banquet like banquet of the
Fenii.
ST. PATRICK. Although Fionn spent generously all he obtained by
strength, fleetness, and plunder, he is now sorrowful in the
mansion of a lord who furnishes no dinner, and demons torment him
forever.
OISIN. It would be pitiful and mournful, if thy story were true, ah
Patrick! for all the saints who are in heaven, if they were to
strive with Fionn in contest of liberality, could not obtain the
victory over him.
* * * * *
Tell to me without controversy what is the reason of the custom you
have to be ever beating your breasts, and each evening kneeling
under gloom?
ST. PATRICK. I tell thee that it is not because we have scarcity of
food and of drink that we are under armour (watching), but because
we desire to be perpetually on our guard against gluttony.
OISIN. It is not fear of gluttony, nor in dread of king of saints
that I receive for myself scarcity of bread, but because I am not
able to obtain it from the clergy.
Astonishment is upon me to witness the greatness of your love for
the man you call Christ, if hereafter he will perpetually upbraid
you for the abundance of your portions and of your drink!
Farewell to Fionn of the noble Fenii; with him was ample banquet
and division; he was not like the man who is called God; and
moreover he gave without waiting for remuneration.... Never at any
time did I witness him asking for kneeling and bitter weeping.[644]
But vain was the lament of the blind bard. The ideal of the pagan
hero, whose fame he vaunted, had lost its primal appeal. It was the
ideal of the cloister, incarnate in the “saint of many prayers and
many vigils,” that was now enthralling the affections and shaping the
consciences of men.
[Sidenote: The monasteries as
the cradle of the modern social
conscience]
In the course of a few generations the vast enthusiasm awakened for the
ascetic life covered all Christian lands with convents and monasteries,
which in their ethical influence constituted one of the most important
of the institutions of the Church. In truth, the monasteries stand
in closer and more vital relation than does any other ecclesiastical
institution to the ethical evolution of the Western world. The service
they rendered to civilization in preserving and transmitting to the
modern world various elements of the intellectual and material cultures
of antiquity has been fully recognized and gratefully acknowledged;
but not so full justice has been rendered them for their contribution
to the moral life of modern times. Yet it is probably true that the
most precious thing conserved by the monasteries from the wreck of
ancient civilization was that social conscience which was generated
in the heart of old Judaism and bequeathed to Christianity. Professor
Nash, in his work entitled _The Genesis of the New Social Conscience_,
maintains, and we think with right, that the distinctive qualities
of the modern conscience--tenderness for the unfortunate, a lofty
altruism, a noble capacity for self-sacrifice--were qualities conserved
and cradled in the medieval monasteries.
This view of the relation of the monasteries to the moral evolution
in Western civilization may be accepted by the student of morals as
a correct interpretation of medieval monastic history, while at the
same time he admits the truth of Lecky’s contention that there was
a self-regarding motive in Christian asceticism--it was personal
salvation, he says, that the monk was primarily seeking--which made
the morality of the Christian saints inferior to the morality of the
heroes of Greece and Rome. It is undoubtedly true that many entered
upon the monastic life from self-regarding motives; but it is also
true that constant meditation upon religious themes, and especially
the holding ever before the imagination the ideal of the Master,
who for love of man made the supreme self-sacrifice of the Cross,
had as a natural result the deepening of the altruistic feelings,
the sensitizing of the conscience, and the moving of the will to
self-denying service for others. As a consequence the spirit of true
self-renunciation was often exalted among the recluses of the cloister
to an unwonted degree, and thus it came about in the course of time
that many who out of solicitude for their own salvation had sought the
solitude of the cloister are later found in the outside world, going
about, in imitation of their Master, doing good, ministering in the
spirit of absolute self-forgetfulness to the needs, temporal as well
as spiritual, of the poor, the afflicted, the heavy-laden, and the
life-weary. A large part of the philanthropic work of the Church during
the Middle Ages was carried on by the monks.
This humanitarian spirit, this cloister conscience of monasticism, was
bequeathed to society at large. Thus may the direct line of descent of
the modern social conscience be traced through the medieval monasteries.
[Sidenote: The new conscience
condemns and finally suppresses
the gladiatorial games]
One of the earliest and the most important of the moral reforms
effected by the new conscience in the institutions of pagan Rome was
the suppression of the gladiatorial games. For almost seven hundred
years preceding the triumph of Christianity in the Roman world, these
spectacles had formed the favorite amusement of the Roman people
without having awakened any special moral protest. Some of the pagan
philosophers and moralists, particularly Seneca and Plutarch, had
denounced them as opposed to the sentiment of humanity, but their
protest had found no echo in the common conscience of the age. As a
rule the pagan moralists saw nothing in them to condemn.
It was reserved for the Christian moralists to awaken the conscience
to a recognition of the criminality of these cruel spectacles. It was
particularly the Christian teaching of the sacredness of human life
that contributed powerfully to create the new ethical feeling as to
the immoral character of these amusements, and prepared the way for
their final abolition (404 A.D.) through the protest made by the monk
Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death.
Speaking of the significance of the abolition of the gladiatorial
games, Lecky declares that “there is scarcely any other reform so
important in the moral history of mankind.”[645] One thing which
enhanced greatly the importance of the reform was its timeliness. Just
at the moment of the suppression of these spectacles the Germanic
tribes were passing the frontiers of the Empire and adopting the
customs and institutions of the Romans. Had not these amusements been
abolished or put under the ban of the moral feelings before the final
catastrophe to the Empire, the barbarian tastes and fighting instincts
of this new race would have led to the eager introduction of these
sports into all the northern countries, just as certainly as the humane
spirit of the Greeks prevented their general introduction into Grecian
lands. When we recall the indurating and dehumanizing effects of these
amusements upon the Roman populace, we realize the importance and
timeliness of the reform which kept the barbarian nations free from
their brutalizing and deadening influence.
[Sidenote: The new conscience
condemns infanticide and
self-destruction]
Equally emphatic was the condemnation which the new conscience
pronounced on infanticide and self-destruction. We have seen in our
review of the morality of the classical peoples how almost universal
was the practice of the exposition of infants, and how slight was the
moral condemnation which the custom evoked even from philosophers and
moralists. When the practice was prohibited, usually the prohibition
sprang from considerations of a prudential or economic character rather
than from scruples of conscience.
But the Christian teachers, proclaiming the sacredness of human life
and the immortal destiny of every human soul, declared the destruction
of the infant as sinful as the taking of the life of the adult. It is
to this teaching doubtless that is, in large measure, due the existence
in Christian lands of a conscience which condemns the destruction of
the newborn babe as an act of deep moral turpitude.
It was the same Christian doctrine of the sacredness of human life,
along with the teaching of the duty of resignation, that created also a
new moral feeling in regard to suicide. We have seen how the conscience
of the classical peoples in general passed no condemnation upon the act
of self-destruction if life had in any way become a burden; but the
Church taught that suicide is the same as murder, indeed a greater sin
because it destroys not only the body but also the soul. Some Christian
moralists maintained that “Judas committed a greater sin in killing
himself than in betraying his master Christ.”[646]
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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.
Now the method of Christianity is exactly the reverse of this. Its
appeal is made to the individual; it does not concern itself directly
with social and industrial systems, or with governmental institutions
and arrangements. It would reform society by reforming the individual.
When Christianity entered the world Cæsarism had just established
itself upon the ruins of republican and national freedom, but the
Christian preachers said nothing about political liberty; the Master
had said, “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” The war
system was in full vigor; after a period of Quakerism the Church first
condoned, then accepted, and finally consecrated this heritage of
barbarism as one of the necessary institutions of human society. The
gladiatorial games were the sole important institution of antiquity
which the Christian teachers absolutely condemned as an institution,
and the abolition of which they persistently demanded and finally
effected.
It was the same with slavery as with other social institutions. It
existed everywhere when Christianity appeared, but the Christian
teachers never preached abolition. The Christian emperors adopted, and
for two centuries maintained practically unchanged, the pagan slave
code. There were under these rulers, it is true, some ameliorations in
the laws, due to Christian influence; thus cruel forms of punishment,
as branding on the forehead or throwing from a precipice, were
prohibited. With the exception of these minor isolated mitigations of
the lot of the slave, slavery passed over into Christian civilization
as an unchanged heritage from the ancient world, and continued to
exist as a Christian institution until, through the action of various
agencies, political and economic as well as moral, it was gradually
transformed into serfdom. During the later centuries of its prevalence,
however, Christian teachings softened many of the cruelties of the
system, and caused, speaking generally, the individual slave to be
treated with greater consideration and humanity.
[Sidenote: The broadening moral
movement in progress in the
ancient world is checked]
Unfortunately there were large offsets to the moral gains of which
we have been speaking. Christianity had entered a world in which the
most important ethical movement in progress was the broadening of the
moral sympathies. The genius of the new religion, a genius inherited
from the great prophets of Judaism, was well calculated to impart, as
for a period it did, a fresh impulse to this cosmopolitan movement,
and to foster and strengthen this growing sentiment of philanthropy
and universal brotherhood. Its mission seemed to be to consummate the
work of Greek philosophy and of Roman world conquest, to complete the
obliteration of national boundaries, to throw down the partition wall
between Greek and barbarian, Jew and gentile, patrician and plebeian,
bond and free, and to make each man’s neighbor to be every fellow being
of whatsoever race or class or creed.
But this spirit of genuine Christianity was soon obscured and the world
movement toward ethical universalism obstructed and checked by the
theological teaching which made moral merit and salvation dependent
upon the acceptance of a prescribed creed. In place of the tribal and
racial walls of division which had originally separated the communities
of men and which the progress of events had thrown down, it raised
a new partition wall which divided mankind into two great ethically
artificial classes, believers and unbelievers, Christians and pagans.
In place of the doctrine of race election it substituted the doctrine
of individual election. Throughout a large part of the Christian
period “infidels” and “heathen” have too often been to Christians
what “gentiles” were to the “chosen people,” and “barbarians” to the
intellectually elect Greeks.
Thus was the broadening and leveling movement which marked the later
centuries of antiquity checked, while a new division as inimical to
universal charity as the old divisions of race and cult was created.
[Sidenote: St. Augustine as the
representative of the narrowing
movement]
The representative and promoter of this retrograde movement in the
moral domain was the African bishop St. Augustine. His “City of
God,” viewed from one side, is altogether like unto the old city of
man. It is simply the ancient classical city in its early period of
aristocratic pride and exclusiveness before it had felt the broadening
influence of a thousand years of varied experience and growing culture.
Only a few can acquire citizenship in the new city. Its privileges are
only for “the elect.” A great multitude, the nonelect, are left outside
the city gates. Thus, in the words of Wedgwood, “all the arrogance,
all the exclusiveness, all the love of privilege, for which the city
of man no longer afforded any escape, found a refuge in the city of
God.”[653]
The narrowing and hampering influence upon the moral development of the
European peoples of this unethical system of Augustinian theology and
metaphysics it would be difficult to exaggerate.
[Sidenote: Loss of the virtue of
toleration]
The new division was even more of a hindrance in some respects
than the old to the moral progress of the world; for there was not
merely created a tendency to the limitation of Christian charity to
the community of believers, but there was fostered an intolerant
and persecuting spirit. The world into which Christianity entered
was, speaking generally, a tolerant world. There were, it is true,
persecutions for opinion’s sake in the pre-Christian age, but these
were comparatively infrequent. In general, persecution in classical
antiquity sprang from some other motive than dislike or fear of
religious dissent, as we have seen to have been the case in the
persecution of the Christians by the pagan emperors of Rome.[654]
But after the promulgation of the moral code of the Church, which made
wrong belief or denial of the orthodox creed a fault of unmeasured
criminality, toleration ceased to be a virtue and became a vice.
Thus the virtue of toleration, which Lecky pronounces “the supreme
attainment of Roman civilization,” was lost. Intolerance became a duty,
and remained such for more than a thousand years, making a tragedy
of centuries of European history. Wars of annihilation or subjection
against pagans and infidels were waged, and the persecution of heretics
was carried on with a hatred and ferocity in strange contrast to
the unbounded charity and infinite tenderness of the Founder of the
religion in the name of which these things were done.
This spirit of intolerance thus called into existence led, during
the period under review, to the suppression, first, in the fourth
century by the Christian emperors, of freedom of religious worship;
and then quickly to the suppression of liberty of thought throughout
Christendom.[655] By the opening of the sixth century no one in any
Christian land could freely think or freely express his thought, even
on philosophical themes. This retrograde movement in its ultimate
consequences was one of the most far-reaching revolutions in the moral
history of the Western world.
[Sidenote: “Between moralities”;
the new-forming ideal]
Aside from the broad ethical movements traced above, induced by the
Christian conception of life and its new valuation of particular
virtues and duties, there was in this epoch a moral phenomenon of
another sort which we must now notice, namely, the moral anarchy which
characterized the later centuries of the period under review.
In an earlier chapter we spoke of the fusion of moral ideals which
ultimately takes place when two races meet and unite to form a new
race and a new culture.[656] But as Bagehot has pointed out, such a
commingling of races is always attended by a special danger. It is
likely for a time to produce “something not only between races, but
_between moralities_.”[657]
In the fact here stated we must doubtless look for the explanation in
part of the turbulent, anarchical character, ethically viewed, of the
period which immediately followed the downfall of ancient civilization,
and which saw the creation, out of Roman and barbarian elements, of
the new Romano-German world. In the migrations and settlements of the
German conquerors in the Roman provinces, and in the mixture of races
which there took place, there resulted necessarily, on the one side,
a break-up of all the old tribal relations which formed the basis of
the morality of the barbarians, and, on the other side, the destruction
of all the restraints and conventions which had formed the bulwark and
stay of the more refined, if less simple and pure, morality of the
Romans. With the old moral codes discredited, with ancestral ethical
ideals disintegrated,[658] men stood, to use Bagehot’s phrase, not
between races only but also between moralities, and the historical
ethical evolution was broken by what has been aptly called a moral
interregnum. The epoch covering the interval between the destruction
of the Roman governmental system in the West in the fifth century and
the establishment of a semblance of social order by Charlemagne toward
the end of the eighth century, presents, according to the concurrent
view of all chroniclers and historians of the period, one of the most
appalling spectacles of moral anarchy afforded by the records of human
history.
In the midst of this moral chaos, however, a new moral world was
forming. Gradually, under various influences, racial, cultural, and
religious, there was taking shape and form, through a fusion of
different ethical elements, a new moral ideal, the ideal of knighthood,
which for an epoch--throughout the crusading centuries--was to absorb a
large part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom, and to determine in
great measure the character of the enterprises of the age.
Since one of the influences which produced this great transformation in
the Christian ideal was the creed and moral code of Islam, we shall in
our next chapter turn aside from following the ethical evolution among
the European peoples to watch for a space the rise and progress of this
new faith whose martial ethics was destined to leave so deep an impress
upon the moral ideal of Christianity.
CHAPTER XIV
THE ETHICS OF ISLAM: A MARTIAL IDEAL
I. RELIGIOUS BASIS OF THE MORAL SYSTEM
[Sidenote: Introduction: Islam
creates a new conscience in the
Arab race]
The great revolution which in the seventh century of the Christian
era agitated all Arabia and gave a new trend to vast currents of
world history was essentially a moral revolution. It was the moral
degradation of the Arab tribes, still clinging to an outgrown,
idolatrous worship incapable longer of giving moral guidance to its
followers, that stirred the soul and inspired the message of Mohammed.
The Prophet’s real appeal was to the conscience of the Arab race. The
chief aim and purpose of his preaching was to effect a moral reform.
He gave the Arabs, it is true, a new religion, but the religion was to
give impulse and sanction to the new morality. The transformation which
the new faith wrought in the moral consciousness of the Arabian nation
was probably not less profound than that effected by Christianity in
the moral consciousness of the European peoples. It is this which
makes the rise of Islam a matter as important in the moral as in the
religious history of mankind.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of the
unity of God]
Islam may, with strict historical accuracy, be said to be essentially a
republication of Judaism. Its morality, like the old Hebrew morality,
is largely derived from its conception of deity. It teaches that God
is one, and that he is all-powerful, compassionate, forgiving, and
righteous. Allah is great and merciful and just, is the burden of the
Prophet’s message respecting deity. This ethical monotheism has been a
governing force in the moral life of the Mohammedan world, just as a
like ethical monotheism has been a molding influence in the moral life
of the Jews and of all those nations that have received their religion
from them.
[Sidenote: The dogma of salvation
by belief]
Another religious doctrine which has contributed largely to shape
the morality of Islam is that of salvation by belief. Only the true
believer can be saved. The tendency, indeed the logical and inevitable
consequence of this doctrine, has been to make Islam one of the most
intolerant of the great religions. It has tended to restrict the moral
sympathies of Moslems to coreligionists and to make propagandism by
violence seem a virtue.
[Sidenote: An unchangeable moral
law]
Islam claims to be a divine revelation to man. This doctrine of the
supernatural origin of the religion makes the moral code, which is
bound up with it, a rigid, unchangeable law, for it is only a human
code that can be changed without irreverence and sacrilege. The
blighting effects upon Mohammedan morality of this dogma of a moral law
supernaturally given for all time will be noted a little later, when we
come to speak of the actual moral life in Mohammedan lands.
II. THE MORAL CODE
[Sidenote: General nature of the
code]
Like all the other ethical systems of Asia, save those of genuine
Christianity and Buddhism, the Islamic system lays special emphasis
upon the performance of particular prescribed acts. It is by no means
silent respecting the necessity of right states and dispositions
of mind. But instead of relying upon general principles for the
guidance of the moral life, it lays its emphasis upon specific outer
observances, such as almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimages, and stated
prayers.[659] The tendency of such a code of precise rules and
commands, as was pointed out in connection with Chinese morality and
again in connection with the postexilic morality of the Jews, is
to externalize morality and render the moral life conventional and
mechanical.
[Sidenote: The duty and virtue of
right belief]
In correspondence with the dogma of salvation through belief, the
paramount duty and virtue in the ethical-religious code of Islam is
unquestioning belief in Allah as the only true God and in Mohammed
as his prophet. Without this virtue of correct belief there can be,
according to the teachings of Islam, no salvation.
[Sidenote: Fighting for the true
religion a cardinal duty]
One effect of thus making right belief an indispensable virtue was to
make intolerance practically a virtuous disposition of mind, and the
conquest of infidels a paramount duty. It is here that we find one of
the fundamental differences between the ethical teachings of Christ and
those of Mohammed. The Founder of Christianity, through his teaching
of nonresistance, condemned war. He commanded his followers to put
up the sword. The founder of Islam, on the other hand, frankly and
without scruple adopted the war system of his time and consecrated it
to a religious end and purpose. His followers were commanded to fight
for the extension of the religion of Allah.[660] Those who fell in
battle for the faith were promised immediate entrance into the joys of
Paradise.[661]
Never was there a more fateful provision given a place in a code of
morals. It determined in large measure the character of Islam and
foreshadowed its history. It made it a martial religion. This martial
religion, through reaction upon Christianity, helped to make it like
unto itself. Thus was prepared the way for the Holy Wars.
[Sidenote: Provisions of the code
respecting slavery]
Just as Mohammed adopted the war system he found in existence, so did
he adopt that of slavery. But while accepting the system, he did much
to improve the status of the bondsman. The legislation of the Koran
in this department of ethics follows the humane regulations of the old
Hebrew code. In its specific provisions favorable to the slave it goes
beyond the requirements of the New Testament. It not only enjoins the
kind treatment of slaves but provides that converts to Islam shall be
set free, and in general encourages manumission.[662]
[Sidenote: Family morals: polygamy
recognized as ethical]
In no department of ethics is the contrast between Christian and
Mohammedan morals sharper than in the sphere of domestic morality.
Sex relations which the Christian Church condemns as sin, and which
the Christian civil law makes a crime, are by the Mohammedan moral
consciousness pronounced natural and right, or at least ethically
indifferent. The New Testament absolutely prohibited polygamy, although
from primitive times the moralists of the East had had in general no
condemnation for the custom; but the Koran accepted the system without
scruple. In doing so, however, it placed salutary restraints upon the
unregulated license which had hitherto characterized the institution.
It limited the number of wives of the faithful to four,[663] and
surrounded divorce with wholesome restrictions.
Family ethics were further lifted to a higher level by the positive
prohibition of infanticide,[664] a practice which constituted
one of the worst evils of Arab society in pre-Islamic times. The
positive enactments of the Koranic code in this department of morals
accomplished what was effected indirectly in the same domain by
Christianity through its teachings of the sanctity of human life.
[Sidenote: The prohibition
of gambling and the use of
intoxicating liquors]
Among the other prohibitions of the moral code of Islam are two worthy
of special notice for the reason that, being made largely effective
by the sanctions of religion, they have exercised an incalculable
influence upon the Mohammedan world. These are the provisions of the
Koran forbidding in the most positive terms gambling and the use
of alcoholic drinks.[665] These prohibitions have had a great and
undeniable influence in preserving Mohammedan civilization, in the
extended reach of lands over which it has spread, from those inveterate
twin evils of gambling and drunkenness which constitute one of the
deepest stains on Christian civilization.
[Sidenote: Animal ethics]
It has been maintained that the place given duties to lower animals is
a crucial test of a moral code.[666] Tried by this standard, the code
of Islam must be accorded a high place among the ethical systems of the
world. In the department of animal ethics it is on a level with that of
the old Hebrew Testament. Indeed, the tender solicitude of the code for
dumb animals is one of its most admirable features. The whole animal
creation is here brought within the pale of ethics. Thus at the outset
Islam took up a position respecting man’s duty toward the animal world
which Christianity is only just now tardily assuming.
[Sidenote: A concrete and
practical morality]
Taken as a whole the ethical rules and commands of the Koran constitute
an admirable code, one which has been an efficient force in the moral
improvement and uplift of the peoples of vast regions of the earth. The
morality inculcated has been succinctly characterized as a concrete and
practical one. It is particularly well adapted to races in a low stage
of culture. The very fact that, notwithstanding some serious defects
and limitations, the code has been accepted by so large a part of the
human race, and has, for over a thousand years, given moral guidance
and inspiration to such vast multitudes, goes to prove that the great
body of its rules and prescriptions of conduct are in general in line
with the elemental laws of the moral world.
III. THE MORAL LIFE
[Sidenote: Mohammedan morality
depressed by racial influences]
In any comparison instituted between Christianity and Islam as moral
regenerators of society there is need that the difference in the
fields entered by these rival creeds be kept carefully in mind.
Islam was placed at a disadvantage in that it went among the morally
degenerate and dissolute peoples of the Orient, while Christianity had
for its field the classical peoples and particularly the fresh German
race. In those same Eastern lands and among those same Oriental or
semi-Hellenized races Christianity had not only signally failed morally
to reform and uplift society, but in that unfavorable environment had
itself become lamentably degenerate and corrupt. In pointing out this
disadvantage to which Islam has been subjected, a discerning Moslem
writer says, “Like rivers flowing through varied tracts, both these
creeds have produced results in accordance with the nature of the soil
through which they have found their course.”[667] There is here the
necessary recognition of the influence which the historical environment
exercises upon the moral standard. The prerequisite of a good harvest
in the field of morals, as in the physical world, is not only good seed
but also a good soil.
[Sidenote: Consequence of giving a
religious sanction to war]
The whole history of Islam, as already remarked, has been molded by
the fact that fighting for the extension of the true religion was made
by Mohammed a chief duty of the faithful. Islam’s wonderful career of
conquest during the first century after its rise was in large measure
the result of the Prophet having made war against infidels a pious
duty. Hitherto war among the Arabs had been for the most part merely
a raid or hunt. Now it was given an ethical-religious motive and thus
made a crusade. In the space of a single century a large part of the
countries which had formed the historic lands of antiquity had been
brought by the Arabian warriors under the sway of Islam.
But this was not all. These conquests brought Islam in contact with
Christendom along all its extended frontier from the Straits of
Gibraltar to the Bosporus, and thus created the conditions which led to
the Holy Wars between Moslem and Christian, which filled the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. Such were the momentous and far-reaching
consequences of the giving by the Arabian Prophet of a religious
sanction to war, and the reënforcing of the war spirit among a martial
race by making warfare a duty and death in battle a sure passport to
the bliss of paradise.
[Sidenote: Mitigation of Oriental
barbarities in war]
While adopting and sanctifying the war system, Islam did something in
the way of mitigating its savagery. Up to this time the war code of
the Asian peoples had lost little or none of its primitive barbarity.
The indiscriminate slaughter of the vanquished, without regard to
age or sex, had been a common practice. But when the second Arabian
caliph, Omar, sent out his warriors to effect the conquest of the world
for the true religion, he strictly enjoined them to spare the women
and children and the old men. This injunction became a part of the
Mohammedan war code, and, though not always observed, it did much to
make the earlier wars waged for the spread of Islam, compared with most
of the recorded wars among the Oriental races, merciful and humane.
[Sidenote: Intolerance as a
corollary of religious principles]
Intimately related to the subject of the Mohammedan ethics of war is
the subject of toleration. As we have seen, the natural tendency of the
teaching that right religious belief is necessary to salvation, and
that fighting for the spread of the true religion is a paramount duty,
is to foster intolerance, indeed, is to make intolerance a virtue.
These doctrines of Islam have in the main restricted to the faithful
the outgoings of the moral sympathies. To the moral consciousness of
the Moslem masses tolerance has not presented itself as a virtue
at all, but rather as a reprehensible disposition of mind, since it
argues lack of zeal for the true faith. There is to-day more religious
intolerance in Moslem lands than in any other regions of the earth. In
this respect the Mohammedan world is about at the standpoint held by
Christendom in the Middle Ages.
But fortunately it is the same with a bad principle as with a good
one--it never produces its full logical consequences. There is that in
the constitution of things and in human nature which prevents this.
Hence there has been in Mohammedan lands a larger measure of toleration
than, in view of the teachings of Islam, we should have looked for.
But the toleration enjoyed by non-Moslems under Mohammedan rule has
been at best precarious. With lamentable frequency, in lands where
large sections of the population are ignorant and debased, outbursts of
fanaticism have resulted in terrible massacres of “unbelievers.”
Not until Moslem civilization has felt the broadening effect of those
material, intellectual, and moral revolutions which have finally
brought in toleration in a once intolerant Christendom, will this
virtue, without which a true and progressive moral life is impossible,
find a place in the ethical code of Islam.
[Sidenote: The slave trade under
Islam]
The slave trade in Mohammedan lands has been fostered through the
consecration of the war system by Mohammed and his recognition of
slavery as a part of the established social order. Throughout the first
century of the career of Islam the propaganda of the faith by the sword
provided an unfailing source of slaves, such as had not been opened
up since the completion of the conquest of the world by the Roman
legions.[668] This religious legitimatizing of the slave trade filled
Moslem lands with slave markets, and, when the wars of the religious
propaganda had ceased, tended to give a fresh impulse to the African
slave traffic, which had been in existence from time immemorial. This
trade by Mohammedans has been just such a curse to eastern and central
Africa as the European Christian slave traffic--which, beginning in
the fifteenth century, continued till its final suppression in the
nineteenth--was to the west African coast and the hinterland. The
Moslem trade is still carried on clandestinely,[669] since there has as
yet been little or no moral disapprobation of the traffic awakened in
Mohammedan lands.
[Sidenote: Drunkenness in
Mohammedan countries]
The absolute prohibition in the Koran of the use of all intoxicating
liquors has been wonderfully effective in preserving Mohammedan lands
from the great evil of drunkenness. This vice, so common in Christian
lands, is almost unknown in countries where the faith of the Koran is
really dominant and the influence of Europeans has not been felt.
In Afghanistan the penalty inflicted for drunkenness is death. So
rigorously is the law of Islam in this matter enforced that persons in
a state of intoxication are almost never seen. Nor is the evil simply
driven under cover; there is practically very little drinking going on
in the privacy of the home.
[Sidenote: Moslem charity]
Islam has been only less effective than Buddhism and Christianity in
fostering the attractive virtue of charity. The precepts of the Koran
respecting almsgiving and other deeds of benevolence have greatly
promoted the habit of giving among the followers of the Prophet. The
giving of direct relief to the poor in the form of alms is probably
quite as general as among Christians, though much of this charity is
indiscriminate and tends to foster that mendicity which is such an
ever-present evil in Mohammedan lands. The building of caravansaries,
the construction of aqueducts, the opening of fountains along the
routes of travel, and the founding of asylums are forms of benevolence
which recall similar works of philanthropy in the later period of the
pagan Roman Empire.
Respecting this charity, however, it must be said that much of it has
the taint of self-interest. Many of these good works are performed not
so much from genuine philanthropy as from self-regarding motives, the
dominant thought of the doer being to gain religious merit for himself.
[Sidenote: Moral influence of
Islam on races low in civilization]
The spread of Islam has been almost from the first largely among
tribes and peoples low in the scale of civilization. In the earlier
centuries of its career, besides its conquests among the peoples of
ancient culture, it won over a great part of the uncivilized clans
and tribes of Asia, and to-day is making constant and rapid progress
among the negro tribes of central Africa. What renders this fact of
significance to the historian of morals is that Islam has shown itself
to be one of the most potent forces at work in the world to-day for
the moral elevation of peoples still on or near the level of savagery.
Canon Isaac Taylor affirms that it “causes the negro tribes of Africa
to renounce paganism, devil worship, fetishism, cannibalism, human
sacrifices, infanticide, witchcraft, gambling, drunkenness, unchastity,
cruelty, and personal uncleanliness.”[670]
That the moral code of Islam should be even more effective than the
Christian in lifting savages to a higher moral level is attributed by
Canon Taylor to the fact that the moral standard of Christianity is so
high that “its virtues are only vaguely understood and not generally
practiced, while the lower virtues which Islam enforces are understood
and generally practiced.”
In a word, it is with Islam’s morality the same as with its theology.
Its doctrine of one God is simple, concrete, and easily understood,
and for this reason Islam is admittedly more readily accepted by races
low in culture than Christianity with its metaphysical doctrine of the
Trinity. As the simplicity and concreteness of its teachings respecting
deity adapt its creed to the savage mind, so do the lower concrete
practical virtues of its moral code adapt it to the rudimentary moral
sense of the primitive man.
[Sidenote: Effects upon Mohammedan
morality of an unpliant law]
One of the most striking and instructive phenomena of universal history
is the contrasted fortunes of Mohammedan and Christian civilization. In
the eighth century of our era Mohammedan culture was in many respects
superior to that of Christendom. It held forth great promises for the
future. But these promises were not kept. Stagnation quickly followed
the period of brilliant achievement, and a blight fell upon the Moslem
world, while the history of Christendom has been a record of wonderful
development and progress, until to-day the two worlds cannot be placed
in comparison with one another, but only in contrast.
Beyond question many agencies, such as race, religion, and government,
have concurred to produce this contrast in history and fortune,
but equally certain is it that a potent contributory cause is
the difference in the moral systems which the two civilizations
respectively inherited. The moral life of the Christian world,
happily freed from the bondage of the rigid Mosaic law, an outer law
of positive minute commands, has expatiated under the comprehensive,
flexible law of the Gospel, a law of love and liberty. As a result
the moral life of Christendom has been, on the whole, notwithstanding
certain Mohammedanizing tendencies, an expansive growth under the
guidance of a moral consciousness gradually purified and refined by
experience and advancing culture. On the other hand, the moral life
of the Mohammedan world has been subjected to the authority of an
external, unchanging law, a law conceived to have been given for all
time, a republication practically of that rigid Mosaic law from the
bondage of which the Christian world had fortunately escaped. But the
moral life cannot be thus subjected to a rigid external authority
without resulting inanition and death. “The blight that has fallen on
the Moslem nations,” declares a well-informed and thoughtful Mohammedan
writer, “is due to the patristic doctrine which has prohibited
the exercise of individual judgment.”[671] The ethical code of a
people, like its civil code, must be elastic and responsive to the
ever-changing needs and demands of the growing moral life.
CHAPTER XV
THE MORAL LIFE OF EUROPE DURING THE AGE OF CHIVALRY
I. THE CHURCH CONSECRATES THE MARTIAL IDEAL OF KNIGHTHOOD
[Sidenote: Introductory]
From the third to the ninth century the ideal of asceticism absorbed
a great part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom. During the later
part of this period, however, as we have noted, there was growing up
alongside the ascetic ideal another of a very different character--the
martial ideal of knighthood. In the present chapter we shall first make
a brief survey of the various causes that gave this new trend to the
moral feelings and convictions of the age, and then shall glance at
some of the more important historical outcomes of the vast enthusiasm
evoked by this new ideal of character.
The ideal of knighthood, a product in the main of feudalism, grew up
outside the Church, and only later was recognized by ecclesiastical
authority and approved as compatible with the ethical spirit of
Christianity. Had not the ideal been thus approved by ecclesiastical
authority, and advantage taken of the enthusiasm it evoked to promote
through it the cause of the Church, it would never have become the
significant force it did in European history. Therefore we must first
inquire what were the influences that engendered a military spirit in
the Church and led it to approve the martial ideal of the knight and
give the consecration of religion to the institution of chivalry which
was its embodiment.
[Sidenote: The genius of
Christianity opposed to the war
spirit]
If at the advent of Christianity one reflecting upon the genius of the
new religion and the teachings of its Founder had ventured to forecast
the influence of the new faith upon the different departments of
morality, he would almost certainly have predicted that this influence
would be felt most decisively upon the ethics of war. The attitude
assumed by the early Christians toward the military life would have
justified this forecast, for Christianity brought into the world the
new principle of nonresistance.[672] This teaching made the primitive
Christian community almost a Quaker body; but barely three centuries
had passed before this religion which had entered the world as a gospel
of peace and good will had become a martial creed and its emblem been
made a battle standard.
[Sidenote: Causes which fostered
the war spirit in the Church:
(_a_) the heritage of the war
ethics of the ancient world of
culture]
The causes that produced this amazing transformation in the Christian
Church were various and so interrelated as to make it difficult to
determine just what influence was exercised by each. Yet it is possible
to note the character of the different agencies at work, and to form
at least some general idea of the way in which the transformation was
wrought.
First, there was the inheritance from the past. War had always been
one of the leading occupations of men. It had scarcely ever occurred
to any one to question its legitimacy. It was looked upon as a part of
the constitution of things. The ideas, feelings, habits, engendered
by its practice through uncounted millenniums of history had become
ingrained in every tissue and fiber of man’s being. Set in the midst
of the world, the Church yielded to the influence of this baneful pagan
heritage. It incorporated with its own moral code, wholly alien to the
essential spirit of Christianity as these elements were, the war ethics
of the pre-Christian world, and thus made this pagan international
morality a permanent part of Christian ethics.[673] It will be
instructive for us to follow somewhat closely this reaction upon the
ethics of the Church, first of the war code of the civilized world of
the south, and then later of the war spirit of the barbarian world of
the north.
The early Fathers of the Church in general condemned the military
service as incompatible with the Christian life.[674] Not till the
second century of the Empire do we find any record of Christian
soldiers serving in the Roman armies. By this time the early rule of
the Church forbidding a member to serve in the army had become relaxed;
but members of the Christian body who entered the Roman legions were
required to undertake a prescribed penance and to seek absolution
before partaking of the Eucharist. By the time of Diocletian Christians
appear to have entered with little or no scruple upon the military
life.[675] A significant waymark of this gradual transformation is
the great victory won by the Emperor Constantine over his rival
Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge, 312 A.D. Upon that field
the soldiers of Constantine fought beneath the Labarum, a standard
which bore as an emblem the Christian cross. The fortunate issue of
the battle for Constantine seems to have greatly confirmed the feeling
in the Christian community as to the legitimacy of war. The Church
conformed more and more positively its teachings and discipline to
the requirements of the military service. Saints Augustine (354–430
A.D.) and Ambrose (340–397 A.D.), in opposition to most of the earlier
Fathers, were open apologists and defenders of war and of the military
life.
Thus during the very period when the Church was putting under its ban
the cruel and sanguinary amusements of the Romans by the suppression
of the gladiatorial games,[676] and thus lifting domestic morality to
a new and higher plane, through a strange inconsistency it was first
condoning and then finally consecrating the international pagan war
system of which these sports were only a mild imitation.
[Sidenote: (_b_) The war spirit of
the German race]
After the fifth century the influence upon the ethics of the Church of
the war system of the civilized world of the south was reënforced by
the martial spirit of the barbarian world of the north. That world was
now, largely through the missions of the monastic Church, being rapidly
brought within the pale of Christianity. But all these northern peoples
were the very incarnation of the war spirit. Their favorite deities
were gods who delighted in battle and bloodshed. Fighters these men
were, and fighters they remained even after conversion and baptism.
The mingling of moralities which followed their conversion is well
illustrated by the passionate outburst of the Frankish chieftain Clovis
as he listened to the story of the Crucifixion: “Oh,” he exclaimed,
“if only I could have been there with my trusty warriors!” The soul
of Clovis lived on in his race. Four centuries later these Frankish
warriors, as knight crusaders, were on the spot of the Crucifixion,
redeeming with lance and sword the tomb of the slain Christ from the
hands of infidels. It was this ineradicable war spirit of the northern
barbarians to which was due, perhaps more than to any other agency, the
infusion of a military spirit into that church of which the Founder was
the Prince of Peace.
Among the customs of the early Germans there was one which had such a
positive influence upon the evolution we are tracing in Church morality
that we must here make special note of it. This was the ordeal by fire,
by water, or by wager of battle to determine the guilt or innocence of
an accused person. The prominent place held by this institution among
savage or semicivilized peoples is familiar to the student of primitive
society. Now the German folk brought with them this institution, and
with it the belief which made the ordeal, and particularly the ordeal
by combat, a solemn judicial matter in which God rendered decision and
gave victory to the one whose cause was just. This barbarian conception
of the wager of battle between individuals became incorporated with
the common body of Christian ideas and beliefs. The same manner of
thinking was perforce applied to war. A conflict between great armies
was conceived as a wager of battle in which God gave victory to the
right. Thus was war consecrated and made an agency whereby God executes
judgment among the nations.
[Sidenote: (_c_) The war records
of the Old Hebrew Testament]
This interpretation of the nature and mission of war was reënforced by
a like unfortunate interpretation of the records of the Old Testament.
The good bishop Ulfilas was right when, in translating the Hebrew Bible
into the Gothic tongue, he omitted the war chronicles through fear that
these records of wars and massacres would fan into too fierce a flame
the martial zeal of his Gothic neophytes. To these terrible chronicles,
which represent God as commanding the Israelites to wage war against
his enemies, and even as ordering the most horrid atrocities upon war
captives, is due in large part the idea so dominant even to-day among
Christian nations that God is a God of War, and that through the ordeal
of battle he gives judgment on the earth.[677]
[Sidenote: (_d_) The armed
propaganda of Islam]
The transformation taking place in the ethical standard of the
Church under the various influences we have named was hastened and
completed by the reaction upon Christian ethics of the martial ethics
of Islam.[678] This new influence began to be exerted in the seventh
century. By infection the crusading spirit of the Mohammedan zealots
was communicated to the Christian Church. Toward the close of the
eleventh century the spiritual head of Christendom, Pope Urban II,
summoned the Christian nations of Europe to arms for the recovery of
the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the unbelievers.
Feudalism by this time had flowered in chivalry. The Christian
lands were filled with brave young knights, especially knights of
Norman descent, aflame with martial enthusiasm and eager for warlike
adventure. It was the ancestors of these very men, instinct with the
military spirit, that Rome had once enlisted in her legions to fight
the battles of the Empire; it is the children of those legionaries that
the Christian Church now summons in the name of Christ to her standard
to fight the battles of the Cross.
The transformation of that Church was now complete. The age of the
Crusades had opened. Christ and Mars were co-sovereigns in Christian
Europe. The teachings of the Prince of Peace and the war spirit of
the civilization of antiquity and of the German barbarians were
reconciled.[679] As Lecky finely portrays it, “At the hour of sunset
when the Christian soldier knelt down to pray before his cross, that
cross was the handle of his sword.”[680]
II. THE COMPOSITE IDEAL OF KNIGHTHOOD
[Sidenote: The composite character
of the ideal: its pagan-Christian
virtues]
The foregoing brief account of the reconciliation and commingling in
later Roman and early medieval times of the pagan ethics of war and
the Christian ethics of peace has already acquainted us with what was
the distinctive characteristic of the ethical ideal of knighthood,
the ideal which resulted from this mingling of these two strongly
contrasted moralities. It was a composite ideal, a combination of pagan
and Christian virtues. The true knight, who was the incarnation of the
ideal, must possess all the admired moral qualities of the pagan hero,
and, together with these, all the essential virtues of the Christian
saint. Among the pagan virtues we find a set of moral qualities that
are attributes of character which, with possibly one or two exceptions,
were assigned a high place either in the barbarian German or in the
classical ideal of excellence. Chief among these qualities are personal
loyalty, courage, truthfulness, justice, magnanimity, courtesy, and
self-respect.
The first duty and virtue of the true knight was absolute loyalty to
his superior, to his comrades in arms, and to the cause espoused.
This virtue of loyalty is the virtue which Professor Royce makes the
root from which all other virtues spring.[681] Without doubt it is,
if not the central virtue of every true moral system, one of the most
attractive of all ethical traits, and one most sacredly held from taint
by every person with a nice sense of what constitutes true nobility of
character.
A second and indispensable virtue was courage. The knight must be brave
as well as loyal. Cowardice and knighthood were wholly incompatible
things.
Another moral quality was veracity, absolute fidelity to a promise. The
pledged word of the true knight was sacrosanct and inviolable.[682]
Still another indispensable trait in the character of the ideal knight
was love of justice. The true knight must be just; an unjust knight
could not be a true knight any more than an unjust judge can be a true
judge.
Again, the knight who would be loyal to the ideal of knighthood must
be magnanimous. One of the elements of this virtue is unwillingness
to take an unfair advantage of another, especially of an enemy. It
was a disgraceful thing for a knight to attack his foe when at a
disadvantage, as when disarmed or fallen. He must always meet his enemy
in fair and open fight.
Furthermore, the true knight must be courteous. It was as much his
duty to be courteous as to be truthful. Now courtesy is not a trait or
feeling which inspires lofty action, but one which induces gentleness,
kind consideration, and gracious deference toward all alike--rich and
poor, high and low.
Lastly, the knight must possess dignity or self-respect. The age of
chivalry interpreted this virtue or duty as requiring the knight to
stand on his rights as a man. He must not let an injury to himself
or to a friend go unpunished. He must resent every insult and return
blow for blow. Not to do so argued cowardice and pusillanimity. All
this was of course directly opposed to the Christian requirements of
humility, meekness, nonresistance, and forgiveness of injuries, and was
distinctly a part of the moral code of chivalry which was borrowed from
pre-Christian or non-Christian morality.
To these essentially pagan virtues the knight, after the institution
of chivalry had been approved and consecrated by the Church, must add
all the distinctly Christian virtues, particularly the virtue of right
religious belief. Only the true believer could be a true knight.
A striking illustration of the mixture of moralities with which we
have to do in the period of chivalry is afforded by the celebrated
religious military orders of the Hospitalers and Templars, which were
formed just before the Second Crusade, when the enthusiasm for the
chivalric ideal was at its height, while that for the ascetic had not
yet sensibly abated. The Hospitalers were monks who, to their monastic
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience or humility, added the martial
obligations of knighthood; the Templars were knights who to their
military vows added those of the monk. Thus in these remarkable orders
of knight-monks we see incongruously united the monastic and military
ideals, two of the most sharply contrasted conceptions of worthy life
that it is possible to find in the whole history of ethical ideals.
[Sidenote: Defects of the ideal]
The ideal of chivalry had serious defects. First, the military
spirit, borrowed from paganism, which the ideal apotheosized, was in
absolute opposition to the spirit of Christianity, so that the perfect
reconciliation and fusion of the different moral qualities entering
into the ideal was impossible.
Second, from feudalism, with its sharply defined social classes, the
ideal received an aristocratic stamp. In this respect it was the
direct opposite of the monastic ideal. Any person, freeman or slave,
king or peasant, could become a monk, and by following the more
excellent way gain the homage of men and win the crown of sainthood.
But the chivalric ideal was one to which no plebeian might aspire.
Only a person of noble birth could become a knight. This exclusive
aristocratic character of the ideal constituted one of its most
serious defects. Yet in spite of this and other defects it was a noble
and attractive ideal, and one which not only left a deep stamp upon
medieval history, but contributed precious elements to the ethical
heritage which the modern world received from the Middle Ages.
III. THE CHIEF MORAL PHENOMENA OF THE PERIOD
[Sidenote: Influence of the ideal
of chivalry upon the history of
the epoch]
Just as the moral enthusiasm awakened by the monastic ideal gave a
special character and trend to much of the history of the age of its
ascendancy,--inspiring or helping to inspire the missionary propaganda
among the barbarian tribes of Europe, giving birth to a special
literature (the _Lives of the Saints_), and fostering the spirit of
benevolence and self-renunciation,--so did the unmeasured enthusiasm
created by the chivalric ideal give a distinctive character to much of
the history of the age of its predominance--lending a romantic cast
to the Crusades, creating a new form of literature, and giving a more
assured place in the growing European ideal of character to several
attractive traits and virtues. Respecting each of these matters we
shall offer some observations in the immediately following pages, and
then shall proceed to speak briefly of some reform movements which
belong to the general moral history of the epoch under review.
[Sidenote: Chivalry and the
Crusades]
The Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries against the Moslems
of the East, in so far as those enterprises were inspired by moral
feeling,--and religious-ethical feeling was the chief motive force
behind them,--were largely the translation into action of the ideal
of chivalry now commended and consecrated by the Church. The oath of
the Knights of Malta, who were a perfect incarnation of the spirit of
chivalry, was “to make eternal war upon the Turks; to recognize no
cessation of hostilities with the infidel, on any pretext whatsoever.”
It is an amazing change that, in the course of a few generations, has
come over the ethical spirit and temper of the peoples of Christendom.
In the earlier medieval time the best conscience of the age was
embodied in the monk-saints Augustine, Columba, Winfrid, and a great
company of other unarmed missionary apostles to the pagan Celts
and Germans; in this later time the best conscience of the age is
incarnated in the armor-clad warriors Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond,
Bohemond, Tancred, and a multitude of other knightly leaders of the
hosts of Crusaders who go forth to redeem with blood and slaughter the
tomb of their martyred Lord.
[Sidenote: Romance literature
as an expression of the ethical
spirit of the age]
No element of civilization responds more quickly to the changing
ethical ideal of a people than its literature. The change that passed
over the popular literature of Christendom in the transition of Europe
from the age of asceticism to the age of chivalry is finely summarized
by Lecky in these words: “When the popular imagination [in the earlier
age] embodied in legends its conception of humanity in its noblest and
most attractive form, it instinctively painted some hermit-saint of
many penances and many miracles.... In the romances of Charlemagne and
Arthur we may trace the dawning of a new type of greatness. The hero of
the imagination of Europe is no longer the hermit but a knight.”[683]
An interesting monument of this new species of literature, in what
we may view as a transition stage, is the _Gesta Romanorum_,[684] a
collection of moral stories invented by the monks in their idle hours.
These tales are a curious mixture of things Roman, monastic, and
knightly.
But for a true expression of this romance literature we must turn to
the legends of the Holy Grail, in which a lofty imagination blends,
in so far as they can be blended, all the varied elements of the
knightly ideal in a consistent whole. No age save the age of Christian
knighthood could have produced this wonderful cycle of tales.
[Sidenote: Contribution of
chivalry to the moral heritage of
the Christian world]
But it is neither in the crusading enterprises nor in the literary
products of the age of chivalry that we are to look for the real
historical significance of the ideal of chivalry. Its chief import
for the moral evolution of the European nations lies in the fact that
it helped to give fuller and richer content to the Christian ideal
by contributing to it, or by giving a surer place in it, certain
nontheological virtues, some of which the Church had laid little
emphasis upon or had entirely neglected.
Thus the enthusiasm for the ideal of chivalry, like the Church’s
veneration of the Holy Virgin,[685] tended to elevate and refine
the ideal of woman, and thus to counteract certain tendencies of
the ascetic ideal. It helped to give a high valuation to the moral
qualities of loyalty, truthfulness, magnanimity, self-reliance,
and courtesy. We designate these attractive traits of character as
chivalrous virtues for the reason that we recognize that knighthood
made precious contributions to these elements of the moral inheritance
which the modern received from the medieval world.
[Sidenote: Restrictions on the
right of private war: the Truce of
God]
Very closely connected ethically and historically with chivalry is
the movement during the later medieval time for the abolition of
the right of private war.[686] In the tenth century, as feudalism
developed and the military spirit of knighthood came more and more
to dominate society, the right of waging war, with which privilege
every feudal lord of high rank was invested, resulted in a state of
intolerable anarchy in all those lands where the feudal system had
become established. Respecting this right, claimed and exercised by the
feudal prince, of waging war against any and every other chieftain,
even though this one were a member of the same state as that to which
he himself belonged, there was in these medieval centuries precisely
the same moral feeling, or rather lack of moral feeling, that exists
to-day in regard to the right claimed and exercised by the different
independent nations of waging war against one another.
As a result of this practice of private war, Europe reverted to a
condition of primitive barbarism. Every land was filled with fightings
and violence. “Every hill,” as one pictures it, “was a stronghold,
every plain a battlefield. The trader was robbed on the highway, the
peasant was killed at his plow, the priest was slain at the altar.
Neighbor fought against neighbor, baron against baron, city against
city.”
In the midst of this universal anarchy the Church lifted a protesting
voice. Toward the end of the tenth century there was started in France
a movement which aimed at the complete abolition of private war. The
Church aspired to do what had been done by pagan Rome. It proclaimed
what was called the Peace of God. It commanded all men everywhere
to refrain from fighting and robbery and violence of every kind as
contrary to the spirit and teachings of Christianity.
But it was found utterly impossible to make the great feudal barons
refrain from fighting one another even though they were threatened with
the eternal torments of hell. They were just as unwilling to surrender
this highly prized privilege and right of waging private war as the
nations of to-day are to surrender their prized privilege and right to
wage public war.
Then the leaders of the clergy of France, seeing that they could not
suppress the evil entirely, resolved to attempt to regulate it. This
led to the proclamation of what was called the Truce of God. The first
certain trace of this movement dates from the year 1041.[687] In that
year the abbot of the monastery of Cluny and the other French abbots
and bishops issued an edict commanding all men to maintain a holy and
unbroken peace during four days of every week, from Wednesday evening
till Monday morning.[688] Every man was required to take an oath to
observe this Truce of God. The oath was renewed every three years, and
was administered to boys on their reaching their twelfth year.
This movement to redeem at least a part of the days from fighting
and violence came gradually to embrace all the countries of Western
Europe. The details of the various edicts issued by Church councils
and popes vary greatly, but all embody the principle of the edict of
1041. Holydays, and especially consecrated periods, as Easter time
and Christmas week, came to be covered by the Truce. The Council of
Clermont, which inaugurated the First Crusade, extended greatly the
terms of the Truce, forbidding absolutely private wars while the
Crusade lasted, and placing under the ægis of the Church the person and
property of every crusader.
The Truce of God was never well observed, yet it did something during
the eleventh and twelfth centuries to mitigate the evils of private
war and to render life more secure and tolerable. After the twelfth
century the kings of Europe, who were now strengthening their authority
and consolidating their dominions, took the place of the Church in
maintaining peace among their feudal vassals. They came to regard
themselves as responsible for the “peace of the land,” which phrase now
superseded those of the “Peace of God” and the “Truce of God.” Thus the
movement to which moral forces had given the first impulse was carried
to its consummation by political motives. To the Church, however,
history will ever accord the honor of having begun this great reform
which enforced peace upon the members of the same state, and which has
made private wars in civilized lands a thing of the past.
The abolition of private warfare was the first decisive step marking
the advance of Europe toward universal peace. Public war, that is,
war between nations, is still an established and approved institution
of international law; but in the moral evolution of humanity a time
approaches when public war shall also, like private war, be placed
under the ban of civilization, and will have passed upon it by the
truer conscience of that better age the same judgment that the
conscience of to-day pronounces on that private warfare upon which the
Truce of God laid the first arresting hand.
[Sidenote: Progress in the ethics
of war: sale into slavery of
Christian captives condemned]
Although the Church has done little in a direct way to abolish public
war, or even directly to create in society at large a new conscience
in regard to the wickedness of war in itself as an established method
of settling international differences, its influence has been felt
from early Christian times in the alleviation of its barbarities and
cruelties. One of the first ameliorations in the rules of war effected
through Christian influence concerned the treatment of war captives.
Among the ancient Greeks, as we have seen, under the influence of the
sentiment of Panhellenism, there was developed a vague feeling that
Greeks should not enslave Greeks. But aside from this Panhellenic
sentiment, which had very little influence upon actual practice, there
was in the pre-Christian period seemingly little or no moral feeling on
the subject, and the custom of reducing prisoners of war to slavery was
practically universal.
But the custom, in so far as it concerned Christian prisoners, was
condemned by the Christian conscience as incompatible with the spirit
of Christianity, and the rule was established that such captives
should not be enslaved.[689] We observe the first clear workings of
this new war conscience in Britain after the conversion of the Saxon
invaders. The Celts of Britain were Christians, and the Saxons, after
they themselves had been won over to Christianity, ceased to sell into
slavery their Celtic captives. Gradually this new rule was adopted by
all Christian nations. No other advance of equal importance marks the
moral history of public war during the medieval period.
This humane rule, however, did not, as we have intimated, embrace
non-Christians. Our word “slave” bears witness to this fact. This term
came to designate a person in servitude from the circumstance that up
to the eleventh century, which saw the evangelization of Russia, the
slave class in Europe was made up largely of _Slavs_, who, as pagans,
were without scruple reduced to slavery by their Christian captors.
But the earlier rights which the immemorial laws of war conferred upon
the captor were not wholly annulled in the case of Christian captives.
The practice of holding for ransom took the place of sale into slavery.
This custom prevailed throughout the feudal period, but gradually
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this practice finally
yielded to the more humanitarian custom of exchange of prisoners.[690]
Thus in this department of ethics there is to be traced a gradual
humanization of the code, which, beginning in savagery with gross
cannibalism and torture, advances through killing in cold blood, sale
into slavery, and holding for ransom, to equal exchange.
[Sidenote: Morality in the
monasteries: moral significance of
the rise of the Mendicant Orders]
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
CHAPTER XVI
RENAISSANCE ETHICS: REVIVAL OF NATURALISM IN MORALS
I. DETERMINING INFLUENCES
[Sidenote: The Renaissance: the
new intellectual life]
Toward the close of the medieval ages came that important movement in
European society known as the Renaissance, a main feature of which
was the restoration of classical culture. Since the incoming of the
northern barbarians with their racial traits and martial moral code
there had been no such modifying force brought to bear upon the moral
evolution of the European peoples, nor was there to appear a greater
till the rise of modern evolutionary science.
The Renaissance exerted its transforming influence on the moral life
of the West chiefly through the new intellectual life it awakened
by bringing the European mind in vital contact with the culture of
the ancient world; for intellectual progress means normally moral
progress. Hence as the Renaissance meant a new birth of the European
intellect, so did it mean also a new birth of the European conscience.
Just as the conscience of the medieval age had its genesis in the new
religion which superseded the paganism of the ancient world, so did the
common conscience of to-day have its genesis in the new science, the
new culture, which in the Renaissance superseded medieval ideas and
theological modes of thought. A chief part of our remaining task will
be to make plain how the new intellectual life born in the revival of
the fifteenth century, and expressing itself since in every department
of human life, thought, and activity, has reacted upon the moral
feelings and judgments of men and taught them to seek the ultimate
sanctions of a true morality in the deep universal intuitions of the
human heart and conscience.
[Sidenote: The decay of feudalism
and the rise of monarchy: court
life]
Running parallel throughout the later medieval time with the classical
revival, whose significance was so great for European morality, there
was going on a political and social revolution which exerted an
influence on the ethical evolution only less potent and far-reaching
than that of the intellectual movement. During this period the
petty feudal states in the different countries of Europe were being
gathered up into larger political units. The principle of monarchy was
everywhere triumphing over that of feudalism. The multitude of feudal
castles, in which had been cradled the knightly ideal of manhood, were
replaced by the palaces and courts of rich princes and powerful kings.
This meant a great change in the social and political environment of
the higher classes.
In the first place, in these later courts there was a brilliancy
of life, a culture and a refinement rarely found in the earlier
feudal castles. In the next place, the relation which every member
of the court sustained to the prince or sovereign was fundamentally
different from that which the vassal had sustained to his lord under
the feudal régime. This relation, it is true, was still a personal
one; but independence was gone, and with this were gone the pride and
self-sufficiency which it engendered. In these princely courts the
knight became a courtier.
The effect of these changes in surroundings and relationships upon
the standard of conduct was profound, as we shall see when, a little
farther on, we come to inquire what were the ethical feelings and
judgments awakened in this new environment.
[Sidenote: The growth of the
towns: the workshop and the market
as molders of morals]
Three institutions--the monastery, the castle, and the town--dominated
successively the life of the Middle Ages. Each developed a distinct
ethical ideal. The monastery cradled the conscience of the monk; the
castle, the conscience of the knight; and the town, the conscience of
the burgher.
What particular virtues were approved by the moral sense of the town
dweller we shall note a little farther on. We here merely observe that
in the atmosphere of the town, in the relationships of the workshop and
the market, were nourished the lowly lay virtues of the artisan and
the trader, virtues which, though disesteemed by classical antiquity,
regarded as of subordinate worth by the monk, and held in positive
contempt by the knight, were yet to constitute the heart and core of
the ethical ideal of the modern world.
II. SOME ESSENTIAL FACTS IN THE MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE
[Sidenote: Revival of the
classical conception of life:
the new birth of the European
conscience]
When Christianity entered the Greco-Roman world with its new moral
ideal, the old classical ideal of character, as we have seen, was
practically superseded. There were, it is true, certain elements of
this pagan morality which were consciously or unconsciously absorbed by
Christianity; but the classical ideal as a whole was rejected, just as
the greater part of the cultural elements of Greco-Roman civilization
were cast aside. For a thousand years Hebrew-Christian conceptions of
the world and of life shaped the thought and conduct of men. Then came
the Renaissance.[697]
In the study of this movement the attention of the historian has
ordinarily been centered on the literary, artistic, and intellectual
phases of the revival, while the ethical phase has been given but
slight attention or has been dismissed with the facile observation that
the movement induced a revival of pagan immorality. This is true. But
the really significant thing was not the revival of pagan _immorality_
but the revival of pagan _morality_. For just as this classical revival
meant a new enthusiasm for the artistic, literary, and cultural
elements of the earlier Greco-Roman civilization, so did it also mean a
new enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman ideal of character. To many it was
no longer the Church ideal but the classical that seemed the embodiment
of what is ethically most noble and worthy. Such persons gave up the
practice of the distinctively Christian theological virtues, or,
if they still outwardly observed the Church code, this was merely
insincere conformity suggested by prudence or policy; the code of
morals which their minds and hearts approved and which they observed,
if they observed any at all, was the code of pagan antiquity. It is in
this secularization of the ethical ideal, in this divorce of morality
from theology, in this announcement of the freedom and autonomy of the
individual spirit, that is to be sought the real significance of the
classical revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the
moral history of the Western world.
In two ways chiefly did the Renaissance exert its transforming
influence upon European morals: first, by awakening a new intellectual
life, for, as we have had repeatedly shown us, a new mental life
means a new moral life; and second, by the direct introduction of
various elements of Greco-Roman morals into the Christian ideal of
character. Thus at the same time that the cultural life of Europe
was being enlarged and enriched by the incorporation of those
literary and art elements of classical civilization which had been
rejected or underestimated by the Middle Ages, the moral life of
Christendom was being profoundly modified by the incorporation of
those ethical elements which constituted the precious product of the
moral aspirations and achievements of the best generations of the
ancient world. The conscience of those persons in the modern world
who are imbued with the true scientific spirit, that is to say, with
the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance, is quite as largely Greek
as Hebraic. A recent writer reviewing the life of a distinguished
personage (Julia Ward Howe) recognized this mingling in modern culture
of these diverse elements in these words: “She has blended and lived,
as no other eminent American woman, the humanistic and the Christian
ideals of life. She has preached love and self-sacrifice, and she has
loved beauty and self-realization.”
[Sidenote: Theological morality:
the ethics of persecution]
In the domain of theological morality the history of the Renaissance
affords one of the most painful chapters in European history. This
chapter has to do with the establishment of the Inquisition to maintain
uniformity of religious belief.
It is not an accident that this chapter should form an integral part of
the history of the Renaissance. The spread of heresy, which threatened
the unity of the medieval Church, was largely the outgrowth of the new
intellectual life awakened by the revival of learning.[698] Hence it
was inevitable that the age of the Renaissance should be also the age
of persecution. It is not a recital of the history of the Holy Office
during the period under review which is our concern in this place,
but only a consideration of the motives of Christian persecution.
That intolerance should ever have been regarded by the followers of
the tolerant Nazarene as a virtue and persecution of misbelievers as
a pious duty, challenges the attention of the historian of morals and
incites earnest inquiry into the causes of such an aberration of the
moral sentiment.
It cannot be made a matter of reasonable doubt that one of the chief
causes of Christian intolerance is the theological doctrine that
salvation is dependent upon right belief in religious matters, and
that error in belief, even though honest, is a crime that merits and
receives eternal punishment.[699] This dogma leads logically and
inevitably to intolerance and persecution;[700] for if wrong belief is
a crime of so heinous a nature as justly to subject the misbeliever to
everlasting and horrible torments, and if the misbeliever is likely to
bring others into the same fatal way of thinking, then it follows that
heresy should be extirpated, just as the germs of a dreaded contagion
are stamped out, by any and every means however seemingly harsh and
cruel. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians logically “argued
that if the death penalty could be rightly inflicted on thieves and
forgers, who rob us only of worldly goods, how much more righteously
on those who cheat us out of supernatural goods--out of faith, the
sacraments, the life of the soul.”[701]
It was this theological teaching that heresy is a fault of unmeasured
sinfulness, an “insidious preventable contagion,” which was the main
root that fostered Christian intolerance and persecution.[702] The
activities of the Holy Office were maintained not by bad men but by
good men. “With such men it was not hope of gain, or lust of blood,
or pride of opinion, or wanton exercise of power [that moved them],
but sense of duty, and they but represented what was universal public
opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.”[703]
Reflecting on these facts, we readily give assent to the charitable
judgment of the historian Von Holst in commenting on the acts of the
Terrorists in the French Revolution, that “wrongdoing to others lies
not so much in the will as in the understanding.” The greatest crime
of history was committed by men who knew not what they did.[704] It
was a theological doctrine which is to-day rejected by the reason
and conscience of a large section of the Church itself, that caused
the loss for centuries of the virtue of toleration, which in the
ethical systems of the classical world had been assigned a prominent
place among the virtues, and which, could it have found a place in
the standard of goodness of the Church, would have saved Christendom
the horrors of the Albigensian crusades, the pious cruelties of the
Inquisition, and the mutual persecutions of Catholics and Protestants
throughout the age of the Reformation.
[Sidenote: Political morality:
Machiavellian ethics]
The matter of dominant importance in the sphere of political morality
during the Renaissance was the creation of a code of morals for
princes. This was a system formulated by the Italian philosopher
Machiavelli, who wrote under the secularizing influences of the
classical revival and of the paganized courts of the Italian princes of
his time.[705] It was a code which the ruling class, for whom it was
designed, eagerly adopted, for the reason that it harmonized with their
desires, ambitions, and practices, and sanctioned as not only morally
permissible, but even as obligatory and meritorious, policies and acts
which, without such sanction, might have awakened in some at least
inconvenient and hampering scruples of conscience.
This princely ideal, notwithstanding that the conduct of the prince who
acted in accordance with it was generally condoned, was not one which,
like the ascetic or the knightly ideal, awakened moral enthusiasm. It
was a standard of conduct never approved by the best conscience of
Christendom. On the contrary, the work in which Machiavelli embodied
this ideal for princes was, on its first appearance, fiercely assailed
as grossly immoral, and ever since has called forth the severest
condemnation of moralists.
The fundamental principle of Machiavelli’s system is that the moral
code binding on the subject is not binding on the ruler; or rather that
ethics has nothing to do with politics.[706] With the prince the end
justifies the means. He is at liberty to lie, defraud, steal, and kill,
in fine, to employ all and every form of deception, injustice, cruelty,
and unrighteousness in dealing with his enemies and with other princes
or states.
This moral standard set for princes by Machiavelli was the dominant
force in international affairs from the middle of the sixteenth to the
middle of the seventeenth century. During this period it debased the
public morals not only of Italy but of every other land in Christendom.
Its vicious principles were acted upon by every court of Europe.[707]
Even to-day Machiavellism, though condemned in theory, is still too
often followed in practice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that
_The Prince_ has exercised a more baneful influence over the political
morals of Europe than any other book ever written.
It is instructive to contrast the influence of Machiavellism with that
of Stoicism. Among the good effects of Roman Stoicism was its ennobling
influence upon the imperial government. It gave the Roman Empire such a
succession of high-minded and conscientious rulers as scarce is shown
by the history of any other state ancient or modern. In contrast to
the influence of this noble philosophy which apotheosized duty and
exalted in rulers the virtues of clemency, truthfulness, magnanimity,
and justice, Machiavellism filled, or contributed to fill, the thrones
of Christendom with rulers whose moral sense was so blunted by its
sinister doctrines that for generations truth speaking, sincerity,
regard for the obligations of treaties, and respect for the rights of
sister states were almost unknown in the diplomacy and mutual dealings
of the governments of Europe. It is only after the lapse of more than
three centuries that Christendom is freeing itself from the evil
influence of Machiavelli’s teachings, and that there has been generated
a new public conscience which recognizes that states like individuals
are subjects of the moral law, and that the code which is binding on
individuals is binding likewise on governments and communities.
[Sidenote: The ethical value of
the ideal of the courtier]
We have already mentioned the ideal of the courtier as one of the
ethical or semi-ethical products of the age of the Renaissance. This
was a conception of perfect manhood which was nurtured in the socially
brilliant and refined courts of the Italian princes of this period. It
was a fusion and modification of selected virtues and qualities of the
knight and of the scholar. The Christian theological virtues had no
necessary place in it.
It was the distinctive virtues of the knight, elevated and refined,
which formed the heart and core of the ideal. Like the ideal of
knighthood, the courtly ideal was an aristocratic one; the courtier,
like the knight, must be “nobly born and of gentle race.”[708] Martial
exploits were accounted to him as virtues; “his principal and true
profession ought to be that of arms.”[709] As loyalty to his superior
was a supreme virtue in the knight, so was absolute loyalty to his
prince the pre-eminent virtue of the courtier. Not less prominent was
the place accorded in the ideal to the knightly virtues of courage and
courtesy.[710]
But to these qualities and virtues of the knight the courtier must
needs add those of the scholar. The ordinary knight despised learning
and held the virtues of the scholar in contempt. But the ideal of
courtliness grew up in a land where humanistic studies had become a
ruling passion, and in an age when the highest ambition of many an
Italian prince was to be known as a patron of learning. It was natural
that, developing in the atmosphere of these courts, the new standard of
perfect manhood should give a prominent place to the qualifications and
virtues of the scholar.
This ideal of the courtier was never such a moral force in history
as that of the monk or of the knight, but there were in it ethical
elements of positive value to the moral life of the world. It was
the inspiration of many of the finest spirits of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.[711] Of the noble-minded Sir Philip Sidney a
biographer says, “He conscientiously molded his life on the model of
the perfect courtier of Cortelliani.” Nor has the ideal ever ceased
to appeal to the imagination, or lost its power to soften and refine
manners and ennoble conduct. It inspires gentle consideration for
others of whatsoever estate, incites to unselfish service, and induces
absolute good faith and self-forgetting loyalty to friends and to the
cause espoused, all of which are moral qualities of high value, and all
of which have entered or are entering as permanent elements into the
growing world ideal of perfect manhood.
[Sidenote: The ethics of industry:
the medieval towns the cradle of
the modern business conscience]
In the medieval town was developed a moral ideal as distinct and
individual as that of the monastery or of the castle. Central in this
type of goodness were the homely virtues of industry, carefulness in
workmanship, punctuality, honesty, faithful observance of engagements,
and general fair dealing. To these lay virtues were added all those
which made up the Church ideal for the ordinary life, for there had not
yet been effected that divorce of business from theology which had been
effected in the case of politics.
The development of this ideal of goodness was a matter of immense
importance for the moral life of the West, because, acted upon by the
practical ethical spirit of Protestantism and other agencies, it was
destined to supersede the ascetic and chivalric ideals of life, which
for more than a thousand years had been the ruling moral forces in the
life of Christendom, for neither of these ideals of goodness could be
more than a partial and passing form of the moral life. The ascetic
ideal, having for its distinctive qualities such virtues as celibacy,
poverty, solitary contemplation, vigils, fastings, and mortifications
of the body, could not possibly become the standard for all men. It was
confessedly a standard of perfection for the few only.
As to the knightly ideal, this was too exclusively a martial one
to become the supreme rule of life and conduct for the multitude.
Furthermore, it was an aristocratic ideal, an ideal for the noble born
alone. This precluded the possibility of its becoming, as a distinct
type, a permanent force in civilization.
But the ethical type of the towns, embracing those native human virtues
which spring up everywhere out of the usual and universal relationships
of everyday life and occupations, was sure of a permanent place among
the ethical types of the classes and professions of modern society. In
the same sense that the medieval towns (as the birthplace of the third
estate) were the cradle of modern democracy, were they the cradle of
modern business morality. Just as through the medieval monastery passes
the direct line of descent of the present-day social conscience of
Christendom,[712] just so through the medieval town passes the direct
line of descent of the present-day business conscience of the Western
world.
[Sidenote: Disuse of trial by
wager of battle]
The influence of the spirit generated in the medieval towns is seen in
that important reform, the abolition of the judicial duel, which was
one of the most noteworthy matters in the moral history of the Middle
Ages.[713]
It was the military spirit of the German barbarians which, as we have
seen, was a chief agency in the introduction of the wager of battle
or trial by combat in the jurisprudence of the European peoples.[714]
Besides the influence of the towns, a number of other causes concurred
in gradually effecting the abrogation of this method of settling
disputes, among which the most efficient were the opposition of the
Church, the revival of the Roman law in the eleventh century, and the
advance in general intelligence. Into every one of these agencies there
entered an ethical element, so that we may regard this great reform, in
its causes as well as in its effects, as distinctively a moral reform.
Thus the influence of the towns was essentially ethical, for the rise
of these communities, as we have just seen, meant the superseding
of the ethics of aristocracy and war by the ethics of democracy and
industry. Consequently the influence exerted by the towns was largely
that of a new ideal of character.
The opposition of the Church was motived chiefly by moral feeling,
the pontiffs and the bishops who opposed the practice doing so on
the ground that the ordeal by battle was “brutal, unchristian, and
unrighteous.”
The advocates of the civil law opposed the practice not only because
it interfered with the royal and imperial administration of justice,
but because it was a practice based on ignorance and superstition and
“incompatible with every notion of equity and justice,” since brutal
force was allowed to usurp the place of testimony and reason. Thus the
Roman law, as the embodiment of right reason, was here as everywhere
else a moral force making for what is reasonable and just.
The influence of the general progress in enlightenment was also
profoundly ethical, since this movement resulted, as intellectual
advance always normally does, in a growing refinement of the moral
feelings, in progress in moral ideas, and in truer ethical judgments.
By the opening of the modern age trial by combat, acted on by these
various influences, had become obsolete or obsolescent in most of the
countries of Europe.[715] Strangely enough, the international duel or
public war, resting on substantially the same basis as the private
judicial duel, has held its place as the instituted and legalized
method of settling controversies between nations down to the present
time, without, till just yesterday, being seriously challenged by the
awakening conscience of the world as equally repugnant to the moral law
and incompatible with every principle of reason, humanity, and justice.
CHAPTER XVII
ETHICS OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION
I. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION OF ETHICAL IMPORT
[Sidenote: Principle of the
self-sovereignty of the individual
as the ultimate authority in
morals]
In its essential principle the Protestant Reformation was a protest
against the principle of authority in the realm of the spirit. It
proclaimed the right of individual judgment in matters of religion
and morals. There was in this proclamation an ethical implication of
revolutionary significance. It was a recognition of the truth “that
duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual ... by
himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than
a man’s rational conviction of what is best.”[716]
Of all the agencies which during recent times have been at work
moralizing morality and creating for the moral life a permanent
and indestructible basis in reason and conscience, this Protestant
principle of the autonomy of the individual soul in the spiritual
domain has been one of the most efficient and pervasive.
[Sidenote: The principle of
salvation by right belief]
Though the chief significance of the Protestant revolution and
its ultimate import for morality lay in this assertion of the
self-sovereignty of the individual, still the full ethical consequences
of this revolutionary principle did not become clearly manifest till
after the lapse of more than three centuries.
Throughout the earlier periods of the Reformation era the moral
evolution in Protestant lands was influenced less by the announcement
of this principle than by that of certain other principles less
fundamentally important, or by certain minor modifications effected
by the reformers in the body of doctrines and practices of the Roman
Catholic Church.
Among these principles was that of salvation by faith, which meant
practically salvation by right belief. This was no new principle in
Christian theology. The Church had always insisted upon acceptance
of the main articles of its creed as necessary to salvation. But by
reason of the emphasis which had been placed upon the doctrine of the
meritoriousness of works, many had come to believe, and to act upon
the belief, that a man is justified by what he does. The assertion
of the doctrine of justification through faith alone had important
consequences for morality, since it implied the denial of the ethical
value of works, which meant specifically the repudiation of the
principles of asceticism, on which the monastic system rested, as well
as the rejection of the doctrine of purgatory, which afforded basis
and sanction for a considerable part of the moral code of the medieval
Church.
II. SOME IMPORTANT MORAL OUTCOMES OF THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS
REFORM
[Sidenote: The reform movement
reënforces the ethical tendencies
of the Renaissance]
Though the immediate results of the Reformation were disastrous
to Humanism, the ultimate effect of the religious movement was to
reënforce the true ethical tendencies of the intellectual revival. As
we have seen, the thing of deepest import for morals in the Renaissance
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the announcement of
the freedom and self-dependence of the individual spirit, since such
self-sovereignty is the prerequisite of a true and vital morality.
Likewise the essential proclamation of the Reformation was the
autonomy of the individual in matters religious and moral. It is true
that the reformers, though proclaiming liberty of conscience, the
right of individual judgment, did not, as has already been said, at
once recognize all the ethical implications of this principle. “The
Reformation,” as Dr. Arnold truly observes, “was weak in that it never
consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renaissance--the
Hellenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and
science, to use Plato’s words, of things as they really are.”[717]
But the assertion of the right of individual judgment in matters
religious and moral was bound sooner or later to lead to the
recognition of the duty of inquiry, of investigation of the law and
science of things as they really are, and of absolute loyalty to the
truth when found. The final outcome within the Church of this new
mental attitude has been the “Higher Criticism,” which is simply the
continuation by modern scholars within the reformed denominations
of the scientific criticism of the Bible begun by the distinguished
humanist Erasmus. In this remoter issue of the Reformation the
essential oneness of its spirit with that of the Renaissance is
revealed, and the ground for the assertion that the ultimate moral
results of the religious reform were a reënforcement of the deepest
ethical tendencies of the intellectual revival is disclosed.
[Sidenote: Substitution of an
inerrant Book for an inerrant
Church]
Had all the implications of the principle of the right of individual
judgment in matters of religion and morals been seen and frankly
accepted by the reformers of the sixteenth century, the Protestant
revolution would have effected at once the transfer of morality from
a supernatural to a natural basis. But for an inerrant Church the
reformers substituted an inerrant Book, which every one should accept
as an infallible guide and rule of conduct. The ultimate sanctions
of morality were still looked for in the historic past, in an outer
revelation and an outer authority. Consequently the moral ideal of
Protestantism retained the essentially theological, supernatural
character of the ideal of Roman Catholicism.
[Sidenote: New ranking of virtues
in the moral type]
But the changes effected by the reformers in the body of the teachings
of the old Church resulted necessarily in a certain displacement and
shifting of the virtues in the moral type, and in a new estimation
of ethical values. Various virtues or duties hitherto regarded as
essential to excellence of character were assigned a lower place in
the rank of virtues or were excluded altogether from the ideal, while
new moral qualities or attributes were added, the outcome being what
we must regard as a new moral type. In the following pages we shall
comment briefly upon the more important of the changes effected in
several domains of the religious-ethical life.
[Sidenote: Protestantism brings
into disesteem the monastic ideal]
We proceed now to notice some of the immediate and special moral
effects of the Reformation. In the first place Protestantism
discredited the monastic type of goodness. The meritoriousness of
celibacy was denied. The austerities of the ascetic were declared to be
not only useless but positively wrong. Instead of being an object of
profound veneration and homage, the saint of medieval times became to
the Protestant reformers an object of the deepest moral detestation.
The immediate consequences of this change in men’s conceptions of what
constitutes the highest moral excellence was that throughout one half
of Europe the monasteries, which the religious-moral enthusiasm of the
earlier centuries of Christianity had created, were dismantled and
razed to the ground, and an institution which had dominated Christian
Europe for a thousand years was suppressed in all the northern lands.
This revolution, we believe, effected on the whole a great gain for
morality and marked a forward movement in the moral evolution of
the Western world; but at the same time it must be recognized that
the destruction of this system, which throughout a full historical
period had fostered some of the most admirable of Christian virtues
and nurtured unnumbered saintly lives, resulted in the exclusion
of valuable ethical elements from the moral life of Protestant
communities. There are types of character nourished by the conventual
system that society can ill afford to spare. Very few will dissent
from Lecky’s view that “in the Sisters of Charity the religious orders
of Catholicism have produced one of the most perfect of all types of
womanhood.”[718]
[Sidenote: Effects upon industrial
morals of the dissolution of the
monasteries]
In destroying monasticism the Protestant reformers destroyed an
anti-industrial type of character, and thus helped to clear the
ground for the great industrial development which during the last
three centuries has given a new aspect and outlook to civilization.
The reformed Church gave prominence to the active masculine virtues
as opposed to the passive feminine virtues exalted by the conventual
system. Hence it was more favorable than the old Church to the
development of civilization on its material side. It hardly admits
of doubt that in these opposed tendencies of the ethical ideals of
the two churches is to be sought one cause of the amazing contrast,
industrially viewed, long observed between the distinctively Protestant
and the distinctively Catholic countries of Europe. It is true that
the line of demarcation once so observable is now becoming blurred,
and that modern industrialism with its ideal of industrial virtues is
fast becoming equally characteristic of all lands of advancing culture,
whether Protestant, Catholic, or pagan.
[Sidenote: Effects upon morals of
the abolition of purgatory]
The Protestant denial of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which
followed as a direct logical result of the reformers’ doctrine of
justification by faith, had consequences for morality no less positive
than those that followed the denial of the Catholic teaching of the
meritoriousness of the ascetic life.
It is undoubtedly true that the doctrine of purgatory, conceived as
part of a system of future rewards and punishments, has exerted on
the whole an influence favorable to morality. But the institution
lends itself easily to misuse. In the Middle Ages the doctrine of
indulgences was applied to souls in purgatory, and the shortening
of the period of their suffering there made dependent not alone
upon the prayers of their friends on earth, but often practically
upon the payment of sums of money, designated as alms to the poor
or gifts to the Church. The forgiveness of sins was thus too often
made a commercial transaction. Thus the doctrine of purgatory, beyond
controversy, contributed essentially to that despiritualizing of
religion and that deadening in wide circles of the moral sense which
characterized the later medieval period and which, through inevitable
reaction, helped to provoke the Protestant revolt.
The effect upon morals of the abolition of purgatory by the reformers
was immediate and far-reaching. Many specific duties were at once
dropped from the moral code. Prayers for the dead ceased to be a
pious duty; they were not even morally permissible. Furthermore, the
performance of such good works as the making of pilgrimages and the
giving of alms for the benefit of souls in purgatory not only ceased to
be regarded as meritorious, but came to be looked upon as positively
wrong. Besides these direct ethical consequences of the abolition of
purgatory there were indirect ethical results which we shall notice in
another connection.[719]
[Sidenote: Effects of the
religious reform upon the virtue
of toleration[720]]
Ultimately the Reformation, largely through the outworkings of the
principle of the right of private judgment in matters of conscience,
was destined to foster the growth of the important virtue of
toleration. But throughout the first three centuries of Protestantism,
owing mainly to the great emphasis laid by the reformers on the
doctrine of the supreme ethical value of correctness of religious
belief, this principle of the right of private judgment exerted
little appreciable influence upon the moral evolution. Holding fast
to the doctrine of the criminality of wrong belief, the new Church
like the old was necessarily intolerant. It regarded heresy with
dread, looked upon toleration as a fault, and, whenever circumstances
favored, engaged in persistent and unrelenting persecution to maintain
uniformity of religious belief. It was not till late in the modern
period that religious toleration came generally to be recognized by the
Protestant conscience as a virtuous disposition of supreme worth.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MORAL EVOLUTION SINCE THE INCOMING OF DEMOCRACY: THE NEW SOCIAL AND
INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENCE
I. FORCES DETERMINING THE TREND OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT
[Sidenote: The incoming of
democracy]
Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given
fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion,
none has exerted a greater influence than modern democracy. This is so
because in its essential spirit democracy is at one with Christianity.
It is merely “a principle which continues ... over a wider range of
institutions the same principle as Christianity introduced.”[721] It
extends the Christian principle of equality from the spiritual to the
political, the social, and the economic domain. It makes all men equal
before Cæsar as well as before God.
And like Christianity, democracy extends the range of persons who are
brothers until not only all classes within the same state but all
peoples and races are included. “In the democratic union of nations,”
in the words of Lecky, “we find the last and highest expression of the
Christian ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”[722]
It is this identity of the essential spirit of democracy with the
essential spirit of Christianity which makes the incoming of democracy
a revolution of such supreme importance in the moral history of the
world. To truly democratize society, as to truly christianize it, is to
moralize it.
[Sidenote: Modern inventions and
the new industrialism]
“The causes,” observes Lecky, “which most disturbed or accelerated
the moral progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of
great men; in modern times they have been the appearance of great
inventions.”[723]
In no department of morals, save the international, have modern
inventions exerted a greater influence than in the department of
industrial ethics. In this sphere these inventions have reacted on
morals in two ways: first, they have changed fundamentally for the
masses in all civilized lands the economic conditions of life, which
conditions, as we have seen, are the great molders of morals; and
second, through the changes they have wrought in the processes of
production, and through the immense development they have given to the
whole industrial system, they have caused principles and institutions
once just and beneficent in their outworkings to become instruments of
inequity and oppression, and have thus awakened new moral judgments
respecting these maxims and conventions. The growth of these new
ethical feelings and convictions constitute an important part, perhaps
_the_ most important part, of the moral history of recent times. They
are the motive force in several of the most significant moral movements
of to-day in the industrial world. Preëminently true is this of the
present-day labor movement. “Its form,” as Professor Peabody says, “is
economic, but its motives are moral. It is an effort--often blind and
groping, sometimes pitifully misdirected, yet none the less proceeding
from the conscience of the time--to shape economic life into an
instrument of social justice and peace.”[724] Socialism, too, with all
its ethical aspirations and enthusiasms, is in large part a product of
the new industrialism.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of
evolution]
Not less disturbing to morals than the political and industrial
revolutions has been the revolution in scientific thought effected by
the doctrine of evolution. This theory has been not only a powerful
dissolvent of a large part of the body of medieval theology and hence
of that part of morality dependent upon this system of thought, but,
through the dominant place which this interpretation of the cosmic
process assigns to the self-regarding motives, it has exercised in wide
circles of society an unfavorable influence upon morals by seeming to
give nature’s sanction to self-assertive, antisocial conduct. There
are drifts in both the public and the private morality of the last
half century which, as we shall see, find their explanation in the
disturbance of ethical values created by the general acceptance of the
Darwinian theory of progress through “the survival of the fittest.”
But we shall also see this same theory, better interpreted in its
profoundest intimations, giving strong support to the best ethical
instincts of humanity and supplying new incentives and encouragement to
humanitarian endeavor.
[Sidenote: General intellectual
progress]
The moral history of the Western world since the Renaissance affords
a striking illustration of the dependence of progress in morals upon
progress in general intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that, fostered
by a free press, by the public-school system, and by various other
agencies, the average of intelligence in the modern democratic state
is higher than it was in any of the states--save possibly in some of
the small city states of Greece--of ancient or medieval times. This
new intellectual life, speaking broadly, has reacted favorably upon
the moral life. It has dispelled superstition, destroyed prejudices,
widened the outlook of men, and broadened their moral sympathies. In a
word, the seeing of life and things as they really are has tended to
clarify the moral sense and to render clearer and truer the vision of
the ethical ideal.
[Sidenote: The decline of dogmatic
theology]
The body of hereditary ethical convictions and judgments upon which
modern influences have been especially at work was, as has been seen,
shaped and molded largely by theology. Hence nothing has influenced
more positively the moral evolution in recent times than the profound
modification which, during the period, has taken place in men’s
religious beliefs. Under the influence of advancing intelligence, of
evolutionary science, of ever closer relations between the different
races and nations, and the resulting contact and comparison of
different religions, there has gone on a rapid disintegration of old
creeds. The effect of this upon many has been the elimination from
their moral code of all purely theological elements, the erection of a
new standard of moral values, and the adoption of an ideal of character
which may best be described as being in the main a composite of Greek
and gospel ethics.
[Sidenote: Growing intimacy of
international relations]
The dependence of moral progress in modern times upon inventions, as
Lecky observes, is shown perhaps even more strikingly in the domain of
international than in that of industrial ethics. As in antiquity it
was the world-wide extension of the Roman rule through conquest which
broke the primal isolation of the Mediterranean peoples and created
that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which arose the ethical
universalism characterizing the cultured circles of Roman society in
the later centuries of the Empire, so in this modern age it is the
great inventions of the steamship, the steam railway, the electric
telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and
the rest, which have broken the isolation of the nations, bound them
together by a thousand commercial, social, and intellectual ties,
and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which have
naturally sprung those ethical feelings and convictions which form the
growing international conscience of to-day.
Thus it is that inventions, whose aims were primarily to promote
civilization on its material side, have become the most efficient
agencies in creating a sense of ethical oneness among the nations, and
thus in opening a new epoch in the moral evolution of mankind.
II. EXPRESSIONS OF THE NEW MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS OF
LIFE AND THOUGHT
_1. The Ethics of Democracy_
[Sidenote: The democratic
revolution a moral movement]
The great history-making upheavals and readjustments in human society
are moral in their causes as well as in their effects. They arise from
a divergence between what _is_ and what _ought to be_. The democratic
revolution which began in France in 1789 affirms with emphasis the
correctness of this ethical interpretation of the great passages of
human history. What superficially viewed appears to have been primarily
a political or economic revolution was in truth, in its deepest
motives and impulses, a moral revolution. “It was moral enthusiasm
for the rights of man ... and not the breakdown of an economic
system, which created modern democracy.”[725] The watchwords of the
Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--are all words of moral
import. They are tremulous with righteous wrath at age-long oppression,
contempt, and abuse; and they are instinct with the living forces of a
noble moral ideal. They express the essential spirit of the Revolution,
which each day, where it has free course, finds fuller embodiment in
political, social, and moral reforms, in humanitarian institutions and
altruistic effort.
[Sidenote: The ethics of democracy
rejects class morality]
Democracy tends in various ways to purify and ennoble morality, but
especially by destroying all invidious class distinctions, and thereby
destroying that class morality which through all periods of history has
hampered the moral progress of the race. All the civilizations known
to history before the incoming of modern democracy had their superior
class, including only the few, who alone were regarded as possessing
capacity for the highest virtues; and their inferior classes, embracing
the many,--sudras, slaves, or serfs,--persons regarded as created
for the use of others and capable of nothing more than a qualified or
servile morality.
Now democracy, recognizing “human capacities in all and not merely in a
few,” throws down the partition walls between classes and puts all on
the same level of opportunity and privilege. It thus establishes the
conditions of a common moral life and of a progressive moral evolution;
for if history teaches any truth, it teaches that a civilization
dominated by a privileged class that uses the masses selfishly or
thoughtlessly for the enhancement of its own interests and pleasures
is foredoomed to moral stagnation and decadence--so true is it that
society is an organic body and that if one member suffers the whole
body suffers with it.
[Sidenote: The ethical import of
education by the state]
Again, democracy has deep significance for morality on account of its
relation to education. Despotic bureaucratic monarchy is indifferent or
positively opposed to the education of the masses because the safest
basis of such a government is sodden ignorance. On the other hand,
general intelligence is the very breath of life of a democracy. Hence
the education of the masses is the foremost task of the modern free
state. The public-school system of the modern world is the outcome of
this imperious demand of democracy.
Now this relation of the democratic state to popular education has
immense importance for the moral life, first, for the reason that
advance in general intelligence means a better maintenance of the moral
standard. To increase the number of schools in a community is to lessen
the need of prisons and reformatories. More than a century ago Beccaria
previsioned this relation of popular education to crime. “The most
certain method of preventing crime,” he maintained, “is to perfect the
system of education.”[726]
And second, education in the modern democratic state has special
significance for the moral development going on in Western
civilization, for the reason that it means not merely a better
maintenance of the moral standard, but also an essential modification
of the moral type itself. For in the establishment of its system of
education the state has assumed what formerly was one of the chief
functions of the Church. This transference of the business of education
from the Church to the state has rightly been pronounced “one of the
most important movements in the history of education since the Dark
Ages.” What renders it of such importance in the view of the historian
of morals is that, in the hands of the state, education has become or
is becoming wholly secularized. In some countries even the reading of
the Bible in the schools or the giving of any religious instruction
whatsoever is prohibited.
Now this secularization of education results inevitably in the
secularization of morality. That portion of the moral code which
derives its sanction from theological or special religious doctrines
is neglected. Thus one outcome of the transfer of the function of
education from the Church to the state has been the imparting of a
fresh impulse to that naturalistic movement in morals whose point of
departure was the classical revival of the fifteenth century. And thus
the three dominant movements in modern European civilization--the
Renaissance, the Reformation (in its ultimate effects), and the
democratic revolution--have all worked together in determining the
general trend of the moral evolution in the Western world.
[Sidenote: The democratic state
assumes the social-ethical
functions of the Church]
The ethical import of the incoming of democracy is shown again in
the assumption by the democratic state of the philanthropic work of
society. Throughout the Middle Ages the Church was the almoner of
society, the builder of hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses. Since the
advent of democracy much of this humanitarian work has, like education,
been taken over by the state. This assumption by the state of these
former functions of the Church is one of the most noteworthy ethical
movements in modern history.[727] What makes it significant is, first,
the fact that the work is undertaken by modern governments largely
from purely philanthropic motives. This means that with the coming to
political power of the people a new spirit has entered into government,
which means, further, that those altruistic sentiments which it has
been a chief function of religion to foster have come to inspire
society at large.
And second, this assumption by the state of the philanthropic functions
of the Church is significant because of what has made its undertaking
of these tasks necessary. This necessity has arisen not merely by
reason of the possession by the state of the taxing power and hence
of the means needed for carrying on this humanitarian work, but also
because of its relation to modern science. Much of this work of rescue
and cure is dependent for its successful administration upon scientific
knowledge and skill. It is largely because the state is in closer
alliance than the Church with modern science, and therefore is the more
efficient agent for carrying on this humanitarian work, that society
makes it, instead of the Church, its chief almoner and trustee.
_2. The Ethics of Industrialism_
[Sidenote: The alliance of modern
industry and science]
A distinctive characteristic of modern industry is its alliance with
science. This union dates from the French Revolution. One aim of
the revolutionists was to put exact knowledge at the service of the
industrial arts, and, by thus increasing the productive forces of
society, to create an abundance for all, banish poverty from the earth,
and advance civilization to a higher point than ever before reached.
And this alliance of industry and science has, in so far as mere
production is concerned, more than met every expectation. Through
the application of inventions and scientific knowledge to the
various industrial processes, society’s powers of production have
been increased threefold, tenfold, fifty-fold, in some arts even a
thousandfold. Surely now all will be fed and clothed and sheltered.
But this vision of a millennium of well-being for all as the result of
the union of science and industry has not come true. The great mass of
the world’s toilers are underfed, ill-clad, and improperly housed. From
the slums, from the dark and noisome tenements of our great cities,
arises the bitter cry of children, ragged, wan, and hungry, robbed
through the parents’ poverty of every delight and right of childhood.
“The poverty of the workers,” cries Henry Demarest Lloyd in passionate
protest, “is the sin of our age.”[728]
[Sidenote: The divorce of modern
industry and ethics: economic
Machiavellism]
The causes of this pitiful failure of the new industrialism,
notwithstanding its capacity for enormous production, to provide for
the wants of all is not far to seek. Our age, while uniting science
and business, has divorced ethics and business, just as in the time of
the Renaissance in Italy there was effected a divorce of ethics and
politics. Political economists have taught that ethics has nothing
to do with economics. And this economic Machiavellism of the schools
has not been merely an academic thing; it has probably exerted as
sinister an influence upon the modern industrial order as the political
doctrines of Machiavelli exerted upon the diplomacy and governmental
policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dominated by this
philosophy our business life has become frankly unmoral--large sections
of it grossly immoral.
[Sidenote: The breakdown of the
system]
But economics and ethics can no more be divorced than politics and
ethics. Machiavellism has succeeded no better in economics than in
politics. “The system based on [this philosophy] is breaking down
all over, in strikes, riots, panics, gluts, unemployed idleness, and
class murder. It is breaking down not because the task of getting
plenty for the body--and the soul--for every one out of the fruitful
earth and the fellowship of man is an impossible task, but because the
task is an impossible one of accomplishment--that or anything else in
human affairs--by the devil’s code of selfishness instead of love, of
solitary advantage instead of the good of all. By such a philosophy
there could be no government, no family; and if it continues, there
will ere long be no business. But it cannot continue.”[729]
[Sidenote: Reforms whose aims are
the moralization of the industrial
order: (_a_) socialization of the
unearned increment in land values]
It cannot continue because there is a fast-growing conviction of the
falsity of the philosophy of economic Machiavellism--an ever-growing
recognition of the truth that the relationships of men in business,
like all other human relationships, are conditioned by the moral law
of human brotherhood. There are profound changes taking place in the
moral feelings and judgments of men respecting many of the customs,
principles, and institutions of the modern industrial order. There is
a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and
arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of
human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more
complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very
embodiment of unreason and injustice.
Among the economic institutions respecting which there is taking place
such a change in moral judgment is that of absolute private property
in land. Although this is an institution unknown to primitive peoples,
in all the great civilizations of the past we find society based upon
it. That the system, since it inevitably results in private monopoly,
has contributed largely to the creation of that gross inequality in
wealth which has characterized every advanced civilization known to
history, and which has helped to prepare its downfall, does not admit
of reasonable doubt. The monopolization of land by a class has been one
source, and probably a main source, of the phenomenon in modern society
of deepening poverty in the midst of growing wealth, of dehumanizing
want for the many along with demoralizing luxury for the few. That in
countries of large and thickening population a private monopoly in
the arable land is the embodiment of a colossal and cruel wrong is
incontrovertible. That a single class should be allowed to become the
absolute owners of the soil and thereby acquire the legal right to
exclude all others from it save on the condition that practically all
that can be got from it by the hardest toil, save just enough for the
bare subsistence of the laborer, shall be given over as rent to the
holder of the land, is as great a moral wrong as to take directly from
the worker the product of his toil by reducing him to bodily slavery.
It is this gross inequity which has made the history of many countries,
like much of the history of Ireland, a harrowing tragedy. The wrong, if
not greater, is at least more obvious when the land thus monopolized
is the site of a great city where the enormous ground values have been
created not by any labor or expenditure on the part of the owners, but
by the growth and enterprise of the community as a whole.
Just as the world has got a new conscience in regard to the wrong of
slavery, so is it getting a new conscience in regard to this “great
iniquity,” as Tolstoy calls it, of private monopoly in land. This
growing ethical conviction will ultimately destroy the illusion that
the earth and its resources may, without moral wrong, be monopolized by
a fortunate or favored few and the great masses be dispossessed.[730]
The new conscience will decree that all of nature’s gifts in land and
all increments in its value created by society shall belong to society
and shall be the common heritage of the successive generations of men.
[Sidenote: (_b_) Limitation of
inheritance]
Another of the conventions of our industrial system in which the moral
sense of mankind is beginning to recognize an element of inequity is
the right of unlimited inheritance. So long as land remains the common
property of the community, or so long as there exists substantial
equality in wealth among the members or families of a social group,
the injustice of this is not apparent. But after great extremes of
poverty and wealth have appeared, as in present-day civilization, then
the essential injustice of the institution is disclosed; for there is
thus created an idle class living on the labor of others. When a single
child through the accident of birth becomes the heir of millions, while
hundreds of other children come into the world absolutely portionless
and at the same time shut out from the use of any bit of the earth
even as standing room, then the system becomes a crass denial of human
solidarity and brotherhood. And there is in this law of unlimited
bequest a double wrong. The child of over-great wealth is wronged
as well as the child of poverty. One is born to a life of luxurious
leisure, and the other to a life of unremitting toil. Now, as Professor
Dewey observes, there is moral value in work and there is moral value
in leisure, but “it is beginning to be seen that their values cannot be
divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other
enjoy the freedom.”[731]
Therefore the ethical demand for the modification of our laws of
inheritance in such a way that they shall recognize the social as
well as the individual element in wealth must be heeded as much out
of regard for the children of the overrich as out of regard for the
children of the very poor.
[Sidenote: (_c_) Socialism: the
democratization of industry]
Still another institution of modern industrialism which has come or is
coming under the reprobation of the present-day conscience of a rapidly
growing number is private capitalism, that is, private ownership of
the instruments of production, together with competition and the wage
system, the necessary concomitants of this capitalistic régime. These
new ethical feelings and convictions form the real motive force in the
propaganda of modern socialism. The presupposition of socialism is that
not merely ground rents but all returns (interest, dividends, profits)
on every form of private capital embody an unearned increment, and that
this element should determine the ownership and control of capital.
Hence socialists demand that all the material instruments of production
now owned by individuals or by a class shall be held in common; that
there shall be common, democratic management of production; that
competition, as inherently unethical,[732] shall be replaced by
coöperation; and that the wage system shall be replaced by a system of
distribution by public authority which shall give the manual workers of
the world a more equitable share of the products of industry.
Socialism embodies one of the largest funds of ethical feeling that
have become active in Western civilization since the incoming of
Christianity. In truth, in its real essence and purified form it
is the spirit of primitive Christianity at work in the industrial
domain. It is a recognition of human fraternity. It is an effort to
unite economics and ethics, to make business life a realization of the
moral ideal. The aim of true socialists is to make the benefits of
science, invention, and civilization a common heritage. They recognize
that society can continuously progress only as these benefits become
the possession not merely of a few but of all. In the disregard of
this immutable law of human progress they discern the main cause of
the retrogression, decay, and failure of every great civilization of
the past; in its solicitous fulfillment they find the only ground of
hope for the constant improvement of human society as a whole and the
uninterrupted moral progress of the world.
_3. The Ethics of Modern Science_
[Sidenote: Science and the virtue
of intellectual sincerity]
We have already referred to the influence of modern science upon
morals. This influence has been felt in the fostering of specific
virtues and in the creation of a certain attitude of mind toward life
and its ethical problems.
Among the particular virtues which science has fostered is
philosophical veracity or love of truth. This virtue of intellectual
sincerity is to the scientist what the virtue of faith or belief is
to the churchman. Without it there is no salvation in the world of
science. The man of science must be a truth-lover, a truth-seeker, and
a truth-teller. He must take every pains to find out what is the exact
fact, and then make a scrupulously veracious report of what he has
found. He must be loyal to the truth at all hazards.
This reverent regard for the truth, this intellectual sincerity, which
is the cardinal virtue of the man of science, is fostered in him
partly by the recognition of the supreme importance of exactness when
it comes to the application of scientific knowledge to the arts of
life. The least departure here from the truth of the matter means dire
disaster and loss. Then also the veraciousness of nature reacts upon
the student of her laws. Nature is not only infinitely exact in all her
movements, but punctual in the fulfillment of all her engagements. She
keeps her word with us, as Emerson says. She is the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever. The careless, unveracious man can enter into no
partnership with her.
Open-mindedness and impartiality are elements of this virtue of
intellectual veracity. The wide divergence between philosophical and
theological morality is here impressed upon the student of moral ideals
and standards. In the ethics of theology doubt, even sincere doubt, is
reckoned as an unfortunate infirmity, or often as positive and fatal
sin. Science, on the other hand, reckons it a cardinal duty. Hardening
oneself in belief when there are circumstances calculated to awaken
doubt, even the slightest conceivable doubt, is justly regarded by the
man of science as treachery to truth and an unpardonable sin.
It is in the creation of this scientific conscience, which pronounces
the habit of accuracy, open-mindedness, impartiality of judgment, love
of truth for truth’s sake a supreme virtue, that science has rendered
one of its greatest services to morality.
[Sidenote: Egotistic tendencies
of the doctrine of evolution: the
philosophy of Nietzsche]
The scientific doctrine of evolution, which teaches that life has
advanced from lower to higher forms through struggle and competition,
resulting in the survival of the fittest, has exercised a profound
influence upon all the sciences relating to man, but upon none has it
left a deeper impress than upon the science of ethics.[733] Nor have
its effects here been confined to ethical speculation; it has largely
shaped and molded actual conduct.
In some respects this influence has been harmful to both ethical theory
and practice. In the domain of philosophy it may best be traced in the
teachings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche insists that man must follow the lead
of nature; that the struggle for existence must be kept up on the human
plane just as it goes on in the lower realms of life; that the strong
should use for their own advancement the weak; that the nurture and
care of the defective and weak is a crime against humanity[734]--for
“the hope of the future lies in perfecting the strong, not in
strengthening the weak”; that only through the struggle for existence
has nature produced her highest type, man, and that it is only through
obedience to this great cosmic law, in accordance with which the higher
prey upon the lower, that “the superman,” the highest possible type of
mankind, can be brought into existence.
This teaching tends to steel the heart against human sympathy and to
blunt all the finer sensibilities. It seems to justify and excuse all
kinds of antisocial action. And, indeed, the doctrine has been used as
a justification and excuse not only of individual self-assertion and
egotism but of national and race self-assertion and egotism as well.
Modern imperialism has sought to justify aggression upon weaker and
so-called “inferior races” by an appeal to this law of evolution as it
works on the lower levels of life. Thus the doctrine has in a certain
measure fostered national egotism, and has stood right in the way of
the development of a true international morality.
[Sidenote: Altruism _versus_
egotism in the cosmic process]
But these drifts toward egotism in modern philosophy and life induced
by evolutionary science are more than compensated by opposing movements
of ethical thought created by a truer interpretation of the facts of
evolution and a deeper insight into the cosmic process.[735]
The philosophy of Nietzsche is a strange misreading of nature. To say
that self-sacrifice is “in open defiance of nature,” is to overlook
the dominant fact in evolution, namely, maternity; for maternity,
motherhood, is only another name for self-sacrifice. And it is further
to overlook the fact that the principle of coöperation is even more
dominant and controlling in the cosmic process than the principle of
competition. Social animals, those in which the altruistic instincts
are most strongly developed, greatly outnumber the unsocial, solitary
animals.[736] The Carnivora, those animals that live by preying upon
others, are becoming extinct. On the plane of human life this principle
of coöperation, of mutual helpfulness, has supplanted, or is gradually
supplanting, the lower principle of competition. In the struggle
for existence between tribes and peoples those groups have gained
supremacy that have developed the strongest social instincts; that is,
those within which the principle of coöperation and the virtue of the
self-devotion of the individual to the welfare of the whole have been
dominant forces in the life of the community. From these facts we are
justified in assuming that it is the altruistic and not the egoistic
instincts and motives that nature aims to make the permanent and
controlling factors in the cosmic evolution.
Again, that nature is ethical in her aim is disclosed by the fact that
she has brought forth such a being as man. Her preferences are shown in
the preferences of the being she has produced.[737] Man prefers good to
evil; he loves justice and hates injustice; he reveres the truth and
detests falsehood; he recognizes that self-sacrifice is nobler than
selfishness; he divines the final triumph of his ethical ideals. In
man--at his best--nature reveals her preferences. Man is the answer to
the question, “Is Nature good?”[738]
Viewed thus from a higher standpoint the cosmic process of evolution
has reënforced faith in a moral order of the universe and has been an
inspiration and an incentive to humanitarian effort.[739]
[Sidenote: Evolution and animal
ethics[740]]
In Brahmanic India and in all Buddhist lands religious beliefs have,
as we have seen, placed the whole animal creation under the protection
of the moral feelings. In ancient Persia it was religious ideas which
caused one half of the lower animal world to be regarded as sacred and
thus to be brought within the protective pale of morals.
Dogmatic Christianity, falling far short of the ethics of Judaism in
this domain, created a vast rift in the organic world between man and
the lower animals. The dumb creatures were declared to be made solely
for man’s use and enjoyment. Psychical relationship between them and
man was denied, though the ancient world had very generally assumed
this. Indeed, this attitude of the Christian dogmatists toward the
animal creation was made a matter of reproach by their pagan critics.
These teachings were not without their influence on practice.
Humanity to animals became a less prominent virtue than it had been
in pre-Christian times. The closeness to nature of the lives of the
medieval hermits and monks often caused, it is true, a feeling of
tenderness to be awakened in them for their “brothers,” the birds and
animals, which found expression in many beautiful legends. But in
general the attitude of the Christian world toward the lower animals
has been unsympathetic.
The doctrine of evolution, however, teaching the kinship of all life,
has bridged the gulf between man and the lower animal world, and has
brought all dumb creatures more positively than ever before in the
Western world under the protection of the moral sentiment. Societies
for the prevention of cruelty to animals have sprung up and increased
in number as in no other epoch of the Christian era. The new moral
feeling condemns all inhumanity to dumb creatures, and looks with
disapproval upon such sports as cockfighting, bear baiting, and
bullfights, which were favorite amusements only a few generations
ago.[741] Hunting for pastime is also coming under the condemnation of
this growing moral sentiment. Thus “through the portals of spiritual
kinship,” in the words of Professor Evans, ... “our elder brothers
enter into the temple of justice, and enjoy the privilege of sanctuary
against the wanton or unwitting cruelty hitherto authorized by the
assumptions and usurpations of man.”[742]
[Sidenote: Import for morals of
psychical research]
It is undeniable that the earlier tendency of modern science was
agnostic and materialistic. It caused in many minds an attenuation or
an absolute destruction of the belief in a supersensuous world and a
life after death. The practical effect of this fading from the eyes
of men of the vision of another world was, upon certain temperaments,
a loss of faith in the ethical character of the cosmic process and a
consequent lessening of moral enthusiasm.
This attitude of mind, which is still that of a large class, can be
changed only by the reaffirmation by science of the assumptions and
teachings of all the great world religions respecting the existence
of a supersensuous world and a future life. It is therefore a matter
of immeasurable import to morality that these assumptions of religion
are coming to be regarded by an ever-growing number of scientists as
well founded in reality. Psychical research has given a new trend to
large sections of scientific speculation.[743] It is no longer crassly
materialistic. It even assumes the existence of a supersensuous world.
Thus at the conclusion of a careful survey of the evidence of man’s
survival gathered by the English Society for Psychical Research, the
distinguished physicist Sir Oliver Lodge writes: “The boundary between
the two states--the known and the unknown--is still substantial, but
it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a
tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we
are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our
comrades on the other side.”[744]
Incontrovertible proof of man’s survival after bodily death would mark
the opening of a new era in the moral life of humanity; for, in the
minds of many, “ethics can be rendered ethical only on the assumption
that there is a reality deeper than the phenomenal world of sense,
truer than the world we know and better.”[745] It was doubtless a
conviction that the future of both religion and morality is in large
measure dependent upon a firm belief in a future life which led
William Ewart Gladstone to say of psychical research that it is “the
most important work which is being done in the world--by far the most
important.” Indisputably, the reaction of another world lying clear and
distinct in the light of science beyond the frontiers of earth would
give new meaning to life and a fresh impulse to the moral progress of
the race. The effect upon the moral life of the modern world would be
not less profound than that produced upon the moral life of the ancient
world by the incoming of Christianity with its glad affirmation of a
life beyond the tomb.
_4. The Ethics of Theology_
[Sidenote: The progressive
moralization of the idea of God]
In an admirable chapter entitled “Ethics and Theology” the author
of _Moral Evolution_, after noting how religious ideas and beliefs
exert an influence on moral ideas and conduct, remarks: “Now we
are to observe that moral ideals have, in their turn, modified and
clarified doctrine, or, in other words, that there has been an ethical
development of theology, and that contempt of creed is really the
substitution of a moral for an immoral or a nonmoral theology.”[746]
The same truth is expressed by Newman Smyth in these words:
“Reformations have grown out of the ethical protest of the Christian
mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in
the vitalizing influence of ethics.”[747]
As a result of the growth and refinement of the moral feelings, there
has been going on in wide circles in Western Christendom just such a
change in men’s conception of the character of God as marked the best
Hebrew thought during the later centuries of the history of the people
of Israel. The idea of God inherited by the modern from the medieval
age was an incongruous blending of ideas derived from three different
sources. There was, first, the crude archaic notion of deity derived
from the Old Testament records of what conduct in his chosen people
Yahweh approved; second, the dogmas of Augustinian theology respecting
imputed sin, election, everlasting punishment, and other supposed
principles of the divine government; and third, conceptions wholly
inconsistent with these drawn from the New Testament narratives of the
life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.
Gradually, through the growth of the moral feelings, this conception
of the divine character has been purged of its grosser, archaic, and
immoral elements. The early Hebrew ideas have been rejected as the
immature and unworthy notions of deity of a race still on a low plane
of religious development; the Calvinistic idea of God has become “the
supreme incredibility”; while the Gospel teaching of deity has been
received by the instructed reason and conscience as the only credible
ideal of the divine.[748]
Since, as we have repeatedly had brought to our attention, religious
ideas exert a profound influence on moral ideas and on conduct, this
moralization of the conception of the divine character has deep
significance for the progressive purification and refinement of the
moral life of man.
[Sidenote: The moralization of the
conception of future punishment]
Closely connected with these changes in men’s idea of God, indeed
forming a part of that conception, are the changes which have taken
place in their ideas of the divine government in the hereafter.
At different stages of our study we have noted how the classifications
and arrangements of the invisible world are the work of the moral
faculty, and how the developing moral feelings of the historic peoples
have, with the lapse of time, ever modified anew the topography and
moralized afresh the government of the world of spirits.[749]
Now one of the most important modifications ever effected in man’s
conceptions of the other world was brought about by the Protestant
Reformation. The reformers abolished purgatory, and thus left only
two separate realms, heaven and hell, in the world of souls. But in
abolishing purgatory and thereby making all suffering in the hereafter
punitive and eternal, and in failing to recognize gradations of guilt
in human sin by consigning all evildoers, unbelievers, and misbelievers
to the same awful and everlasting torments, the reformers made still
more unethical the government which the popular medieval imagination
had created for the unseen world.
The gradual clarification and growing sensitiveness of the moral
feelings could not long leave unchallenged such a grossly immoral
notion of the divine government. During the last two generations a
notable change has passed over men’s conceptions of the netherworld of
spirits. The hell of the reformers’ imagination has become, like much
else in the Augustinian theology, “the supreme incredibility.” The
blurring of that awful vision is one of the most significant changes
which, during the Christian era, have passed over that world which is
at once the creation and the creator of human morality.
[Sidenote: Exchange in rank of the
theological and the natural Gospel
virtues]
The advance in religious ethics during the last few decades is
registered again in the exchange in rank of the theological and the
natural gospel virtues in the moral ideal of Protestant Christendom.
During this period there has taken place here a genuine “transvaluation
of moral values.” Many representative religious teachers have come to
assign a dominant place in the ethical standard to the natural social
virtues, and have relegated to a lower place the purely theological
virtues, such as right religious belief and ritual observances. In the
case of many the rejection of that part of the moral code resting upon
theological dogmas is as complete as was the rejection by Christianity
of the morality based on the ceremonial laws of the Jews. With these
the saving virtue is no longer acceptance of a prescribed creed, but
loving, self-denying service of humanity.[750]
This transvaluation of moral values within the Church itself is one of
the most important movements going on in the moral life of the modern
world.
[Sidenote: Extension to
theological ethics of the
principle of individual
responsibility]
Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is
found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility
to the domain of religion.[751] It will be recalled how completely the
law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive
peoples.[752] With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the
injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual
responsibility comes to be established.
This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the
religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in
accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not
until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like
change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the
more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle
of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained
it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years,
however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle
as the embodiment of a gross inequity. The doctrine that all the
generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his
transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience
as incredible, untrue, and immoral.
This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the
ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with
the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the
consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of
civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history.
_5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience_
[Sidenote: (_a_) As manifested in
the history of the African slave
trade]
By the phrase “social conscience,” as we shall use it here, we mean
those ethical feelings and judgments which cover the relations of
master and slave and the relations of society to its unfortunate and
erring members.
In the entire history of the moral evolution of humanity there is
no chapter which reveals so plainly the upward trend of the ethical
movement in civilization as that which tells the story of the
beginnings and the final suppression of the African slave trade, and of
the rise and fall of the institution of negro slavery among Christian
peoples.[753] Restricting our survey for the moment to the slave trade
as distinct from slavery, the amazing fact which meets us here at the
outset is that until late in the modern period the peoples of Western
Christendom had practically no conscience whatsoever in regard to the
African slave trade, and this notwithstanding that the conscience of
the age was in many other matters true and sensitive. The whole subject
lay practically outside the realm of morals. The slave trade was looked
upon as a perfectly legitimate business.[754] Practically no one
thought it wrong to go to Africa, kidnap or purchase a shipload of the
natives, bring them in stifling holds--where sometimes half the unhappy
victims died on the passage--to the West Indies or to the Spanish and
English mainland of the Americas and sell them as slaves.[755] What
little opposition to the traffic existed, arose in general from other
than feelings of moral disapproval.[756]
The movement for the abolition of the trade constitutes an important
phase of the social and moral life, particularly of England and of the
English colonies in America, during the latter part of the eighteenth
century and the earlier part of the nineteenth. In England the wave
of humanitarian feeling which swept away the obstacles set in the way
of the abolition of the traffic by selfish interests was raised by
the great religious revival led by Whitefield and the Wesleys. The
leaders of the reform were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.
After twenty years of agitation a bill was passed abolishing the trade
(1807). This marked as great a moral victory as ever was won in the
English Parliament, for it was the aroused moral sentiment of the
nation which was the main force that carried the reform measure through
the Houses.
In America there had arisen among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, even
before the Revolution, a protest against the trade on purely moral
grounds. By the time the Federal Convention met in 1787 sufficient
sentiment had been developed in the matter to secure the adoption of
a provision in the Constitution to the effect that the importation of
slaves should cease in 1808. From that year on, the slave trade, as
distinct from slavery, was under the ban both of the law and of the
public conscience; but it continued to be carried on clandestinely
until the Civil War.
[Sidenote: (_b_) As manifested in
the antislavery movement]
Even before the consummation of the movement for the suppression of the
negro slave trade there had sprung up an agitation for the suppression
of the negro-slave system itself. England abolished slavery in her
colonies in 1833, paying £20,000,000 for the emancipation of 800,000
slaves in her West India possessions. In the United States there was
very little antislavery feeling prior to 1830.[757] At that time
the great majority of the peoples of the Northern as well as of the
Southern states, if they did not look upon negro slavery as wholly
proper and right, at least regarded as reprehensible any interference
with the institution where established. Even the Church in general
denounced the abolitionists as infidels and pronounced their conduct
fanatical and wicked.[758] But notwithstanding this opposition the
abolition movement and the movement for the restriction of slavery to
the states where already established gained impetus steadily, and the
heated debate led up quickly to the Civil War.
The most significant thing in that passage of our history is not the
revolt of the South, but the revolt of the conscience of the North.
Had there been no moral revolt in the North, there would have been no
slaveholders’ revolt in the South.
The development of moral feeling respecting the wrongfulness of
slavery did not cease with the emancipation of the slaves as a
result of the Civil War. Indeed, with the reform an accomplished
fact, the clarification of the moral sense of the people has gone on
uninterruptedly until a gulf has come to separate the present-day
conscience of the great majority of the instructed and thinking classes
in both sections of the Union from the conscience of the same classes
one or two generations ago.
[Sidenote: (_c_) As manifested
in society’s treatment of its
unfortunate and delinquent members]
The record of society’s treatment of its dependent and erring members
forms another inspiring chapter in the history of the growth of
the new social conscience. In a little over one hundred years the
Christian world has advanced from harsh vagrant laws to associated
charities; from the burning of witches to asylums for the insane;
from noisome dungeons to penitentiaries and institutions of rescue
and correction.[759] The numerous and costly private and public
institutions established and maintained by the new humanitarian
sentiment is one of the most distinctive characteristics, ethically
viewed, of modern civilization. So multiform are the expressions of
this new spirit that it is impossible in so brief a survey as the
present to exhibit in more than barest outline this phase of the
ethical evolution.
The recent history of charity, taken in the sense of relief given to
the poor, is a record of change both in motive and method. There has
always been a great deal of almsgiving in the world, since this has
been a duty especially enjoined by religion. But because charity has
had this religious motive, it has often been sullied by self-love, alms
being given not so much for the sake of the poor as for the benefit of
the soul of the donor. In recent times this religious motive has become
less operative, but the amount of almsgiving has undoubtedly increased,
and we are justified in the conclusion that it is motived as never
before by genuine altruistic feeling. It is probably true, however,
that there is less indiscriminate, emotional almsgiving now than
formerly. But there is greater “social compunction,” a deeper sense of
society’s responsibility for the existence of poverty, and an earnest
inquiry respecting the primary social causes of it. Hence effort is
directed not merely to the immediate relief of want and misery through
organized charity, but to the cure of poverty through the removal
of the causes of destitution. At this point the investigations and
labors of the philanthropist merge with those of the sociologist, the
economist, and the statesman.
In society’s treatment of the defective and the insane, as compared
with its treatment of these same classes scarcely more than a century
ago, is registered an ethical progress truly remarkable. A hundred
years or less ago in England and in all the European countries the
idiot and the oddly formed human prodigy were exhibited to afford
amusement to the people. The growth in humanitarian feeling has
rendered all this a thing of the past. “The passing of the freak is
not a casual incident in the history of the circus, but a striking
illustration of the tendency which has been in progress for centuries
toward the humanizing of our amusements.... To spend a merry afternoon
at the madhouse watching the antics of the maniacs in their chains
seemed natural and reasonable to civilized Englishmen not so many
generations ago. It has become absolutely unthinkable.”[760] The
history of the stage offers like testimony. “Not so very long ago,”
writes David Belasco, in giving advice to the amateur playwright, “the
entrance of a cripple or a hunchback was sufficient to get a laugh from
the audience. In these humanitarian times there is no fun to be made
out of physical deformity.”[761]
But it is in society’s treatment of the criminal class that there is to
be traced the greatest progress in humanitarianism. In the pre-Norman
period in England the punishments for crime were characterized by a
barbarity incredibly callous. “Men branded on the forehead, without
hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger
which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all
who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a
churl.... The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper
lips were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there
is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive.”[762]
What was true of English law was true of the laws of every other
European country. And there was little or no essential amelioration
of these savage law systems before the last quarter of the eighteenth
century. Seventy thousand executions took place in England during the
reign of Henry VIII.[763] “In the reign of William III there does not
appear to have been any consciousness that the penal laws were, in many
respects, disgraceful to any community but a tribe of savages.”[764]
If a definite point of departure of the movement for the humanizing
of the criminal laws of Europe and the putting of the treatment of
criminals on an ethical basis be sought, it will be found in the life
and writings of the Italian jurist Beccaria,[765] who maintained that
the effect of cruel punishments is to increase crime by indurating the
sensibilities of the people.[766]
A great impulse to the humanitarian movement initiated by Beccaria
was given by the devoted labors of the great philanthropist John
Howard (1726–1790), who, with his eyes opened to the awful conditions
of prison life through official connection with Bedford jail, where
Bunyan dreamed, spent his life in visiting all lands inspecting prisons
and jails and dungeons and lazar houses, and “taking the gauge and
dimension of misery, depression, and contempt.”
The crusade of John Howard marks the real beginning of practical prison
reform, which has “transformed prisons from hells into hospitals for
recovery,” and revolutionized the entire theory and administration
of judicial punishment.[767] The aim and purpose of the modern
penitentiary system is to develop self-respect and manhood.[768] To
this end the lock-step and striped clothing have been abolished in many
prisons, and along with them all cruel and humiliating punishments. The
establishment of reform schools, reformatories, and penitentiaries, the
introduction of the indeterminate sentence, the proposed creation of
courts of rehabilitation, and the founding of the juvenile court,[769]
mark the ethical advance which the last century has witnessed in this
domain.[770]
_6. International Ethics: the New International Conscience_
[Sidenote: The development
of international morality
foreshadowed by the earlier
development of intranational
morality]
One of the most significant of phylogenetic laws is formulated by
Haeckel in these words: “The short, quick history of an individual
organism is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the species
to which the organism belongs.” Now this law holds good for the
history of the human species as well as for that of the lower tribes of
life. And here it embraces not only the history of the bodily but also
that of the psychical development. Consequently the law under which
the moral evolution of man is going on may be stated in this way: The
history of the development of conscience within a social group (clan,
tribe, nation) is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the
development of conscience in humanity at large, that is to say, between
the groups composing the human race. And since law codes, private and
public, are essentially embodiments of the growing and clarifying
conscience, this mode of the ethical evolution may be expressed in
strictly juristic terms as follows: “The development of international
law follows step by step the earlier development of municipal law.”[771]
With this law in mind we may define moral progress in the international
domain as the gradual assimilation of international to intranational
ethics, or, in other words, the growing conformity of the standard of
public morality to that of private morality.
[Sidenote: The gradual moralizing
of the relations of the advanced
to the backward races: _The White
Man’s Burden_]
As thus defined, a special expression of progress in international
morality is found in the growing recognition by governments that the
obligations of the strong toward the weak are the same for nations as
for individuals. A public conscience that is like the best private
conscience is constantly becoming more and more a regulative force in
the relations of the superior to the inferior races.[772] Unhappily
that exploitation of the weaker by the stronger races, which makes up
so large a part of the history of the past ages, still goes on; but
it is, in general, less grossly unethical than ever before, while with
each succeeding generation the protest of the common conscience of the
civilized world against all unfair and oppressive treatment of the
backward by the more advanced races grows more earnest and insistent.
Good illustrations of this quickening of the public conscience are
found in England’s dealings with India and China. In the year 1813
a resolution declaring that England’s first duty in legislating for
India was to promote the interests of the people of India was proposed
in Parliament, but was defeated. Twenty years later (in 1833) this
principle was definitely embodied in a Government of India Act.[773]
In 1841–1842 England, at the end of what has been justly characterized
as “one of the most dishonorable and detestable wars that ever stained
her annals,” compelled China to keep her ports open to the iniquitous
opium traffic. Two generations later (in 1906) the House of Commons by
resolution unanimously declared the Indian opium trade with China to
be “morally indefensible,” and requested the Government to bring it to
a speedy end.[774] Five years later England entered into an agreement
with China, according to the terms of which the importation of Indian
opium into China will cease on or before 1917. This is a notable
triumph of the new international conscience.
Our dealings with the island of Cuba since its liberation--opinions
may differ in regard to the rightness of our original act of
intervention--affords another encouraging illustration of the progress
the world has made in international morality. And the same is true of
our dealings with the Filipinos, notwithstanding the utterly painful
character of the earlier chapters of the story. There has been no
responsible official utterance on this subject that has represented
our task in our acquired dependency as other than a public trust, as a
guardianship to be exercised solely in the interest of the Filipinos as
the nation’s wards. The better moral feeling of the nation, intensified
in many by deep compunction, has indignantly repudiated all those
unofficial utterances which have cynically represented the islands as
an inviting field for selfish exploitation by American capitalists,
and has demanded that our government in the islands should be inspired
and controlled by the spirit of unselfish service. And this ethical
spirit has in general marked our administration of the affairs of the
islanders. “I believe that I am speaking with historic accuracy and
impartiality,” declares ex-President Roosevelt, “when I say that the
American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its
combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense,
marks a new and long stride forward in advance of all steps that
have hitherto been taken along the path of wise and proper treatment
of weaker by stronger races.” This ethical purpose is especially
manifested in the sending out, in the early period of our rule, of five
hundred young American teachers to carry to this deeply wronged people
the best we have to give--a national act without a parallel in all the
history of the past.
It inspires hope in the future to note how far this last step forward
carries us away from the starting point on this line of ethical
advance. At first the fate of the weaker race was extermination
or slavery; then its fate was to be reduced to the condition of a
tributary; still later, to be subjected to commercial and industrial
exploitation by the conquering people; and lastly, to be made, in
theory if not yet in actual practice, the beneficiaries of a benevolent
self-sacrificing service, which finds lofty expression in Kipling’s
_The White Man’s Burden_:
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the
common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it
finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted,
the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than
something already attained.
[Sidenote: Progress in war ethics:
Hugo Grotius]
But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what
is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most
encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This
progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly
traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In no period
of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with
greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious
wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had
been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have
been lost.
This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in
morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound,
a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, _De Jure
Belli et Pacis_, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius[775]--a
work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever
written not claiming divine inspiration.”[776] The aim of Grotius was
not to abolish war,--he did not think universal peace an attainable
ideal,--but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities,
to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had
come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be
formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding.
The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.[777] As the
Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman
civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform
of the laws of war.[778]
The influence of the work of Grotius was profound and widespread. From
the time of its appearance dates a new departure in the humanization of
war, and a fresh moral advance in international law.[779] “His ideas,”
says Dr. Andrew D. White, “found their way into current discussion,
into systems of law, into treaties; and as generations rolled by, the
world began to find itself, it hardly knew how, less and less cruel,
until men looked back on war as practiced in his time as upon a hideous
dream--doubtless much as men in future generations will look back upon
the wars of our times.”[780]
The humane provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the
establishment of the Red Cross Society, which on the field of
battle cares without discrimination for the stricken, are inspiring
illustrations of the growth of this new humanitarianism.
[Sidenote: Movement for the
abolition of war--a moral issue]
Now this growing sensitiveness of the public conscience which has
effected so many mitigations of the barbarities of war has resulted
in a widespread and insistent demand that war between civilized
nations shall not merely be humanized but that it shall be abolished,
that disputes between nations shall be settled as disputes between
individuals are settled--by courts of justice.
Without doubt many influences, political, social, and economic,[781]
have concurred in creating this great world-wide movement, and in
calling into existence the Hague Conferences and the international
and national peace congresses of the last decade or two; but among all
these forces and motives the one of greatest potency is the awakened
and instructed conscience of the world in regard to the criminality of
war as an established and legalized method of settling controversies
between civilized nations. It is this new conscience and not the
new dreadnought to which we must look to abolish war and to keep it
abolished. For, like the question of slavery two generations ago,
this question of war has become a moral issue, and, like the slavery
question, it will give the world no rest until settled in accordance
with the demands of the new conscience.
[Sidenote: War an abrogation of
the ordinary moral code]
Especially intolerable to the more sensitive conscience of to-day
is the assumption that nations may at will suspend or abrogate the
ordinary moral code. For, as Lord Morley truly says, “To declare war
is to suspend not merely _habeas corpus_ but the Ten Commandments,
and some other good commandments besides.”[782] That is to say, war
is a suspension of a great part of those rules of morality which,
slowly and painfully formulated by the growing moral consciousness of
man, have become the guide and standard of ordinary conduct. In war
the conscience of the commander is inhibited. “The commander who lost
a battle through the activity of his moral nature,” once cynically
declared United States Senator Ingalls, “would be the derision and jest
of history.” And that is so. The world has not yet ceased to deride
those Jews who lost their city to the Romans because their consciences
forsooth would not let them fight on the Sabbath day. War cannot be
conducted by the rules of ordinary morality.
With a great part of the ordinary moral code suspended, there is
substituted for it a war code every maxim of which reveals its archaic,
vestigial character, stamps it as a survival from an early savage
stage of human development, as a legacy from a long-past age of the
historical evolution when morality was as yet only an intratribal
thing, that is, when men felt that they owed duties only to members of
their own tribe or social group.[783]
[Sidenote: Unfavorable reaction of
the ethics of war upon the ethics
of peace]
In many ways, some obvious and others subtle and hidden, war works
“moral damage” to society, but we here confine ourselves to emphasizing
merely the moral loss and hurt resulting from the reaction of its low
archaic code upon the more advanced peace code. For, as Professor J.
Neville Figgis justly observes, “It is impossible to remove the very
notion of morality from international affairs without in the long run
undermining it in private life.”[784] What is regarded as right and
proper in war will come to be regarded as right and proper in peace.
That is to say, the maintenance of a double standard in morals is just
as impossible as the maintenance of a double standard in money. By a
sort of Gresham’s Law the lower standard will drive out the higher or
drag it down to its own low level.
This reaction of the war code upon the ordinary moral code is well
illustrated by what takes place when society metes out to persons
convicted of crime ferocious and barbarous punishments. In the
medieval centuries in Europe when the penalties for offenses were
often fiendishly cruel mutilations of the body, such as cutting off
the ears, the hands, the lips, or the nose, this judicial procedure
was imitated to such a degree by individuals seeking private vengeance
that mayhem, that is, the mutilation of an enemy by depriving him
of a member, became a crime of such frequent occurrence that it was
necessary to make special and severe enactments against it.[785] After
society stopped mutilating the bodies of offenders against its laws,
this offense of mayhem virtually dropped out of the calendar of private
crimes.
In a similar way does the war ethics of the nations react disastrously
upon private morality. The slow moral progress of European civilization
during the last two or three centuries, compared with its wonderful
intellectual and material progress, may with little hesitation be
attributed in large part to the unfavorable influence of its war ethics
upon its everyday moral code. The war code is applied to politics,
to ordinary business, and to the relations of industrial classes.
The politician as a politician does a hundred things he would not
think of doing as a man, and justifies his acts by appealing to the
adage, “Politics is war.” The business man, citing the like maxim,
“Business is business,” which means that competition is a species of
war and must be conducted on war principles, flings his Christian
code to the winds and, pitilessly pushing his competitor to the wall,
compasses his financial ruin. It is the same in the struggle between
labor and capital. In this struggle acts of violence, like those of
the McNamaras, are committed, and the persons who do these things
absolve themselves in the forum of their own consciences on the plea
that a state of war exists between capital and labor and that this
justifies the adoption of war methods. Here doubtless we have the moral
psychology of the suffragette movement in England. Indeed, the leaders
of this startling propaganda tell us frankly that they are waging war,
and that this justifies their suspension of the ordinary rules of
conduct. In the light of this avowal the alleged inscrutability of
their acts disappears. The movement is simply another illustration of
the truth that so long as nations act under the illusion that they may
without moral wrong employ violence to obtain justice, just so long
will there be individuals who with good conscience will seek justice
through violence.
At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in
various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war
ethics, in all other domains and relationships--in the family, in the
Church, and in social intercourse--act in accordance with the higher
moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the
establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices
mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting
from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies
and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground
of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as
Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends
of humanity for the service he has done in ... showing that the whole
sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the
ideals accepted in public affairs.”[786]
[Sidenote: Obsolescence of war
as a school of morals: the war
system an anachronism in modern
civilization]
The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the
civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their
argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of
the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in
the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages
been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true,
as is assumed by Professor William James in his _Moral Equivalent of
War_, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to
common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race
by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past
stages of human development, the time is past when the war system can
serve the highest ends of civilization. It is an anachronism in the
modern world. It has become a drag upon the moral progress of the
race. By an ethical necessity the day of its abolition approaches. At
a time not remote, as history reckons time, the common conscience of
the world will brand war between civilized nations as the greatest of
crimes, and will regard the nation that assaults another with intent
to commit general slaughter as a criminal nation--as a common enemy of
the human race. In that coming and better age men will look with the
same incredulous amazement upon our infernal engines and devices for
wholesale man-killing that we of this age look upon “the iron virgin of
Nuremberg” and the other medieval instruments of torture in the museums
of Europe.
To many this optimistic forecast, in the face of the prevailing
war spirit and the ever-growing armaments of the nations, may seem
oversanguine and incredible. But to think despairingly of the future
argues a failure to discern what is really most significant in the
international situation to-day. The most significant thing in the
ongoings of life at Rome on that memorable day of the year 404 of our
era which saw the last gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was not
that, four hundred years after the incoming of Christianity with its
teachings of the sanctity of human life, gladiators fought on the arena
to make a holiday for Rome; the significant thing was the protest made
by the Christian monk Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death,[787]
for that announced the birth into the Roman world of a new conscience,
and that, through an ethical necessity, meant the speedy abolition of
“the human sacrifices of the amphitheater.”
And so to-day the significant thing is not that nineteen hundred years
after the advent of a religion of peace and good will among men,
gladiator nations still wet the earth with fratricidal blood; the
significant thing is the constantly growing protest against it all, for
that announces the birth into the modern world of a new international
conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity like that which
abolished forever the bloody sacrifices of the Colosseum, means the
certain and speedy abolition of war as a crass negation of human
solidarity and brotherhood, and a venturous denial of a moral order of
the world and the sovereignty of conscience.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Henry T. Buckle, _History of Civilization in England_ (1891), vol.
i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that
there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article
entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” _North British Review_ for
December, 1867.
[2] For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman,
_The Economic Interpretation of History_, 2d ed.
[3] _Social Evolution_ (1894), p. 307.
[4] Ralph Barton Perry, _The Moral Economy_ (1909), p. 254.
[5] Immanuel Kant, _Critique of the Practical Reason_; cited by Fisher,
_History of the Christian Church_ (1888), p. 623.
[6] “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has
originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct,
arrived at by some person or persons.”--T. H. GREEN, _Prolegomena to
Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 361.
[7] _Prolegomena to the History of Israel_, tr. Black and Menzies
(1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
[8] Wake, _The Evolution of Morality_ (1878), vol. ii, p. 4;
Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906),
vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 237;
George Harris, _Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 79.
[9] T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 240.
[10] “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality,
which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands
and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly,
“Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” _The International
Journal of Ethics_ for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The
original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man,
as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right
and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most
direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore,
the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than
is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive
man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history
of mankind” (_Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_, tr. Gulliver
and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.
[11] “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”--GEORGE
HARRIS, _Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 54.
[12] “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto
ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole
realm of ethics.”--SCHURMAN, _The Ethical Import of Darwinism_ (1887),
p. 201.
[13] S. Alexander, _Moral Order and Progress_ (1889), p. 354. The same
thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,”
_North British Review_ for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral
graveyard ... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils
which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally
crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall
spring.”
[14] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.
[15] “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not
created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice
which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the
inner by the outer.”--G. LOWES DICKINSON, “Ideals and Facts,” _Hibbert
Journal_ for January, 1911, p. 266.
[16] “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and
competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in
sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”--BALDWIN,
_Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development_ (1897), p.
397.
[17] See Chapter XVIII. “The activity of a free people creates a great
number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights;
so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality
than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests
and high faculties of our nature.”--DENIS, _Histoire des théories et
des idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879), t. i, p. 10.
[18] _Principles of Economics_, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity
but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of
the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing
engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the
contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the
moral type of the most civilized nations.”--LECKY, _The Map of Life_
(1900), pp. 53 f.
[19] _The Moral Ideal_, new and revised edition, p. 19.
[20] “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from
religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has
suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the
ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and
purified by its religions.”--WILLIAM NEWTON CLARKE, _The Christian
Doctrine of God_ (1909), p. 13.
[21] “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris,
_Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this
dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words
of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an
attainment” (_Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 301).
[22] _Meditations_, tr. Long, xi, 18.
[23] “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which
dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in
another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and
judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”--JAMES BRYCE,
_The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed., p. 261.
[24] _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 291.
[25] After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of
Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages
act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours”
(_The Malay Archipelago_, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs
and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the
world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings
Millward in _National Geographic Magazine_ for March, 1909, p. 287).
[26] “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis
in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally
formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the
clan.”--W. ROBERTSON SMITH, _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p.
54.
[27] _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2
Sam. v. 1.
[28] Dudley Kidd, _Savage Childhood_ (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford,
_Lectures and Essays_ (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”
[29] W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p. 267.
See also Coulanges, _The Ancient City_, bk. ii, chap. ix.
[30] Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is
a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier
stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a
member of his own kindred or political community; ... he may deceive,
rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares
only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the
Semites_, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).
[31] It should be carefully noted that this is very different from
saying that his life is _im_moral. To pronounce it immoral would be
like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of
right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only
in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be
certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as
rudimentary as his reason” (_Physics and Politics_ (1873), p. 115).
[32] “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare
animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have
the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral
idea.”--WUNDT, _Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_ (1908), p. 191.
[33] See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.
[34] Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks:
“The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom
I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities
than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather
than positive” (_The Naturalist on the River Amazon_). Cf. Edward
Howard Griggs, _The New Humanism_, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.
[35] For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of
morality, see Fiske, _Cosmic Philosophy_ (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.
[36] “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is
set to work by the practice of comradeship.”--CLIFFORD, _Lectures and
Essays_ (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, _The Approach to the
Social Question_ (1909), p. 149.
[37] “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern
family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic
hearth.”--HELEN BOSANQUET, _The Family_ (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt,
_Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_ (1908), p. 171.
[38] The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a
survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship
group.
[39] When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor,
a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality
now consists in obedience to the law.
[40] Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.
[41] “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does
not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he
endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”--EDWARD CAIRD, _The
Evolution of Religion_ (1894), p. 37.
[42] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 283.
[43] The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is
true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons
related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the
family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a
merely preventive measure--not as a measure of justice or punishment.
But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which
gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.
[44] “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons,
because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk
means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without
protection.”--HOBHOUSE, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 90.
[45] Gen. iv. 13, 14.
[46] “Blood atonement ... was one of the very earliest cases
we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social
obligation.”--SUMNER, _Folkways_ (1907), p. 506.
[47] “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the
family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”--WINES,
_Punishment and Reformation_ (1895), p. 33.
[48] On the _Lex talionis_ consult Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse,
_Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, _Principles
of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the
_Lex talionis_ has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all
peoples.
[49] _The Religion of the Semites_ (1894), p. 267.
[50] Seeck (_Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt_ (1901), Bd. i,
S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a
game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as
the slave of the winner.
[51] _The Truth about the Congo_ (1907), p. 29.
[52] “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to
be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are
often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter
and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal,
however, from a white employer ... is no sin.”--STARR, _The Truth about
the Congo_ (1907), pp. 28 f.
[53] See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in
Chapter XVIII.
[54] On this subject see Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of
the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”
[55] Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks,
Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as
great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (_The Cults of the Greek
States_ (1896), vol. i, p. 73).
[56] Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical
ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The
stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus
the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to
be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a
refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to
the stranger. See Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.
[57] Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population
is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the
Greenlander ... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for
which their language has no word” (Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, p. 334).
[58] Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the
body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby
they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its
vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of
the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive
is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by
primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions
for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing
slaves.
[59] Quoted by Letourneau, _La guerre dans les diverses races humaines_
(1895), p. vi.
[60] Often we find vestiges of the abandoned practice in what may be
called celestial cannibalism (see W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion
of the Semites_ (1894), p. 224). Thus the god of war of the Mexican
Aztecs and the gods of many Polynesian tribes were cannibals, for
human sacrifices must be regarded as a sort of celestial cannibalism,
when the offering is made in the belief that the god actually repasts
on the blood and the finer essences of the sacrificial victim. Where
men have thus made their gods like unto themselves, and the practice
of cannibalism has been consecrated by religion, the gods, because
religion is always conservative, are certain to remain anthropophagi
much longer than their worshipers. Consequently we find human
sacrifices still lingering on as a kind of survival among peoples, as,
for instance, the Mexicans, who have themselves left far behind the
practice of eating human flesh.
[61] Letourneau, _La guerre dans les diverses races humaines_ (1895),
p. 185.
[62] _Od._ i. 260.
[63] Spencer, _Principles of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, p. 350.
[64] _Ibid._ vol. i, pp. 355 f.
[65] _Ibid._ vol. i, pp. 368, 398, 401.
[66] Spencer, _Principles of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, pp. 359 f.
[67] _Ibid._ vol. i, p. 349.
[68] For the influence of the war ethics of the modern nations upon
their peace ethics, see VI, International Ethics: the New International
Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
[69] Breasted, _A History of Egypt_ (1905), p. 65.
[70] _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), p.
176.
[71] Breasted, _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_
(1912), p. 250.
[72] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, p. 172.
[73] This moralization of pure physical myths marks the advance of
all races in culture and morality. As we shall see, Greek and Hebrew
mythologies underwent just such an ethicalizing process.
[74] Renouf, _The Religion of Ancient Egypt_ (1884), p. 73.
[75] “It has long been recognized that the Egyptians had a much more
highly organized conscience than that of most other nations of early
times.”--PETRIE, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_ (1898), p.
86.
[76] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, pp. 193 f.
[77] Wiedemann, _The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of
the Soul_ (1895), pp. 62 f.
[78] Wiedemann, _The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of
the Soul_ (1895), p. 64.
[79] The same evolution is to be traced in China. “Imitations made of
wood, clay, straw, paper, and of other material have been substituted
for the real things.... Slaves and servants, wives and concubines are
also burned, i.e., in paper imitations. They point back to the time
when actual human sacrifices were the custom” (De Groot, _The Religion
of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 71).
[80] _Primitive Culture_ (1874), vol. ii, p. 85.
[81] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, pp. 187 ff.
[82] Truthfulness was one of the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian
ideal. The requirements here were very exact: “I have not altered a
story in the telling of it; I have repeated what I have heard just
as it was told to me,” are the words of one in the judgment hall of
Osiris. Cf. Renouf, _The Religion of Ancient Egypt_ (1884), pp. 76 f.
[83] _The Egyptian Book of the Dead_, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
[84] _The Egyptian Book of the Dead_, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
[85] Annihilation appears to have been the lot of the very wicked; but
the texts are not perfectly clear on this point. Consult Wiedemann,
_The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul_ (1895),
p. 55.
[86] Here are six declarations of the confession which correspond
almost exactly with six of the Ten Commandments: (1) I have not
blasphemed; (2) I have not stolen; (3) I have not slain any one
treacherously; (4) I have not slandered any one, or made false
accusations; (5) I have not reviled the face of my father; (6) I have
not eaten my heart through with envy. See Rawlinson, _History of
Ancient Egypt_, 2d ed., vol. i, p. 142.
[87] Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_ (1898), p. 135.
[88] _Ibid._ p. 162.
[89] “In this judgment the Egyptian introduced for the first time in
the history of man the fully developed idea that the future destiny of
the dead must be dependent entirely upon the ethical quality of the
earthly life, the idea of future responsibility,--of which we found
the first traces in the Old Kingdom” (Breasted, _A History of Egypt_
(1905), p. 173). Professor Breasted suggests a connection between the
growth of the ideal of an ethical ordeal in the hereafter with the
discontinuance of the building of immense pyramids. He says: “It is
impossible to contemplate the colossal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty,
so well known as the pyramids of Gizeh, and to contrast them with the
comparatively diminutive royal tombs which follow in the next two
dynasties, without ... discerning more than exclusively political
causes behind this sudden and startling change.... The recognition of
a judgment and the requirement of moral worthiness in the hereafter
... marked a transition from reliance on agencies external to the
personality of the dead to dependence on inner values. Immortality
began to make its appeal as a thing achieved in a man’s own soul”
(_Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), pp. 178
f.).
[90] _Records of the Past_, New Series, vol. iii. For extended comments
on the maxims of Ptah-hotep, see Amélineau, _Essai sur l’évolution
historique et philosophique des idées morales dans l’Egypt ancienne_
(1895), pp. 93 ff.
[91] Budge, _Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life_ (1899), p. ii.
[92] For other documents of this age which embody the same spirit
of social justice as the precepts of Ptah-hotep, see Breasted,
_Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), lect.
vii.
[93] Amélineau, _Essai_, pp. 140 f.
[94] Alongside slavery proper there existed the system of serfdom, the
nature of which is revealed by the history of the Children of Israel
in Lower Egypt. The status of the Egyptian serf appears to have been
somewhat like that of the Helots of Laconia in Greece. If we rightly
interpret the Biblical account of the servitude of the Children of
Israel, the number of serfs, if their increase seemed dangerous, was
kept down by enforced infanticide (Ex. i. 7–22).
[95] Laurent, _Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité_, t. i, p. 321.
[96] Amélineau, _Essai_, p. 344. The monotheist Ikhnaton (Amenhotep
IV), the reform Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it is true, pursued
throughout his reign a peace policy, but this policy manifestly was
dictated by temperament, or the king’s preoccupation with religious
affairs, and not by moral scruples. His reform was essentially a
religious and not a social or moral one. Not one of the historical
documents of the age contains a word in condemnation of war as
inherently wrong (see Breasted, _Ancient Records of Egypt_ (1906), vol.
ii, pp. 382–419), though in these “the customary glorying in war has
almost disappeared” (Petrie, _A History of Egypt_ (1896), vol. ii, p.
218).
[97] This, however, must not be regarded as wholly an act of wanton
savagery. The killing of his prisoners by the king was probably a sort
of sacrifice in honor of the god who had given him victory over his
enemies. See Amélineau, _Essai_, p. 12.
[98] _Essai_, p. ix; see also p. 252, n. 1.
[99] For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see
Amélineau, _Essai_, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, _The Ancient
Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul_ (1895), p. x; and
Toy, _Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), p. 387.
[100] Petrie, _Egypt and Israel_ (1911), p. 133.
[101] Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a
moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not
conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest
indifferently the good and the bad.
[102] It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological
line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, _The
Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_ (1898), p. 297.
[103] King, _Babylonian Religion and Mythology_ (1899), p. 220.
[104] The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the
Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle
between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never
moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth
of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
[105] Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:
O my god who art angry with me, accept my prayer;
* * * * *
May my sins be forgiven, my transgressions be wiped out.
May the ban be loosened, the chain broken,
May the seven winds carry off my sighs.
Let me tear away my iniquity, let the birds carry it to heaven;
* * * * *
May the beasts of the field take it away from me,
The flowing waters of the stream wash me clean.
Let me be pure like the sheen of gold.
JASTROW, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_ (1898), p. 323.
[106] Cf. above, p. 35.
[107] The stele which bore this code of laws was discovered at Susa in
1901–1902. The reign of Hammurabi is placed at about the end of the
third millennium B.C. There are translations of the code by C. H. W.
Johns (1903) and Robert Francis Harper (1904).
[108] “If a man owe a debt and Adad [god of storms] inundate his field
and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have
not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of
grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall
not pay the interest for that year.”--_Code_, sec. 48. [We have used
throughout Harper’s translation.]
[109] _Code_, secs. 196, 197, 200. Cf. similar provisions of the Mosaic
code: Ex. xxi. 23–25; Deut. xix. 21.
[110] _Ibid._ secs. 209, 210.
[111] _Ibid._ secs. 229, 230.
[112] The provisions read: “If a man aid a male or female slave of the
palace, or a male or female slave of a freeman to escape from the city
gate, he shall be put to death.”
“If a man harbor in his home a male or female slave who has fled from
the palace or from a freeman, and do not bring him [the slave] forth
at the call of the commandant, the owner of that house shall be put to
death” (_Code_, secs. 15, 16).
[113] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, p. 744.
[114] Taylor, _Ancient Ideals_ (1896), vol. i, p. 41.
[115] _Records of the Past_, New Series, vol. ii, pp. 143 ff.
[116] “The white man has no doubt committed great barbarities upon
the savage, but he does not like to speak of them, and when necessity
compels a reference he has always something to say of manifest destiny,
the advance of civilization and the duty of shouldering the white
man’s burden in which he pays tribute to a higher ethical conscience”
(Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 27). King Leopold
may have been responsible for barbarities committed against the natives
of the Kongo as atrocious as those of the Assyrians, but he paid
tribute to the modern conscience by refraining from portraying them in
imperishable marble at The Hague.
[117] Cf. Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 226.
[118] Though the people are shut out from participation in the state
worship, they have set up for themselves a multitude of local shrines
where they worship the spirits of almost every earthly thing, such as
mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. “Men debarred from communion with
the Great Spirit resorted more eagerly to inferior spirits, to spirits
of the fathers, and to spirits generally.... The accredited worship of
ancestors, with that of the departed great added to it, was not enough
to satisfy the cravings of men’s minds.” (Legge, _The Religions of
China_ (1881), p. 176).
[119] _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 274.
[120] Williams, _The Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. ii, p. 239.
[121] We do not mention Buddhism in this connection for the reason
that it is not possible to trace any decisive influence, save in
the promotion of toleration, that this system has exercised upon
Chinese morality. Buddhism enjoins celibacy, and this, like Christian
asceticism, is in radical opposition to the genius of Confucianism.
For this reason, in conjunction with others,--among these its early
degeneracy,--Buddhism has remained practically inert as an ethical
force in Chinese society. What little influence it has exerted has been
confined almost wholly to the monasteries.
[122] “The dread of spirits is the nightmare of the Chinaman’s
life.”--LEGGE, _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 197.
[123] _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 34.
[124] The Taoist doctrines are contained in the _Tao-teh-king_,
supposed to have been written by Lao-tsze, a sage who lived in the
fifth century B.C. The religion which grew out of his philosophy became
in time degenerate, absorbed the worst elements of Buddhism, and is
to-day a system of gross superstitions, magic, and sorcery, which has
undeniably a blighting effect upon morality.
[125] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), pp. 139 ff.
[126] _Ibid._ 138.
[127] Legge, _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 229.
[128] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 143.
[129] Nietzscheism is in essence at one with Taoism. Nietzsche insists
that man should behave as Nature behaves; for instance, that the
strong should prey upon the weak. The difference between Lao-tsze and
Nietzsche lies in their different readings of the essential qualities
of the universe. See below, p. 355.
[130] Taoism is too lofty a doctrine for the multitude. They are
enjoined to imitate the ancient sages, and as these imitated the way
of heaven and earth, in imitating them they are really imitating the
universe.
[131] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 143.
[132] The imitation of the qualities of nature “have given existence
to important state institutions, considered to be for the nation and
rulers matters of life and death.” (De Groot, _The Religion of the
Chinese_ (1910), p. 139).
[133] _The Works of Mencius_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. ii),
bk. vi, pt. i, chap. ii, 2.
[134] “This inference [that man is naturally good] comes into
prominence in the classics as a dogma, and therefore has been the
principal basis of all Taoistic and Confucian ethics to this day” (De
Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 137). Every schoolboy
is taught this doctrine: “Man commences life with a virtuous nature”
(Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 217).
[135] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. ii, 2. And so
Confucius: “An accordance with this nature [man’s] is called the Path
of Duty” (_The Doctrine of the Mean_, chap. i; The Chinese Classics, 2d
ed., vol. i).
[136] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. i, chap. vii, 2, 3.
[137] _Confucian Analects_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i),
bk. xvii, chap. ii. The student of biology will see in this view an
anticipation of the latest teaching of modern science in respect to the
relative importance of heredity and education in the determining of
character.
[138] “There is nothing in this world so dangerous for the national
safety, public health and welfare as heterodoxy, which means acts,
institutions, doctrines not based upon the classics.”--DE GROOT, _The
Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 48.
[139] Confucius thus describes himself: “A transmitter and not a maker,
believing in and loving the ancients” (_Confucian Analects_, bk. vii,
chap. i).
[140] _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 255.
[141] Chinese literature bears unique testimony to the high
consideration in which the virtue of filial devotion and reverence is
held. It abounds in anecdotes exalting this virtue, holding up great
exemplars of it for imitation by the Chinese youth. See Doolittle,
_Social Life of the Chinese_.
[142] _The Hsiao King_ (Sacred Books of the East, vol. iii), chap.
xviii.
[143] _Ibid._ chap. xi.
[144] Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_ (1868), p. 103.
[145] _Ibid._ p. 103.
[146] _China in Law and Commerce_ (1905), p. 34.
[147] “The chief characteristic of Chinese society and the essence of
Chinese morality is reverence for the past.”--REINSCH, _World Politics_
(1900), p. 90.
[148] _The Great Learning_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i),
chap. iii, 5.
[149] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xi, chap. xv, 3.
[150] It is interesting to compare the portraiture of The Princely Man,
as depicted by the pagan Chinese moralist, with that of The Prince, as
portrayed by Machiavelli.
[151] “The standard of excellence [in The Princely Man] is placed so
high as to be absolutely unattainable by unaided human nature; and
though [the author] probably intended to elevate the character of his
grandfather [Confucius] to this height, and thus hand him down to
future ages as a _shing jin_, or ‘perfect and holy man,’ he has in
the providence of God done his countrymen great service in setting
before them such a character as is here given in the _Chung Yung_.
By being made a text-book in the schools it has been constantly
studied and memorized by generations of students to their great
benefit.”--WILLIAMS, _The Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. i, pp. 655 f.
[152] _Confucian Analects_, bk. viii, chap. xii.
[153] _The Great Learning_ (text), par. 5.
[154] Quoted by Pfleiderer, _Religions and Historic Faiths_, p. 96.
[155] _The Great Learning_, chap. x, 22.
[156] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xiii, 6.
[157] _The Great Learning_, chap. ix, 8.
[158] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xii, chap. xix.
[159] _The Great Learning_, chap. x, 21.
[160] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xiii, chap. xi.
[161] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Ideals of the East_ (1905), p. 239.
[162] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 265.
[163] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. viii, 8.
[164] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. iv, 1.
[165] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. ii, 1. While denouncing the
essential wickedness of war, Mencius sanctioned rebellion against a
tyrannical and wicked ruler.
[166] _The Great Learning_, chap. vi, 2.
[167] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. iv, pt. i, chap. xx.
[168] _Confucian Analects_, bk. iii, chap. iv, 3.
[169] _Ibid._ bk. iv, chap. xv, 2.
[170] _Ibid._ bk. vi, chap. xvii.
[171] _Ibid._ bk. ix, chap. xvii.
[172] _Ibid._ bk. xv, chap. xxiii. The same precept is found in bk.
xii, chap. ii, of the _Analects_, and also in _The Doctrine of the
Mean_, chap. xiii, 3.
[173] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xvii.
[174] _Ibid._ bk. iv, pt. ii, chap. xii.
[175] _Ibid._ bk. vi, pt. i, chap. x, 1.
[176] _Confucian Analects_, bk. vii, chap. xv.
[177] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 2.
[178] _Ibid._ bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 5.
[179] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xviii, 1.
[180] The Chinese pay worship, it is true, to the multitude of inferior
gods of Buddhism, but there is little in these cults calculated to
awaken and discipline the moral feelings.
[181] _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 256.
[182] See Colquhuon, _China in Transformation_ (1898), p. 189.
[183] Reinsch, _World Politics_ (1900), p. 98. In their relations with
foreigners the Chinese bankers have won an enviable reputation for
integrity and the scrupulous observance of engagements. The word of a
Chinaman in financial matters is his bond.
[184] _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 214.
[185] Froebel has an illuminating comment on the danger to true
morality that lurks here: “A life whose ideal value has been perfectly
established in experience never aims to serve as a model in its form,
but only in its essence, in its spirit. It is the greatest mistake to
suppose that spiritual, human perfection can serve as a model in its
form. This accounts for the common experience that the taking of such
external manifestations of perfection as examples, instead of elevating
mankind, checks, nay, represses, its development” (_The Education of
Man_, pt. i, sec. 10).
[186] Etiquette has been well defined as “the formal expression of
courtesy,” and courtesy as “morality in trifles.” In Japan, as Kikuchi
informs us, etiquette forms a part of the moral instruction in the
schools. See Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_, vol.
ii, p. 342.
[187] Edward A. Ross (_The Changing Chinese_ (1911), p. 193) says
native authorities admit that from one tenth to one twentieth of the
girl infants are abandoned or made away with.
[188] “Female infanticide in some parts is openly confessed and
divested of all disgrace and penalties everywhere” (Williams, _The
Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. i, p. 836). Jernigan, however, says, “When
carried to the extreme there is a public sentiment in China which
condemns it, and there are official proclamations against infanticide”
(_China in Law and Commerce_ (1905), p. 123).
[189] The primitive kinship group is a characteristic feature of
Chinese society. “Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively
persons having the same surname and the same ancestors” (A. H. Smith,
_Chinese Characteristics_ (1894), p. 226). “I have seen a town of
25,000 people, all belonging to the same clan and bearing the same
family name” (Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 272). Along with
this clan constitution of society goes the principle of collective
responsibility. The group is to a great degree held responsible for
the conduct of each of its members. In case of serious crime, as, for
instance, treason, all the male adult members of the criminal’s family
are punished along with the offender (Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, p. 45). Recently the
punishment of relatives of the offender has been abolished in certain
cases.
[190] The efforts of the Chinese government to put an end to the use of
opium among its subjects--the anti-opium decree was issued in 1906--is
the most noteworthy matter in the recent moral history of China. This
movement is motived by moral feeling as truly as is the movement among
ourselves for the suppression of the liquor traffic. It is, in the
words of Professor Edward A. Ross, “the most extensive warfare on a
vicious private habit that the world has ever known” (_The Changing
Chinese_ (1911), p. 146).
[191] “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”--_Japanese Constitution_,
art. iii.
[192] The state in Japan occupies the place of the Church with us.
“To look up to the state as a sacred institution has always been
characteristic of the people, and from the great work of the recent
reformation onward there has not been a single event of national
consequence which has not originated in this peculiar turn of mind”
(Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii, p. 559).
[193] Corresponding to the knights in European feudalism were the
samurai, above them the daimios, and at the head of the system the
Shogun.
[194] Japanese boys and men, Dr. William Elliot Griffis affirms, are
“more tender and careful with all living creatures than are those of
Christendom” (_The Religions of Japan_ (1895), p. 294). Buddhism caused
in large measure the disuse of flesh for food.
[195] This word means “the way of the warrior,” or “the rule of
knighthood.”
[196] Nitobé, _Bushido: the Soul of Japan_, p. 98. The edition cited
throughout this chapter is that of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905. The
Introduction is by William Elliot Griffis.
[197] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 32.
[198] _Ibid._ p. 30.
[199] For the subject of the downfall of feudalism and the Restoration,
see Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. i, chap. ii.
[200] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 189.
[201] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 323.
[202] Scherer, _What is Japanese Morality?_ (1906), p. 10.
[203] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. vi.
[204] The works of Molière, it is said, have been put under the ban
of the censor in Japan and their circulation forbidden, for the
reason that Molière ridicules old age, and constantly, like the comic
supplement of the newspapers, “makes some father the butt of jokes and
gross wit by his child or children.”
[205] “Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement;
any social system in which children leave their parents in order to
establish families of their own; any social system in which it is
considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more
than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage
can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual
inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which
the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the
daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of
life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts
of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”--LAFCADIO HEARN, _Out
of the East_ (1895), p. 89.
[206] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Awakening of Japan_ (1904), p. 179. Romantic
love is almost unknown in Japan. B. H. Chamberlain affirms that in a
residence of twenty-eight years he heard of only one love match, and
then the young people had been brought up in America.
[207] _Out of the East_ (1985), p. 80.
[208] Five per cent of the men have concubines.
[209] “The central idea in Japanese life is obedience to parents and
reverence for ancestors. Should a Japanese father have misfortunes, his
daughter would think it her filial duty to sell her body. She would not
be regarded as fallen and disgraced, but as having done a right and
noble deed, and might afterwards be restored to her place in society.
But, though it is hard to explain, the Japanese woman is as chaste
and pure and exalted in her ideas of womanhood as any woman on the
globe.”--SIR EDWIN ARNOLD (in an interview).
[210] Bacon, _Japanese Girls and Women_ (1891), p. 121.
[211] Chamberlain, _Things Japanese_, 4th ed., p. 220. By “the ancient
way” is meant _hara-kiri_, or disemboweling. The death by his own hand
of General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, during the funeral of his
departed sovereign Mutsuhito (September 13, 1912), reveals another
motive for suicide which is wholly foreign to our modes of thought
and feeling. “In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of
_jun-shi_, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living
Japanese retainers with their dead lord. The custom gradually died
out, but voluntary suicide as a means of showing personal devotion
or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries”
(George Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” New York _Outlook_ for
October 5, 1912). It was this ancient custom that Count Nogi followed.
“When all was over”--such is Mr. Kennan’s interpretation of his
act--“he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion
to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan,
but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral
atmosphere of that time.”
[212] Japanese feudalism began about the eleventh century. The year
1868 saw its final downfall.
[213] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 99.
[214] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Awakening of Japan_ (1904), p. 175. Count
Okuma makes a similar assertion: “The humanitarian efforts which in the
course of the recent war were so much in evidence, and which so much
surprised Western nations, were not, as might have been thought, the
products of the new civilization, but survivals of our ancient feudal
chivalry” (_Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. i, p. 124). By no
people has the Red Cross movement been taken up with greater enthusiasm
than by the Japanese.
[215] Consult Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii,
pp. 566 f.
[216] “The obloquy attached to the calling brought within its pale such
as cared little for social repute” (Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 66). “The
trades-people,” writes Chamberlain, “stood at the very bottom of the
scale. The hucksters or traders were a degraded class in old Japan, and
degraded their business morals remain, which is the principal cause
of the difficulties experienced by European merchants in dealing with
them” (_Things Japanese_, 4th ed., p. 93).
[217] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 67.
[218] The statement has obtained wide currency that all the banks in
Japan employ only Chinese as cashiers because they cannot find honest
Japanese for these positions of trust. Chinese are sometimes employed
in Japanese banks, but the true reason for their employment is not the
one here assigned. One well qualified to speak authoritatively on this
subject says:
Chinese bankers and cashiers are largely Shansi men, that is,
men from the province of Shansi, where the profession of banking
has become hereditary in a large number of families. They are
all, or nearly all, members of the powerful organization known
as the Bankers’ Guild, which has branches in every part of the
Empire. The Bankers’ Guild has discovered that it is practically
impossible to conduct large financial operations without honesty;
and it therefore enforces honesty by means of a discipline that
is as rigorous ... as that of the New York Stock Exchange.... If
a Chinese banker breaks faith, violates a contract, or betrays a
trust, he is expelled from his guild and the doors of banks are
closed against him for all time. In the first place, therefore, the
Chinese cashier is honest because honesty is a condition of his
business existence. He may not be honest in other respects,--often
he is not,--but he is absolutely honest in the handling of money.
In the second place, he is probably the most expert man living in
the rapid calculation of exchanges. The monetary system of his
country is the most confused, chaotic, and complicated system in
the world. There are fifteen or twenty different kinds of taels,
no one of which bears a fixed relation to any other, or to any
established monetary standard.... The necessity of dealing in some
way with this great mass of unstable and fluctuating currency and
of earning a subsistence from it has made the Chinese cashier one
of the most expert of living accountants. He will solve difficult
monetary problems by short cuts of mental arithmetic, and he
calculates exchanges to eight points of decimals. In the third
place, the Chinese cashier counts and manipulates bank bills and
coins with extraordinary skill and accuracy. I have had dealings
with him in many parts of the Far East, but I cannot remember ever
to have seen him count a sum of money twice, and I have never
caught him in an error....
Now, when you get a man whose honesty is guaranteed by his guild,
whose manipulation of money is phenomenally dexterous, and who can
calculate exchanges to eight points of decimals, you have an ideal
cashier; and if Japanese bankers employ him, it shows their good
business sense rather than their distrust of their own people. But
all Japanese bankers do not employ him. In some of the largest
banks in Tokyo, Kioto, and Osaka there are no Chinese at all--or
at least I have never seen any. This explanation would not be
worth, perhaps, the space that I have given to it, if the story of
the Chinese cashier had not been so widely circulated, and if it
were not typical of a whole class of cases in which the Japanese
are misjudged on the basis of a single incident or a solitary
fact.--GEORGE KENNAN, “Are the Japanese Honest?” the New York
_Outlook_ for August 31, 1912.
[219] “If the descendants of the samurai can erect a standard of
commercial integrity at all comparable to their fine record for courage
and loyalty, we shall be their debtors, not they ours.”--The New York
_Nation_ for July 30, 1908, p. 90.
[220] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 343.
[221] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 331.
[222] _Ibid._ vol. ii, p. 319.
[223] _Ibid._ vol. ii, p. 230.
[224] “I certainly consider that the courage and devotion of the
Japanese soldiers during the late war was to a great extent the result
of this systematic moral instruction and training in schools.”--BARON
KIKUCHI, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_ (1908),
vol. ii, p. 344.
[225] Wedgwood (_The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 22) suggestively
likens the reduction to unity of the various gods of polytheism to
the correlation of the physical forces--light, heat, electricity,
and magnetism. Just as all these are found to be merely different
manifestations of a single force or energy, so are all the deified
phenomena of nature at last discovered to be but different
manifestations of a single primal power--the One, the Supreme, the
Eternal. This correlation of the gods, this reduction of polytheism to
monotheism, holds the same place in the records of the religious and
moral evolution of the race that the correlation of the physical forces
holds in the records of the progress of science.
[226] There may be some philosophers and scientists who profess
materialism, and who make an infinite and eternal unconscious energy
the primal cause of all things. But this is a philosophy of the
universe which has never secured a wide acceptance in the West.
[227] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 59.
[228] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 356.
[229] This was the work of the Brahmans, who, to secure the ascendancy
of their own class, falsified and misinterpreted the sacred books.
[230] _Laws of Manu_ (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv), i. 31, 87.
[231] Cf. Hearn, _Kokora_, chap. xii.
[232] _Laws of Manu_, vi. 63.
[233] _Ibid._ xii. 9, 53–58. The germs out of which this system was
developed by the Brahmans formed a part of the animistic conception of
the world held by the conquered natives. By the sixth century B.C. the
system had been fully elaborated. See Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_
(1881), pp. 16 f.
[234] The theory was also undoubtedly in part the creation of the same
ethical necessity that called into existence the purgatory of the
medieval Church. The reincarnations have for aim and purpose not merely
retribution, but expiation and purification.
[235] The reader of Edward Beecher’s _The Conflict of Ages_, wherein
the author attempts to explain the inequalities of earthly life by
the theory of preëxistence, will be able to appreciate this effort of
Indian philosophers to solve the same problem.
[236] Indian pessimism is doubtless to be attributed in part to the
hot, depressing climate, but more largely to the burdensome caste
system and an oppressive government, which made free and joyous life
impossible to the masses, shutting them up, without hope, to an
existence of ache and pain and wretchedness. “Politics and society,
in our opinion,” says Dr. Hopkins, “had more to do with altering the
religion of India than had a higher temperature and miasma” (_The
Religions of India_ (1895), p. 199). But cf. Bloomfield, _The Religion
of the Veda_ (1908), pp. 263 ff.
[237] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 149.
[238] _Ibid._ p. 187.
[239] This Brahmanic notion of sacrifice, that the gods need food,
is the underlying notion in all religions of which sacrifices form
a part. “That the purpose of sacrifice was simply to feed the gods
was admitted on all sides in the controversy which accompanied the
diffusion of Christianity in the ancient world.... The altar, in the
words of Dean Spenser, was merely the table on which food and drink
were set before the languishing deity” (Payne, _History of the New
World called America_ (1892), vol. i, pp. xi f.). “It is on precisely
the same principle that the Mexicans kept their great war-gods ...
alive and vigorous by the blood of young human victims selected from
their tributaries, and the Peruvians maintained the Creator, Sun, Moon,
and Thunder, on whose favor their crops depended, in youth and vigor by
the continual smoke of burnt llamas” (_Ibid._ vol. i, p. 484). Consult
also Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_. All these were divinities of
vegetation, which were believed to die and to come to life again, as
with the revolution of the seasons vegetation died and was renewed.
Along with this belief went the notion that by magical ceremonies
the worshipers of the gods could aid them in recovering their wasted
energies.
[240] _Laws of Manu_, i. 88–91.
[241] _Ibid._ i. 93.
[242] _Ibid._ ii. 32, 35.
[243] _The Gentoo Code_ (1776), xvi. 1.
[244] _Laws of Manu_, iv. 80, 81.
[245] _Ibid._ viii. 379.
[246] _Ibid._ viii. 380.
[247] _Ibid._ viii. 381.
[248] _Ibid._ iv. 147.
[249] _Laws of Manu_, xi. 247.
[250] _Ibid._ iv. 148.
[251] Even the sudra is not shut out from this hope. If he be pure, the
faithful servant of his betters, gentle in his speech and free from
pride, he will at death be reborn into a higher caste (_Laws of Manu_,
ix. 335).
[252] _Laws of Manu_, xi. 60, 69, 71, 72, 132–138, 140–142, 144.
Especially severe is the penance imposed for killing a cow. See _Ibid._
xi. 109–117.
[253] _Ibid._ vi. 68.
[254] _Ibid._ vi. 69.
[255] It is better, however, to abstain wholly from the use of meat,
since this can be obtained only through pain to sentient beings (_Laws
of Manu_, v. 48). There is no sin in eating meat, “but abstention
brings great rewards” (_Ibid._ v. 56).
[256] _Laws of Manu_, v. 40.
[257] _Ibid._ v. 45.
[258] _Ibid._ vii. 101.
[259] _Ibid._ vii. 103.
[260] _Laws of Manu_, vii. 90–93, 104.
[261] _Ibid._ viii. 84.
[262] _Ibid._ v. 106.
[263] _Ibid._ xi. 231.
[264] _Ibid._ vi. 48.
[265] _Ibid._ viii. 312.
[266] _Laws of Manu_, viii. 313.
[267] Gautama or Buddha, “The Enlightened,” the founder of Buddhism,
died about B.C. 480. Long before he began his teachings moral reform
was in the air in India. Many reforming sects came into existence. The
most important of these was the sect of the Jains. The central teaching
of Jainism is the sacredness of all life, and its first and chief
commandment, Do no harm to any living thing. Its spirit of universal
benevolence left a deep impress not only upon Buddhism but also upon
later Hinduism.
[268] _Dhammapada_ (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. x), xiv.
190, 191. Cf. Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 209.
[269] Oldenberg, _Buddha_, p. 286.
[270] Cf. Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), p. 21; Hopkins, _The
Religions of India_ (1895), pp. 316 f.
[271] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 220.
[272] _Dhammapada_, xx. 283. This doctrine that peace and contentment
of mind come through suppression of desire was also the teaching of the
Greek Cynics.
[273] “No sentient being can tell in what state the karma that he
possesses will appoint his next birth, though he may be now, and
continue to be until death, one of the most meritorious of men. In that
karma may be the crime of murder, committed many ages ago, but not
yet expiated; and in the next existence its punishment may have to be
endured. There will ultimately be a reward for that which is good, but
it may be long delayed. It acts like an hereditary disease.”--HARDY,
_Manual of Buddhism_ (1880), p. 411.
[274] “The difficulties attendant upon this peculiar dogma [karma] may
be seen in the fact that it is almost universally repudiated.... In
historical composition, in narrative, and in conversation, the common
idea of transmigration is continually presented” (Hardy, _Manual of
Buddhism_ (1880), p. 412). By 250 B.C. “in the North and also in the
South the old heresy of the soul-theory had crept back by side issue
into the doctrine from which it had been categorically and explicitly
excluded by Gautama and his earlier followers” (Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_
(1896), p. 198).
[275] _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), pp. 31, 206. Cf. Hopkins, _The
Religions of India_ (1895), p. 321.
[276] But this, as we have just seen, is not the Buddhism of the
Buddhist world in general. The masses in Buddhist lands have never
accepted the doctrine of Nirvana in the sense of extinction of
existence. The following conversation between Moncure Conway and a
Singhalese priest discloses the meaning of the term to an orthodox
Buddhist of Ceylon: “I asked, ‘Have those who are in Nirvana any
consciousness?’ I was then informed that there is no Singhalese word
for consciousness. Sumangala said, ‘To reach Nirvana is to be no more.’
I pointed to a stone step and said, ‘One is there only as that stone is
here?’ ‘Not so much,’ answered the priest; ‘for the stone is actually
here, but in Nirvana there is no existence at all’” (_My Pilgrimage to
the Wise Men of the East_ (1906), p. 134).
[277] These eight requirements are often condensed into four, and then
the formula is called the fourfold path to deliverance.
[278] Cf. Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 211; Hopkins, _The Religions
of India_ (1895), p. 305.
[279] There is in this teaching respecting desirelessness an apparent
inconsistency, for with all other desires suppressed, there remains
the desire for Nirvana. But the difficulty here is only apparent. A
Buddhist priest, questioned respecting this, replied as follows: “The
desire for Nirvana escapes from the mesh that entangles all other
desires, because it is not desire for any object at all” (Conway,
_My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East_ (1906), p. 134). But all
other desires aside from this desire for Nirvana are in a sense sins
of covetousness. And this is the cardinal sin in the view of the true
Buddhist, for covetousness “is a strong desire for something, and all
desire is a hindrance in one’s way to Nirvana.”
[280] This teaching that mental illumination comes through
contemplation is the doctrine in general of the religious and moral
teachers of the East, and of all mystics. It differs fundamentally from
the scientific view, which makes observation and study the means of
enlightenment.
[281] Buddhism limits transmigration to the animal creation;
Brahmanism, it will be recalled, supposes the soul to transmigrate into
vegetable as well as into animal forms.
[282] “To be a true Buddhist, one must renounce, as lust, all desire
of evil, which brings evil; and must live without other hope than that
of extinguishing all desire and passion, believing that in so doing
he will at death be annihilated.”--HOPKINS, _The Religions of India_
(1895), p. 564.
[283] _Dhammapada_, vii. 90–99.
[284] But--and differing in this from Dr. Hopkins--Professor Rhys
Davids makes this perfection which results in annihilation to consist
not in the extinction of every desire, but only of craving desire and
evil passions.
[285] _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 322.
[286] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 317. Stoicism indeed
approaches Buddhism in this respect; but its attitude toward the
doctrine of a future life was in general merely agnostic--it made no
positive denial of immortality.
[287] Cf. Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), p. 123.
[288] Zeller represents Pythagoreanism as springing from an effort to
give an ethical content to life. “We may consider it proved,” he says,
“that the school of Pythagoras, believing in the almighty favor of the
gods, and in future retribution, enforced purity of life, moderation
and justice, minute self-examination and discretion in all actions, and
especially discouraged self-conceit” (_History of Philosophy_ (1881),
vol. i, p. 496). Oldenberg (_Ancient India_ (1896), p. 87) conceives
Pythagoreanism--together with the Orphic worship--as “a bit of Buddhism
in the midst of Greek civilization.”
[289] Gautama’s attitude toward ascetic practices is shown by the
following: “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or
lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can
purify a mortal who has not overcome desires” (_Dhammapada_, x. 141).
[290] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 366.
[291] This is well illustrated in the following incident related by
Moncure Conway. In the island of Ceylon he was visited by an aged
Buddhist priest, who came in a sedan borne by men. Asked why he did
not use a carriage drawn by horses, the priest replied that “he was
afraid a horse might be vitally injured by carrying him.” “But,” said
Mr. Conway, “might it not be the same with one of those men while he is
carrying you?” After a moment’s silence the priest answered, “But a man
can tell me if he is suffering” (_My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the
East_ (1906), pp. 116 f.).
[292] Thousands of rats were formerly kept at public expense in a
hospital at the Indian town of Kutel.
[293] Toleration is not even recognized as a virtue in the moral codes
of ancient Judaism, dogmatic Christianity, and Islam.
[294] _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), p. 231.
[295] Under Asoka, it is true, Buddhism, like Christianity under
Constantine the Great, became militant. But Asoka was a gentle warrior
and made war gently. He neither killed his prisoners nor tortured them,
a common practice with Oriental conquerors, nor did he sell them as
slaves.
[296] “Les paisibles sujets du Grand-Lama thibetain ont cessé d’aimer
la guerre et presque de la faire” (Letourneau, _La guerre dans les
diverses races humaines_ (1895), p. 213).
[297] Edward A. Ross, _The Changing Chinese_ (1911), p. 29.
[298] See above, p. 79.
[299] Mozoomdar, a leader of the Brahmo-Somaj.
[300] Buddhism, like Christianity, teaches that hatred must be overcome
by love: “Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by
good” (_Dhammapada_, xvii. 223). “For hatred does not cease by hatred
at any time; hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule” (_Ibid._ i. 5).
[301] For the influence of Buddhism on the Japanese character, see
Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii, chap. iv,
“Japanese Religious Beliefs: Buddhism.”
[302] _Laws_, tr. Jowett, x. 896. And the thought is near even in the
latest philosophy: “But it feels like a real fight,” says Professor
William James, “as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to
reform.”
[303] Is. xlv. 7.
[304] This dualistic world philosophy is regarded by some students of
the Zend-Avesta as being in the nature of a protest against “the inert
asceticism of Buddhism and the ethical indifference of Brahmanism”
(Darmesteter, “Introduction,” Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol.
iv, p. lxviii). Ranke views it as the product of environment: “If we
keep well in view the contrasts between the various districts and
nations included within the limits of Persia and her provinces, the
incessant struggle between the settled populations and the inhabitants
of the steppes, between the cultivated regions and the desolation of
the desert, thrust back, indeed, yet ever resuming its encroachments,
the ideas of the Zend-Avesta will appear to us natural and, as we may
term it, autochthonic” (_Universal History_, vol. i (1885), p. 105).
[305] The way in which such a conception acts upon the moral life is
well illustrated in the history of English Puritanism. The ethical
strenuousness of the Puritan was the outcome of his deeply felt
consciousness of the ineradicable antagonism between good and evil.
It is all brought vividly before us in Bunyan’s _Holy War_, in the
struggle between Immanuel and Diabolus--of which the myth of Ahura and
Ahriman was the prototype.
[306] _Mihir Yasht_ (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii), vii. 26.
[307] See Jackson, _Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran_.
[308] See above, p. 115.
[309] Zoroastrian ethics, as Wedgwood says, is best understood when
viewed as a protest against the Hindu conception of the universe
and life. “The injunction to industry, the elaborate provisions for
agriculture, the constant stimulus to exertion of every kind, are most
intelligible when we see in them a recoil from the faith which appeared
to this active race [the Iranian] a confusion of good and evil” (_The
Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 59).
[310] _Vendîdâd_ (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv), Farg. iv.
47.
[311] _Ibid._ Farg. iii. 33.
[312] _Ibid._ Farg. iv. 49.
[313] “Aryan morality came down from the heavens in a ray of light”
(_Selected Essays of James Darmesteter_, ed. Morris Jastrow, p. 304).
[314] _Vendîdâd_, Farg. ii. 29.
[315] _Ibid._ Farg. iv. 49 (bis)-55.
[316] _Mihir Yasht_, i. 2.
[317] _Ibid._ xxix. 116, 117.
[318] _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., pp. 71 ff. It is significant that the
sacred standard of the early Persians was the apron of a blacksmith.
[319] _Vendîdâd_, Farg. iii. 31.
[320] _Ibid._ Farg. iii. 4.
[321] _Laws of Manu_, x. 84.
[322] _Vendîdâd_, Farg. iii. 38, 39.
[323] The king who reigned in Persia at the time of Nero, going from
Asia to Italy, traveled by land along the shore instead of going
by ship, “because the Magi are forbidden to defile the sea” (James
Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv, p. xl). But the anxious
observance by the Persians of the requirements of the code is best
disclosed in the disposition which they made of their dead. Since
corpses could neither be burned nor buried nor thrown into the water
without defiling a sacred element, they were exposed on the summits of
mountains or on the top of low towers (dakhmas), the so-called “Towers
of Silence,” that the flesh might be eaten by birds of prey.
[324] _Zend-Avesta_, pt. ii, Yasht xxii (Sacred Books of the East, vol.
xxiii, pp. 314 ff.).
[325] Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi, “Introduction,” p. xx.
[326] “Their [the servitors of Mithra] dualistic system was
particularly adapted to fostering individual effort and to developing
human energy.”--CUMONT, _The Mysteries of Mithra_ (1903), p. 141.
[327] _Herod._ i. 139. We quote Rawlinson’s version.
[328] _Herod._ i. 136.
[329] Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_, vol. i, p. 214, n. 10. We omit the
references.
[330] Cf. _Herod._ ix. 109.
[331] Rawlinson, _The Five Great Monarchies_ (1871), vol. iii, p. 170.
The exception was the case of the Barcæans. Cf. _Herod._ iv. 201.
[332] The modern Persians, who have exchanged the truth-impelling creed
of Zoroaster for that of Mohammed, seem to have lost this ancestral
virtue. It is noteworthy, however, that the Indian Parsees, the
inheritors and preservers of the faith of ancient Persia, are noted for
their uprightness and veracity.
[333] “They [the Parsees] form one of the most esteemed, wealthy, and
philanthropic communities on the west coast of India, notably in the
city of Bombay.”--BLOOMFIELD, _The Religion of the Veda_ (1908), p. 15.
[334] “The whole history of the religion of Israel is a history of
the development of the moral consciousness, and consequently of the
deepening and widening of the opposition between that _which ought to
be_ and that _which is_.”--EDWARD CAIRD, _The Evolution of Religion_
(1894), vol. ii, p. 92.
[335] It may be urged that the moral character given to Yahweh was the
creation of the moral consciousness of his worshipers; but even so,
this conception of deity once formed would inevitably react upon the
moral sense to deepen and purify the feelings that gave it birth.
[336] _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_ (1889), Bd. i, S. 429.
[337] Budde, _Religion of Israel to the Exile_ (1899), pp. 35 ff.; Toy,
_Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), p. 307; W. Robertson Smith, _The
Religion of the Semites_ (1894), pp. 75 ff.
[338] W. Robertson Smith urges that sacrifice among the Hebrews had its
origin in the sacramental communal idea. According to this belief the
clansmen and their god are of the same stock, and the bond of kinship
is renewed and strengthened through the human and the divine members of
the community partaking together of the flesh and blood of an animal
slain.
[339] Job iii. 19.
[340] Eccl. ix. 5; and so ix. 10: “For there is no work, nor desire,
nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol, whither thou goeth.”
[341] Is. xxxviii. 18.
[342] See below, pp. 165 f.
[343] Cf. Chapter II.
[344] The oldest form of the Decalogue is found in Ex. xxxiv; cf. Ex.
xxxiii.
[345] If we compare the morality of this Hebrew Decalogue with that of
the Egyptian Negative Confession, we shall find it to belong to about
the same stage of ethical development.
[346] In the Book of Judges are preserved some traditions which are
illustrative of the moral state of society at this time; for though
all the details of these stories may not be historical, still they
doubtless reflect the general condition of things during this period.
There is a striking similarity between these traditions of gross and
incredible crimes and the traditions of the atrocious immoralities of
the Merovingian Age in European history.
[347] The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian power 722
B.C.; the kingdom of Judah fell before Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon,
586 B.C.
[348] Cf. Kuenen, _The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel_.
[349] _The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel_ (1877), p. 344.
[350] Cf. 1 Kings xxi--the story of Naboth’s vineyard.
[351] “The life-work of Elijah was a turning-point in the history of
the religion of Israel, similar in its consequences to those which
followed the appearance of Zarathustra in Iran.... It was the ethical
idea of God matured in the soul of the prophet by the need of his time
which broke through with irresistible power to the demand for a final
choice between Jehovah, the holy God, and the unholy nature gods of the
heathen.”--PFLEIDERER, _Religions and Historic Faiths_ (1907), pp. 225
f.
[352] _History of the People of Israel_ (1892), vol. ii, p. 275.
[353] Calamities were at this time befalling Israel. “The national
distress served to awaken Israel’s conscience. The obligation
covenanted at Sinai knocked again at the door of their hearts” (Budde,
_Religion of Israel to the Exile_ (1899), p. 93).
[354] Amos iii. 10.
[355] _Ibid._ v. 11, 12.
[356] _Ibid._ viii. 5, 6.
[357] _Ibid._ v. 21.
[358] _Ibid._ v. 22.
[359] _Ibid._ v. 24.
[360] Hosea vi. 6.
[361] To Amos and Hosea, Yahweh is simply the supreme god, the suzerain
of all other gods.
[362] Is. ii. 3, 4; cf. Micah iv. 1–3. See Driver, _Introduction to
the Literature of the Old Testament_ (1897), p. 229, for the opinion
of different commentators on the possible exilic or postexilic date of
these passages.
[363] Is. i. 11–17.
[364] Micah vi. 6–8.
[365] Wellhausen, _Prolegomena to the History of Israel_ (1885), p. 414.
[366] This festival was probably of Babylonian origin. It was
associated with astronomical phenomena--with the seven planets of
ancient astronomy and with the phases of the moon.
[367] The feast of Purim is another transformed festival; “Babylonian
in origin, it was given a Jewish dress and became incorporated into the
system of Jewish observances” (David Philipson, _The Reform Movement in
Judaism_ (1907), p. 3).
[368] Thus the festival of Dionysus, which “in its origin was a mere
burst of primitive animal spirits, is transmuted into a complex and
beautiful work of art” (Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_, p. 14).
[369] Deut. vi. 14.
[370] Montefiori, _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion_
(1892), p. 197.
[371] _Prolegomena to the History of Israel_ (1885), p. 402. Renan
speaks of Deuteronomy in the same strain: “This Thora was the worst
enemy of the universal religion which the prophets of the eighth
century had in their dreams” (_History of the People of Israel_ (1891),
vol. iii, p. 175).
[372] Cf. Chapter XVI. The persecutions of the medieval Church were
largely the outcome of this legislation which made the extermination
of God’s enemies, that is, idolators and misbelievers, a pious duty.
“The terrible _Directorium Inquisitorum_ of Nicholas Eymeric follows
Deuteronomy word for word” (Renan, _History of the people of Israel_
(1891), vol. iii, p. 179).
[373] Deut. xx. 16.
[374] _Ibid._ vii. 2.
[375] _Jewish Religious Life after the Exile_ (1898), p. 45. The
teachings of this same intolerant monolatry has, down to the
present day, exerted a retarding influence upon the development of
international morality, especially upon the war ethics of the Christian
nations.
[376] We meet with the same phenomenon in medieval times. The Christian
Church, which was so harsh in its dealings with misbelievers, was a
tender mother toward the poor and the afflicted of the faith.
[377] The origin of these cities may date from a much earlier time than
the reform under King Josiah. The code may simply register changes
already effected in the customary law. See Nathaniel Schmidt, _The
Prophet of Nazareth_ (1905), p. 61.
[378] Deut. iv. 41, 42; xix. 1–13.
[379] Deut. xv. 7, 8.
[380] _Ibid._ xxiv. 6.
[381] _Ibid._ xxiv. 12, 13.
[382] _Ibid._ xxiv. 17.
[383] _Ibid._ xxiv. 14, 15.
[384] _Ibid._ xxiii. 19, 20. Cf. Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_,
p. 760. The poor in these early times were, in all the lands advancing
in civilization, literally devoured by the money lenders.
[385] Deut. xxiv. 19.
[386] Ruth ii. 4–17.
[387] Deut. v. 14, 15.
[388] _Ibid._ xv. 12.
[389] _Ibid._ xv. 13, 14.
[390] All these regulations respecting slaves, however, lack
universalism. It is compassion for the slave not as a man, but as a
Hebrew, that moves the legislator. The laws are in general for the
benefit of Hebrew slaves alone. Gentiles or foreigners are not included
in these humane provisions. See Lev. xxv and Ex. xxi. 2.
[391] See Is. xl-lxvi.
[392] “Deutero-Isaiah was the first to emphasize and make use of this
plenary and unconditional monotheism.”--MONTEFIORI, _Lectures on the
Origin and Growth of Religion_ (1892), p. 269.
[393] Is. xliii. 10.
[394] _Ibid._ xliv. 6.
[395] _Ibid._ xliv. 24.
[396] _Ibid._ xlv. 5.
[397] _Ibid._ xlvi. 9.
[398] There is a repetition of this in the _Koran_, where the Prophet
of Arabia speaks as one to whom the idea of the unity of deity had come
as a new thought.
[399] W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_ (1894), p. 81.
[400] See above, pp. 18–20.
[401] “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of
them that hate me.”--Deut. v. 9.
[402] Ezek. xviii. 2.
[403] _Ibid._ xviii. 3.
[404] Ezek. xviii. 20. The entire chapter is devoted to this single
subject. This truer view had dawned upon the compilers of the
Deuteronomic code. Cf. Deut. xxiv. 16 and Jer. xxxi. 29, 30.
[405] See below, p. 364.
[406] See lii. 13-liii. 12.
[407] Cf. Bennett, _The Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets_ (1907),
pp. 326 ff.
[408] In the year 539 B.C. Cyrus, king of Persia, having captured
Babylon, issued a decree giving the Jewish exiles in Babylonia
permission to return to their own land and to rebuild the Temple
destroyed fifty years before by Nebuchadnezzar. A band returned and
set themselves to the task of restoring their houses and rebuilding
the Temple. After many interruptions and long delay the building was
finished and dedicated anew to the worship of Yahweh (516 B.C.).
[409] “The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law,
after Ezra’s reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth
in post-Reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of
salvation, and particularly the tendency to formalize and almost to
deify the literal inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.”--NEWMAN
SMYTH, _Christian Ethics_ (1892), p. 95.
[410] For life under the law consult Schürer, _History of the Jewish
People_, division ii, vol. ii, pp. 90 ff.
[411] Matt. xxiii. 23.
[412] _Ibid._ xv. 11, 20. “The identification of morality with ritual
in his [Jesus’] day had confused the issue before human life much as
that issue is now confused by the identification of morality with
opinion” (Hall, _History of Ethics within Organized Christianity_
(1910), p. 62).
[413] Ps. cxxxvii. 9; see Ps. cix.
[414] On this subject see Toy, _Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), pp.
246 ff.
[415] “The people had learned to draw nigh to God without the aid of
sacrifice.”--W. ROBERTSON SMITH, _The Religion of the Semites_ (1894),
p. 215.
[416] Cf. Mark i. 21; vi. 2.
[417] Renan, _History of the People of Israel_ (1895), vol. iv, p. 195.
[418] Consult on this subject Charles, _A Critical History of the
Doctrine of a Future Life_ (1898–1899).
[419] See above, pp. 139 f.
[420] See Cheyne, _Jewish Religious Life after the Exile_ (1898), p.
229; and Toy, _Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), pp. 378, 386.
[421] Ps. xvi. 10, Rev. Ver.
[422]
“I know without me God cannot a moment live;
If I to death should go, He, too, would death receive.”
Quoted by BLOW, _A Study of Dante_ (1887), p. 102.
[423] Cf. above, p. 44; see also Toy, _Judaism and Christianity_
(1891), p. 387; Hall, _History of Ethics within Organized Christianity_
(1910), p. 216.
[424] The Pharisees; cf. Acts xxiii. 6–8.
[425] We see a repetition of all this in what is going on to-day
among the Jews in the great cities of the New World. Liberal Judaism
is largely the outcome of just such influences as brought forth
Christianity out of the narrow ritual Judaism of the Alexandrian Age.
See David Philipson, _The Reform Movement in Judaism_ (1907), chap. xii.
[426] “Those psalms into which a sense of something like the
brotherhood of nations begins to penetrate are for various reasons
later than 382 B.C.... Not till the coming of the Macedonian reconciler
of East and West could there be a presentiment of the truth of the
divine education, not only of Israel, but of the human race.”--CHEYNE,
_Jewish Religious Life after the Exile_ (1898), pp. 134 f.
[427] To Hillel is credited the maxim, “What thou wouldst not have
another do to thee, do not thou to another.”
[428] The teaching of the Orphic sects that there are two elements,
one good and another bad, in man’s nature, was an esoteric doctrine
which had no influence on the popular mind and conscience. Cf. G. Lowes
Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_, 6th ed., pp. 31 f.
[429] There are, it is true, gods of the lower world unfriendly to
man, but there is nothing in the Greek world-view corresponding to
the Egyptian conception of the struggle between the good Osiris and
the wicked Set, or of the Persian idea of the conflict between the
beneficent Ahura Mazda and the evil-working Ahriman. Nor was there
anything in this view like the Babylonian or Persian notion of
malicious spirits.
[430] The Dionysian cult fostered art, but not directly morality. In so
far as the Attic drama was an elevating moral influence, the cult may
be said to have indirectly promoted morals. But the foreign orgiastic
god had to be thoroughly converted before he could strengthen others.
[431] The pre-Hellenic Oriental cult of Aphrodite had undoubtedly an
unfavorable influence on morality. “Some part of this evil character
[was] transplanted into Greek legend, but very little into Greek
worship.... What we know is that until the declining period of Greek
history the cult of Aphrodite, so far as it appears in written or
monumental record, was as pure and austere as that of Zeus and Athena”
(Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (1896), vol. ii, pp. 657,
663).
[432] Cf. Schmidt, _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. i, S. 165.
[433] Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (1896), vol. i, p. 74,
quoting Charondas, the Sicilian legislator.
[434] Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (1896), vol. iv, pp. 177
ff.
[435] Hatch, _The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the
Christian Church_, 2d ed., p. 292.
[436] _History of Greece_ (1900), pp. 320 f.
[437] _Thucyd._ i. 70.
[438] For an illuminating comparison of the Greek virtues of fortitude
and temperance with the corresponding Christian virtues, see T. H.
Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., pp. 304 ff.
[439] _Ethics_, iii. 10.
[440] “But let [each man] know,” says Plato, “how to choose the mean
and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as in him lies, not only
in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of
happiness” (_Republic_, tr. Jowett, x. 619).
[441] Socrates, it is true, taught that it is better to suffer wrong
than to do wrong, but he was here far in advance of the common Greek
conscience.
[442] Quoted by Taylor, _Ancient Ideals_ (1896), vol. i, p. 247.
[443] _Christian Ethics_ (1873), vol. i, p. 63.
[444] _The Greek View of Life_ (1909), p. 205.
[445] If we contrast the Greek conception of man’s nature with that of
certain systems of Christian theology, we shall better understand the
ethical value of such ideas and beliefs. On the occasion of a college
commencement one of the speakers, a stout upholder of the doctrines of
the fall of man, original sin, and the utter depravity of the natural
man, roundly denounced this injunction of Pindar’s. He said to the
young people who had chosen as their class motto, “Be what you are,”
that that was just what they ought not to be. He then went on to show
them that their nature was wholly corrupt, that all their natural
inclinations were toward evil continually, and that if they ever hoped
for salvation they must become what they were not.
[446] “Aristotle may be almost said to have made the difference between
Greek and barbarian the basis of his moral code.”--LECKY, _History of
European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 200.
[447] _Politics_, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 14, sec. 21.
[448] For the ethics of Greek slavery consult Schmidt, _Die Ethik der
alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. ii, S. 203–219.
[449] Thebes, but not from moral scruples seemingly, prohibited under
the penalty of death the destruction of healthy infants.
[450] The reader of Plato will recall how Socrates uses this practice
of the exposition of infants to illustrate his art of bringing to birth
true and false ideas (“lies and shadows”) in the minds of his pupils,
and exposing to die those that are vain shadows. See his _Dialogues_,
tr. Jowett, vol. iii, pp. 350 f.
[451] The practice of the exposition of female infants in the
Hellenistic Age, when luxury increased and children became a burden,
seems to have been more common than in earlier times.
[452] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_ (1888), p. 120.
[453] _Politics_, vi. 4, sec. 12. This contempt for tradesmen and
laborers, generally speaking, continued through all periods of Greek
history. In some states, however, particularly in Athens, it underwent
modification. “The later Athenians began to consider trade an honorable
road to riches, and aristocrats like Nicias were known as careful trade
masters.” In Rhodes, also, trade became honorable.
[454] Paulsen, _System of Ethics_, tr. Thilly, p. 62 n.
[455] _Laws_, tr. Jowett, xi. 919.
[456] They were charged with adulteration of foods, cheating in
measure, etc. Demosthenes declares that a man honest in commercial
transactions was a prodigy. Cf. Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_
(1888), p. 419.
[457] See above, p. 89.
[458] This ethical feeling is to be reckoned with in dealing with
Asiatics--until there is a change in their ideal of manliness. The
overlooking of an injury is apt to be regarded by them as an indication
of weakness and cowardice.
[459] Schmidt, _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. ii, S. 312.
[460] _Herod._ vi. 24. The Delphian oracle tried to cure this defect in
the national character. See the story of Glaucus, _Herod._ vi. 86.
[461] _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. ii, S. 413.
[462] _Ethics_, tr. Welldon, i. 4.
[463] _Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_ (1908), p. 95.
[464] _Od._ xix. 396–398.
[465] _Thucyd._ i. 5.
[466] _Il._ xxii. 485–499.
[467] See Xen. _Mem._ ii. 1, 21, for the parable, by the Sophist
Prodicus, of the choice of Heracles at the parting of the ways.
[468] _The Republic_, iii. 386–392.
[469] See above, p. 35.
[470] “The blessed islands of the West were indeed even then [in the
Homeric Age] a home for the dead, but they had not yet been opened
to moral worth, as in the days of Pindar.”--MAHAFFY, _Social Life in
Greece_ (1888), p. 26.
[471] See Zeller, _History of Philosophy_ (1881), vol. i, p. 125, and
Schmidt, _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. i, S. 99. “Strictly
speaking,” says Professor Seymour, “Homer knows of no instance of
rewards, and of only one case of punishment after death” (_Life in the
Homeric Age_ (1908), p. 469).
[472] For the Greek view of the underworld, and the incoming of the
idea of rewards and punishments in the after life, see Schmidt, _Die
Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. i, S. 97 ff., and Rhode, _Psyche:
Seelencult und Unsterblichkeits Glaube der Griechen_, 4te Auflage, Bd.
i, S. 301–319.
[473] This moralization of Hades is carried still further by Vergil. It
is instructive to compare his vision of Hades with Homer’s.
[474] _Republic_, x. 614–616; see also _Gorgias_, 523–527.
[475] _Herod._ i. 30–32. But Nemesis appears later in the story, and
Crœsus is represented as being punished for the crime of an ancestor.
[476] _Ibid._ vii. 10. The views which the historian here attributes to
the Persian Artabanus were of course a reflection of Greek belief. For
further instances in Greek literature of the conception of the envy of
the gods, consult Schmidt, _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd.
i, S. 78–84.
[477] _Thucyd._ vii. 77.
[478] _Pericles_ (1890), p. 312.
[479] “The very event [the Persian war] which determined the sudden
splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction to the
already existing morality.”--SYMONDS, _Studies of the Greek Poets_
(1880), vol. ii, p. 17.
[480] Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (1896), vol. i, p. 129.
After the tale had been moralized by Æschylus, Phidias carved the story
on the great Zeus throne at Olympia, using it to give emphasis to the
conception of the god as the guardian of the moral order of the world.
[481] _Thucyd._ v. 84–116.
[482] The attitude of the later philosophers toward the notion that the
gods are envious is fairly represented by Plato’s protest: “He [the
Creator] is good, and no goodness can have any jealousy of anything”
(_Timæus_, tr. Jowett, 29).
[483] “The dispensation which takes the aspect of divine envy to
mortals might, it seems, from a higher point of view, be discerned
as the very opposite; human vicissitude is the result of a divine
love anxious to share the true blessedness which comes in the form of
sorrow.”--WEDGWOOD, _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 112.
[484] Taylor, _Ancient Ideals_ (1896), vol. i, p. 227.
[485] Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (1891), vol. i, p. 129.
[486] _Republic_, tr. Jowett, x. 613.
[487] See James Adam, _The Vitality of Platonism_ (1911), chap. v,
“Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil.”
[488] When we contrast with this Sophocles’ treatment of the same theme
in _Antigone_ we realize how great an advance during the interval the
Greeks had made in humanitarian feeling.
[489] See _Thucyd._ iii. 53–59.
[490] The Spartan admiral Callicratides (the successor of Lysander,
406 B.C.) refused to sell his Greek prisoners of war as slaves, but he
stood almost or quite alone in this. See Xen. _Hellen._ i. 6, 14.
[491] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_ (1888), p. 235.
[492] The war brought into fearful exaggeration the salient weakness of
Greek morality. The most reprehensible moral faults of the Greeks were
the outgrowth of political factions and cabals, of party jealousies and
rivalries in the close quarters of city walls. These faults were lifted
into the most savage passions by the war. Thucydides in a memorable
passage (iii. 82) draws a striking picture of the disastrous moral
effects of the prolonged quarrel.
[493] See above, p. 180.
[494] _Republic_, v. 469–471.
[495] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 267; see also
A. Ræder, _L’Arbitrage international chez les Hellenes_ (1912).
[496] _Études sur l’histoire de humanité_ (1880), t. ii, p. 105.
Because of its long exemption from the ravages of war, Elis was more
populous and wealthy than any other district of the Peloponnesus
(_Polyb._ iv. 73, 74). The contrast presented by Greece in general
constituted an impressive commentary on the fatal consequences for
Greek civilization of the war system. Speaking of the depopulation
which incessant wars had caused over almost all the world he knew,
Plutarch says of Greece, a land once “strong in cities,” that the whole
country could raise barely three thousand men, the same number that the
single city of Megara sent to Platæa at the time of the Persian war
(_Philosophical Essays_, “On the Cessation of Oracles,” sec. viii).
[497] See above, p. 18.
[498] “Really to see the good and to know it as such, yet not to love
and pursue it, is impossible; the vision carries with it its own
persuasion and authority.”--MARTINEAU, _Types of Ethical Theory_, 3d
ed., vol. i, p. 74. “Mere school and word knowledge, of course, is
powerless, but real knowledge, knowledge that represents real personal
conviction, cannot fail to influence life.”--PAULSEN, _System of
Ethics_, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 62.
[499] “There are few men whose minds are not more or less in
that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war;
there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by
spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association--resting
upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparities or
inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases
and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself
account; there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and
profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of
self-education to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct
this ancient mental compound, and who has not been driven to it by
his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial
Elenchus no longer stands in the market place to lend him help and
stimulus.”--GROTE, _History of Greece_ (1888), vol. vii, pp. 168 f.
[500] Quoted by Schmidt, _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_ (1882), Bd. ii,
S. 396.
[501] “His [Socrates’] significancy for moral philosophy lies in
his calling attention to _rational_ knowledge as the source of the
moral.”--WUTTKE, _Christian Ethics_ (1873), vol. i, p. 69.
[502] _Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité_
(1879), t. i, pp. 125 f.
[503] Cf. _Gorgias_, 478, 479.
[504] _Laws_, tr. Jowett, xi. 913. Plato saw what the
socialist-philosopher Lloyd saw when he wrote, “More searching ... than
the Golden Rule is that which commands us to inquire if what we desire
for ourselves and others is a right desire” (_Man the Social Creator_
(1906), p. 147).
[505] In the _Republic_ Plato reaches the conception of a Greek
brotherhood, but beyond this he never advanced.
[506] Xen. _Mem._ ii. 6, 35.
[507] _Politics_, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 2, sec. 15; 14, sec.
21.
[508] _Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité_
(1879), t. i, p. 228.
[509] “A moral ideal which was not coextensive with the whole spiritual
nature of man was taken by the schoolmen from the Aristotelian ethics,
and then the so-called religious virtues were more or less cumbrously
and precariously built upon it. Supernaturalism in morals was added to
the classic naturalism as a divine appendix to ethics.”--NEWMAN SMYTH,
_Christian Ethics_ (1892), p. 133.
[510] The downfall of the institutions of the free city state was to
Greek morality what the downfall of the papal Church would have been to
the morality of the medieval ages.
[511] Philopœman and Aratus.
[512] This ascetic tendency in Stoicism is doubtless to be attributed
to the influence of the Orient upon Greek life and thought.
[513] Consistently so, since only through self-control and the
avoidance of all excesses of passion, appetite, and desires can one
maintain that tranquillity of mind which is the condition precedent of
happiness.
[514] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 228.
[515] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, p. 264. The author contrasts
this humaneness of the laws of the Athenian democracy four centuries
before Christ with the atrocious cruelty of the criminal laws of
Christian Europe down almost to the nineteenth century.
[516] _Social Life in Greece_ (1888), p. 269.
[517] _Ibid._ p. 554.
[518] The Apostle Paul at Athens, seeking common ground with his
hearers for the doctrine he preached that God hath made of one blood
all nations of men, finds it in the familiar line of the Stoic
Cleanthes--“We are the offspring of God.”
[519] Plutarch died about 40 A.D.
[520] “From contact with the Greeks, therefore, Christianity obtained
this support, that an ideal long known to the Western world, the Stoic
ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the preaching of the
Apostles was in this respect not out of harmony with the wants and
aspirations of the higher and better minds of the age.”--MAHAFFY,
_Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire_ (1905), p. 146.
[521] “The essential oneness of human moral experience has shown itself
in the ethical results achieved by these various peoples.”--TOY,
_Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), p. 337.
[522] Coulanges, _The Ancient City_, ii, 9.
[523] The authority of the father over each and every member of the
family was legally absolute, extending to life and death. Not until
late in the Empire did the law forbid fathers to kill their grown-up
children or to sell them as slaves. Cf. McKenzie, _Studies in Roman
Law_, 6th ed., p. 141; and Sohm, _Institutes_ (1901), p. 53.
[524] Inge, _Society in Rome under the Cæsars_ (1888), p. 8.
[525] This Roman virtue of obedience to the state has been just such
an enduring force in the moral life of the Christian world as has
the Jewish virtue of obedience to a revealed law (see Chapter IX).
Historically regarded, the Protestant Church, which makes obedience
to a written revealed law a necessary virtue, is the inheritor of the
ethical feeling and conviction of ancient Israel; while the Roman
Catholic Church, which makes submission to ecclesiastical authority an
indispensable virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical tradition and
spirit of ancient Rome. See H. M. Gwatkin (co-author), _Early Ideals of
Righteousness_ (1910), pp. 71 ff.
[526] Tacitus, _Annals_, iii. 16, 17.
[527] This legal subjection of the son to the father, while it
developed and strengthened the virtue of obedience, seemed to deaden
filial _affection_. “Of all the forms of virtue,” says Lecky, “filial
affection is perhaps that which appears most rarely in Roman history”
(_History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 299).
[528] _De Off._ i. 17.
[529] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 177 f.
[530] See p. 245, on the ethics of persecution.
[531] _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 148.
[532] Cf. Chapter XVIII.
[533] The citizen army, which had been the seed plot of those heroic
virtues that cast such a halo around the earlier history of Rome, had
been replaced by a mercenary force in which only the coarser military
virtues could find sphere for exercise.
[534] “The unchecked power of the master ... produced those cold hearts
which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena.”--DILL,
_Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_ (1904), p. 12.
[535] Friedlander, _Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms_
(1888), Bd. i, S. 479–481; English ed., _Roman Life and Manners under
the Early Empire_, vol. i, pp. 243 f.
[536] “The senator was forbidden down to the last age of the empire,
both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.”--DILL,
_Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, p. 102.
[537] _De Off._ i. 42.
[538] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 271.
[539] Friedlander, _Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms_
(1889), Bd. ii, S. 414; English ed., _Roman Life and Manners under the
Early Empire_, vol. ii, p. 77.
[540] “The unusual enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude
sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls.”--DILL,
_Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, p. 238.
[541] In an eloquent passage Lecky thus sums up the demoralizing
effects of the spectacles: “Those hateful games, which made the
spectacle of human suffering and death the delight of all classes, had
spread their brutalising influence wherever the Roman name was known,
had rendered millions absolutely indifferent to the sight of human
suffering, had produced in many, in the very centre of an advanced
civilization, a relish and a passion for torture, a rapture and an
exultation in watching the spasms of extreme agony, such as an African
or an American savage alone can equal”. (_History of European Morals_,
3d ed., vol. i, p. 467).
[542] The period which witnessed the greatest inequality of fortunes
was the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire.
[543] It should be borne in mind that the clients of this period were
wholly different from the clients of the earlier times. The relations
of the early clients to their patrons were those of clansmen to their
chief; the relations of these later clients to their patrons were the
degrading relations of idle, needy dependents to newly rich men without
family traditions and socially and morally wholly unfit for their
elevation.
[544] _The History of Rome_ (1888), vol. ii, p. 524.
[545] “The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems
to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and
subject.”--DILL, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, p. 29.
[546] _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 204.
[547] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 332 ff.
[548] _Ibid._ 3d ed., vol. i, p. 227.
[549] “Men ceased to be adventurous, patriotic, just, magnanimous;
but in exchange they became chaste, tender-hearted, loyal, religious,
and capable of infinite endurance in a good cause.”--SEELEY, _Roman
Imperialism_ (1889), p. 33.
[550] _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 187.
[551] About 40–120 A.D.
[552] Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, p. 64.
[553] Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, pp. 231 f.
[554] Cf. _Ibid._ p. 232.
[555] Stoicism is second only to Christianity as a moral force in
European civilization. “One of the most important expressions of the
moral sense for all time,” affirms Professor Clifford, “is that of the
Stoic philosophy, especially after its reception among the Romans”
(_Lectures and Essays_ (1901), vol. ii, p. 108). Mahaffy declares that
the Stoic philosophy, “above all the human influences we know, purified
and ennobled the world” (_The Silver Age_ (1906), p. 103). Denis thinks
that it was through Stoicism that Rome did most for civilization
(_Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879),
t. ii, p. 5).
[556] Taken from Menander.
[557] “One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant
assertions of the duty of charity to the human race occurs in the
treatise of Cicero upon duties.”--LECKY, _History of European Morals_,
3d ed., vol. i, p. 240.
[558] _De Off._ iii. 5.
[559] _Ibid._ iii. xi.
[560] _Ibid._ i. 16.
[561] _De Finibus_, v. 23.
[562] _Meditations_, vi. 44. This and the following citations are from
Long’s translation, 2d ed.
[563] _Ibid._ iv. 23. The moral element in the conception of the
universal city must not be overlooked. There was implied in it the
idea of universal brotherhood, of the ethical oneness of mankind. The
creation and promulgation of this conception was one of the great
services which Stoicism rendered to civilization.
[564] _Ibid._ iii. 4.
[565] _Ibid._ viii. 59.
[566] This subject is dealt with by Lecky, _History of European
Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 295 ff.; Bryce, _Studies in History and
Jurisprudence_, vol. ii, essay xi, “The Law of Nature.”
[567] Bryce, _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_ (1901), vol. ii, p.
143.
[568] Sophocles, _Antigone_.
[569] Commenting on the consequences of the inspiration of Roman law
by this doctrine of Stoicism, Lecky says: “To the Stoics and the Roman
lawyers is mainly due the clear recognition of the existence of a
law of nature above and beyond all human enactments, which has been
the basis of the best moral and of the most influential, though most
chimerical, political speculations of later ages, and the renewed study
of Roman law was an important element in the revival that preceded the
Reformation” (_History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 297).
[570] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 129. Lecky
instances (vol. i, p. 292) three ways in which Stoicism worked for good
in the Empire: (1) it raised up good emperors; (2) it led men to engage
in the public service; and (3) it rendered the law more catholic and
humane.
[571] Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_ (1904), p. 376.
[572] “In the Stoic emperors ... we find probably the earliest
example of great moral principles applied to legislation on a large
scale.”--CLIFFORD, _Lectures and Essays_, vol. ii, p. 108.
[573] Public feeling in regard to the exercise of the _patria potestas_
had been slowly changing during the centuries. Seneca relates (_De
Clem._ i. 14) how within his memory the people furiously assaulted in
the Forum a certain knight because he had whipped his son to death.
[574] “The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially
traceable to the influence of the Greek view.”--MOMMSEN, _Roman
Provinces_ (1887), vol. i, p. 296.
[575] “The majority of the free population had probably either
themselves been slaves, or were descended from slaves.”--LECKY,
_History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 237.
[576] Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_ (1904), p. 3.
[577] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 312.
[578] _De Clem._ i. 18.
[579] Tacitus, _Annals_, xiv. 42–45.
[580] Manumissions were frequent even in Seneca’s time. Pliny the
Elder was a kind master, regarded his slaves as “humble friends,” and
manumitted many of them.
[581] The client class of the imperial period was made up almost wholly
of freedmen.
[582] It is surprising that while in the Stoic and other schools there
was, during these centuries, great advance in theoretical ethics in
various domains, in that of war there was no essential modification of
the views and feelings of the teachers and leaders of moral reforms.
In the whole range of Roman literature and philosophy there are to be
found scarcely any expressions of disapproval of war. The attitude of
the Roman moralists in this matter appears to have been altogether
like that of the Greek philosophers. The right to wage war for empire
and for glory was taught even by Cicero, only such wars, he insisted,
should be waged more gently than wars to recover property, to punish
insult, or to avenge a wrong (_De Off._ i. 12).
[583] For the ethics of Christian persecution, see below, p. 324.
[584] See on this subject Fiske, _Excursions of an Evolutionist_
(1883), pp. 238 ff.; Hardy, _Christianity and the Roman Government_
(1894), p. 17; Pollock, _Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics_ (1882), p.
147.
[585] Besides this main motive of the persecutions there were these
minor ones: (1) The teachings and practices of the new sect offended
the prevailing spirit of luxury and sensuality; (2) families were
divided; (3) the business of many, as that of the silversmiths of
Ephesus, was threatened (Acts xix. 24–41); and (4) fear on the part
of the government of the danger from the growth of such a strong
semi-secret organization as the Church was becoming within the Empire
(Hardy, _Christianity and the Roman Government_ (1894), p. 165).
[586] “Upon the approach of Christianity humanity took a consciousness
more alert and sensitive, and during the first three centuries of
our era all the ideas, all the sentiments which constitute morality
developed on parallel lines and with remarkable force in the growing
Church and in expiring paganism.”--DENIS, _Histoire des théories et des
idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879), t. ii, p. 145.
[587] _De Off._ i. 25.
[588] _Meditations_, xi. 18.
[589] _Ibid._ vii. 36.
[590] _Ibid._ ix. 9; cf. vi. 47.
[591] _Ibid._ vi. 6.
[592] _Fragments_, tr. Long, lxviii; cf. lxvii.
[593] _Meditations_, iii. 4.
[594] _De Prov._ i. 1.
[595] _Meditations_, x. 21.
[596] _Ibid._ ii. 11.
[597] _Ibid._ xii. 5.
[598] _Ibid._ ii. 17.
[599] Arrian, _Epict._ ii. 14; quoted by Lecky, _History of European
Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 246.
[600] _Meditations_, vii. 31.
[601] _Ethical Essays_, v, “On those who are punished by the Deity
late.”
[602] _De Off._ ii. 14.
[603] _Ibid._ ii. 5.
[604] _Ibid._ i. 7.
[605] _Ibid._ iii. 6.
[606] _Ibid._ iii. 4. Compare this expression of the ancient Greek and
Roman moral consciousness with that of the modern Japanese (see p. 86).
[607] _Ibid._ ii. 12.
[608] _De Clem._ ii. 6. The trouble with this philosophy, as has been
said, is that if one does not feel pity for the sufferings of others he
will not be likely to help them.
[609] Cicero, however, denied the right of self-destruction, and Vergil
mildly censured the act. See _Æneid_, vi. 434.
[610] _Discourses_, i. 9.
[611] _Meditations_, v. 29.
[612] _Ep._ lxx; quoted by Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed.,
vol. i, p. 218.
[613] _De Prov._ i. 2.
[614] Zeno, the founder of the school, and Cato, its exemplifier in
active life, both committed suicide.
[615] Compare the views on this subject of the ancient classical
peoples with those of the modern Japanese (see p. 85 and p. 86 n. 1.).
[616] Glover, _The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire_, 3d
ed. (1909), p. 67.
[617] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 324.
[618] Paulsen, _A System of Ethics_, tr. Thilly (1906), pp. 111 f.
[619] The cult of Isis when introduced into the Western lands favored
illicit love, but by the second century of our era it had, in its new
environment, become so far transformed as to be a true moral force in
society. “Sacrament and mystery lent their aid to fortify the worshiper
[of Isis] in the face of death, but, to derive their full virtue,
he must exercise himself in temperance, abjure the pleasures of the
senses, and purify himself for the vision of God” (Dill, _Roman Society
from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_ (1904), p. 583).
[620] On this subject see Franz Cumont, _Les Mystères de Mithra_
(1892); English ed., _The Mysteries of Mithra_, tr. McCormack.
[621] “It [Mithraism] is perhaps the highest and most striking example
of the last efforts of paganism to reconcile itself to the great moral
and spiritual movement which was settling steadily, and with growing
momentum, toward purer conceptions of God, of man’s relations to Him,
and of the life to come.”--DILL, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus
Aurelius_, p. 585.
[622] “On peut dire que, si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans
sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été
Mithriaste.”--RENAN, _Marc-Aurèle_, 5^{me} ed., p. 579.
[623] “Isis and Serapis and Mithra were preparing the Western world for
the religion which was to approve the long travail of humanity by a
more perfect vision of the divine.”--DILL, _Roman Society from Nero to
Marcus Aurelius_ (1904), p. 574.
[624] Acts xvii. 29.
[625] New to the multitude. Some of the Stoic philosophers, as we have
seen, held and taught this doctrine.
[626] The Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, and some Oriental cults,
particularly that of Mithra, imported into the Roman Empire, made the
participation in a blessed life beyond the grave dependent upon moral
purity of life on earth and through this doctrine exercised a favorable
influence upon morality (see p. 254).
[627] This thought and conviction of the immortality of the individual
was, it is possible, in part the outcome of the decay of the ancient
city, whose fancied eternity had satisfied for a time the instinct of
immortality. But when some centuries had passed, the “Romans sailed
round the Mediterranean and recognized that the cities of the past were
not eternal, and with the same waft of conviction came a compensating
belief that eternity was the heritage of every son of man. Immortality
arose on the horizon of the man, as its last glow faded from the city”
(Wedgwood, _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 341). It was the same in
Judea; as immortality faded from the political horizon of Israel, it
arose on that of the individual soul.
[628] Though the account of the fall of man forms the prelude of the
Hebrew Scriptures, the conception never influenced to an appreciable
degree pre-Christian ethics.
[629] See Schmidt, _The Prophet of Nazareth_ (1905), p. 322.
[630] “L’humanité cherche l’idéal; mais elle veut que l’idéal soit une
personne; elle n’aime pas une abstraction.”--RENAN, _Marc-Aurèle_,
5^{me} ed., p. 582.
[631] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 8.
[632] On this subject consult Hatch, _The Influence of Greek Ideas
and Usages upon the Christian Church_ (1888), lect. xii, “The
Transformation of the Basis of Christian Union: Doctrine in the Place
of Conduct.”
[633] “After the middle of the third century, ... Christianity may be
just as truly called a Hellenic religion as an Oriental.”--HARNACK,
_The Expansion of Christianity_ (1904), vol. i, pp. 393 f.
[634] The change of emphasis from moral life to correct doctrine took
place during the last half of the second and the first half of the
third century. “Under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the
word faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean
the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions,
propositions in abstract metaphysics” (Hatch, _The Influence of Greek
Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church_ (1888), p. 310).
[635] The Athanasian Creed, which by the end of the ninth century
was in use in the churches of the West as an authoritative symbol
and exposition of the Roman Catholic faith, says, “Whosoever will be
saved, before all things, it is necessary that he hold the Catholic
faith, which faith, except every one who do keep entire and unviolated,
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Philip Schaff,
_Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis_, vol. ii, p. 66).
[636] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 68.
[637] “The virtues of the intellect, freedom and boldness of
thought and the power to doubt, the vital principle of scientific
research, are, in the eyes of primitive Christianity, worthless and
dangerous.”--PAULSEN, _A System of Ethics_, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 68.
[638] Cf. Harnack, _The Expansion of Christianity_ (1904), vol. i,
chap. v, “The Religion of Authority and Reason.”
[639] See Paulsen, _System of Ethics_, tr. Thilly (1906), bk. i, chap.
iii.
[640] The ascetic movement was a reaction not only against the moral
dissoluteness of pagan society, but also against the moral degeneracy
which, before the end of the third century, had set in within the
Christian community itself. The Church had become to a lamentable
degree conformed unto the world, and had lost much of that moral fervor
which characterized it during the first two centuries.
[641] Alban Butler, _The Lives of the Saints_ (the Fathers, Martyrs,
and other Principal Saints, compiled from monuments and other authentic
sources), 12 vols. (1854). Orig. ed. pub. 1754–1760.
[642] “If you do any good beyond what is commanded by God, you will
gain for yourself more abundant glory, and will be more honored by God
than you would otherwise be,” was the teaching of the Church respecting
the meritoriousness of ascetic practices. Cf. Newman Smyth, _Christian
Ethics_ (1892), p. 313.
[643] The “Dialogue” is of course a purely literary creation of some
monk. Oisin was not a contemporary of St. Patrick.
[644] J. H. Simpson, _Poems of Oisin_ (1857), pp. 42 ff. We have
reproduced only a small part of the poem.
[645] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 34.
[646] Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(1908), vol. ii, p. 252.
[647] Cf. Dante, _Inf._ xiii.
[648] See above, pp. 175, 215.
[649] Ireland was foremost in this missionary movement because she was
so given over to the monastic spirit. See Montalembert, _The Monks of
the West_ (1861), vol. ii, p. 397.
[650] According to Westermarck (_The Origin and Development of the
Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 565–569) charity took the place of
sacrifice in the primitive cults, and for this reason became such a
prominent religious duty in all the higher faiths.
[651] Montalembert, _The Monks of the West_ (1861), vol. i, pp. 397 f.
[652] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, pp. 86 ff.
[653] _The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 369.
[654] See above, p. 245.
[655] “The suppression of all religions but one by Theodosius, the
murder of Hypatia by the monks of Cyril, and the closing by Justinian
of the schools of Athens, are the three events which mark the decisive
overthrow of intellectual freedom.”--LECKY, _History of European
Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 428.
[656] See above, p. 6.
[657] _Physics and Politics_ (1873), pp. 70 f.
[658] “One may find ... the chief characteristic of the period of the
migrations in a complete uprooting of public morality, a universal
overturning of inherited conceptions of right and wrong.”--FRANCKE,
_Social Forces in German Literature_, 2d ed., p. 12.
[659] _Parliament of Religions_ (1893), vol. i, pp. 574 f.; consult
also Bryce, _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_ (1901), vol. ii, p.
237.
[660] _Qur’ân_, tr. Palmer (Sacred Books of the East, vols. vi, ix),
suras ii. 184–189, 212–215; iv. 90; viii. 40; ix. 5–14, 29; xlvii. 4,
and many others.
[661] _Ibid._ suras ii. 149; iii. 151; ix. 113.
[662] Sura xxiv. 33. The New Testament nowhere inculcates the
manumission of slaves, but the spirit of its teachings is opposed
to slavery, and the early Fathers of the Church encouraged the
emancipation of slaves.
[663] Sura iv. 3.
[664] Suras vi. 138, 141, 152; xvii. 33.
[665] Suras ii. 216; v. 93.
[666] R. Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_ (1875), p. 204.
[667] Ameer Ali, _The Spirit of Islam_, 2d ed., p. 283.
[668] According to the principles of the Koran, though no Moslem
captive might be reduced to servitude, all non-Moslem prisoners could,
as spoils of war, be enslaved: “We make lawful for ye ... what thy
right hand possesses [slaves] out of the booty God has granted thee”
(sura xxxiii. 49).
[669] “The recognition of the slave traffic by Mohammedanism has been,
and is to this day, a curse to Africa and a source of disturbance to
the world’s politics.”--HOBHOUSE, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i,
p. 307.
[670] In an address. Cf. R. Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and
Mohammedanism_ (1875), pp. 59 ff.
[671] Ameer Ali, _The Spirit of Islam_, 2d ed., p. 328. The author
maintains that Mohammed himself did not intend that his rules should be
binding for all time.
[672] This teaching is one which does not show itself as a generally
recognized principle in the pre-Christian centuries, as does the
principle of love, or self-devotion to the common good, or universal
benevolence. “Christianity at its inception did not take over this
moral principle, ready-made, from any of the older cults or cultures
from which the Christian movement was in a position to draw. It is not
found, at least in appreciable force, in the received Judaism; nor can
it be derived from the classical (Greco-Roman) cultures, which had none
of it” (Thorstein B. Veblen, “Christian Morals and the Competitive
System,” _The International Journal of Ethics_ for January, 1910).
[673] “Christian mores in the Western Empire were formed by syncretism
of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war,
slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together
with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are
inconsistent.”--SUMNER, _Folkways_ (1907), p. 116.
[674] For opinions of early Christian writers and the attitude of the
Church on the soldier’s profession and the rightfulness of war, see
Grotius, _Rights of War and Peace_, tr. Whewell, pp. 49 ff.
[675] Harnack, _The Expansion of Christianity_ (1904), vol. ii, p. 205.
[676] See above, p. 277.
[677] Throughout the medieval ages and down almost to our own day
these Old Testament records, misread, were used to justify many of the
cruelties of war, and other atrocities:
Plunder and pillage were supported by reference to the divinely
approved “spoiling of the Egyptians” by the Israelites. The right
to massacre unresisting enemies was based upon the command of the
Almighty to the Jews in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. The
indiscriminate slaughter of whole populations was justified by a
reference to the divine command to slaughter the nations round
about Israel. Torture and mutilation of enemies was sanctioned
by the conduct of Samuel against Agag, of King David against the
Philistines, of the men of Judah against Adonibezek. Even the
slaughter of babes in arms was supported by a passage from the
Psalms, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
against the stones.” Treachery and assassination were supported
by a reference to the divinely approved Phinehas, Ehud, Judith,
and Jael; and murdering the ministers of unapproved religions, by
Elijah’s slaughter of the priests of Baal.--ANDREW D. WHITE, _Seven
Great Statesmen_ (1910), pp. 85 f.
[678] Lecky believes this to have been the main cause of the
transformation in the Church. “The transition,” he says, “from the
almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially
military Christianity of the Crusades was due chiefly ... to the terror
and the example of Mohammedanism” (_History of European Morals_, 3d
ed., vol. ii, p. 252). But, as we have seen, the transition was already
nearly complete before the rise of Islam.
[679] In a portrayal of the character of the Scandinavians, the Church
historian Schaff observes: “Their only enthusiasm was the feeling of
duty; but the direction which had been given to this feeling was so
absolutely opposed to that pointed out by the Christian morality, that
no reconciliation was possible” (_History of the Christian Church_,
vol. iv, p. 110). Yet in the important domain of ethics which we are
here examining this is exactly what did happen.
[680] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 253.
[681] Josiah Royce, _The Philosophy of Loyalty_ (1908).
[682] “So great, it is said, was the knights’ respect for an oath, a
promise, or a vow, that when they lay under any of these restrictions,
they appeared everywhere with little chains attached to their arms
or habits to show all the world they were slaves to their word; nor
were these chains taken off till their promise had been performed,
which sometimes extended to a term of four or five years. It cannot
be expected, of course, that reality should have always come up to
the ideal.”--WESTERMARCK, _The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_
(1908), vol. ii, p. 102.
[683] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 272.
[684] First printed in 1873, from MSS. compiled probably as early as
the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is an English translation by
Charles Swan (1877).
[685] “There can be little doubt,” says Lecky, “that the Catholic
reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal
of woman and soften the manners of men” (_History of European Morals_,
3d ed., vol. ii, p. 367). And so Professor Nathaniel Schmidt: “The
chivalry of the medieval knight from which our modern treatment of
woman so largely is derived cannot be regarded as solely a product of
Christianity, for it has a deep root in the dreamy reverence for woman
characteristic of our pagan ancestors. Yet it would not have become
what it was but for the veneration accorded to the Virgin Mary” (_The
Prophet of Nazareth_ (1905), p. 324).
[686] See Curtis M. Geer, _The Beginning of the Peace Movement_ (1912).
[687] Kluckhohn, _Geschichte des Gottesfriedens_ (1857), p. 38.
[688] This part of the week was chosen because these days had been
consecrated by Christ’s passion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.
[689] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 314.
[690] The last instance of an arrangement for ransom of prisoners
was an agreement between England and France in 1780. See Hall,
_International Law_, 5th ed., p. 414, n. 1.
[691] One center of these reform movements was the celebrated French
monastery of Cluny. The influences which radiated from the cloisters of
this convent had a profound effect for centuries upon the moral life of
Christendom.
[692] See Sabatier, _Life of St. Francis of Assisi_.
[693] _History of the Inquisition_ (1887), vol. i, p. 266.
[694] “There was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by
Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations.... The value
of such an ideal on an age hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated”
(Lea, _History of the Inquisition_ (1887), vol. i, pp. 260 f.). See
also Nathaniel Schmidt, _The Prophet of Nazareth_ (1905), p. 325.
[695] See above, p. 262.
[696] “Ethics on the basis of authority becomes a mere legal
casuistry.”--HALL, _The History of Ethics within Organized
Christianity_ (1910), pp. 296, 326.
[697] “But meanwhile by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a
man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as
they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the
human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed
hours of culmination and seasons of rule.”--MATTHEW ARNOLD, _Culture
and Anarchy_ (1875), p. 143.
[698] It must be borne in mind that the spirit of the Renaissance was
at work long before the Renaissance.
[699] In this there is substantial agreement among historians of the
Inquisition: consult Lea, _The Inquisition of the Middle Ages_ (1887),
vol. i, pp. 236 ff.; Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed.,
vol. i, pp. 98, 395 f.; Pollock, _Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics_
(1882), essay vi, “The Theory of Persecution”; _Catholic Encyclopedia_,
vol. viii, article on “Inquisition.”
[700] “The case for theological persecution is unanswerable if we
admit the fundamental supposition that one faith is known to be true
and necessary for salvation.”--POLLOCK, _Essays in Jurisprudence and
Ethics_ (1882), p. 155.
[701] _Catholic Encyclopedia_, vol. viii, under “Inquisition.”
[702] Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds
a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching
respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared
for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and
predisposed men to inflict suffering” (_Rationalism in Europe_, new ed.
(1890), vol. i, p. 347).
[703] Lea, _History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages_ (1887), vol.
i, p. 234. “The representatives of the Church were children of their
own age.... Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest,
stood by the code of their day and sought to explain and justify it”
(_Catholic Encyclopedia_, vol. viii, under “Inquisition”).
[704] “It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have
said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has
ever been said since the world began.”--GERALD STANLEY LEE, “Business,
Goodness, and Imagination,” _Hibbert Journal_ for April, 1912, p. 651.
[705] On Machiavellism see _The Prince_, and introductions to different
editions by Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Henry Morley; Figgis, _Studies
of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius_ (1907), pp. 81–107; John
Morley, _Machiavelli_ (Romanes Lecture for 1897).
[706] It should be borne in mind that in Machiavelli’s age politics had
been secularized, that is, divorced from theology, and this with the
approval of most men. Machiavelli would now go farther and separate
politics and morality. This is Lord Morley’s interpretation of _The
Prince_. He thinks we shall best understand Machiavelli, yet without
for a moment approving his teaching, “if we take him as following up
the divorce of politics from theology, by a divorce from ethics also.
He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art; the end of
that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the
fundamental principle from which he silently started, without shadow
of doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application
of moral standards to this business is as little to the point as it
would be in the navigation of a ship. The effect was fatal even for his
own purpose, for what he put aside, whether for the sake of argument
or because he thought them in substance irrelevant, were nothing less
than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are
strong” (_Machiavelli_, Romanes Lecture for 1897).
[707] “Catherine de Medici, Philip II, Alva, Des Adrets, Tilly,
Wallenstein were simply incarnations of the Machiavellian theories
which ruled this period.”--ANDREW D. WHITE, _Seven Great Statesmen_
(1910), pp. 86 f.
[708] Castiglione, _The Book of the Courtier_ (1903), p. 22.
[709] _Ibid._ p. 25.
[710] Special emphasis was laid upon this virtue of courtesy in the
ideal of courtliness. And rightly so, for, as has been well said, “To
be courteous is just as much a duty as to be honest, for rudeness
rouses more hatred and bitterness than good honest cheating.”
[711] In many lives of this period there was a combination of the ideal
of the courtier and that of the monk. There is a fine portrayal of such
a character in Shorthouse’s _John Inglesant_.
[712] See above, p. 276.
[713] The best authority on this subject is Lea, _Superstition and
Force_, 4th ed., pp. 101–247.
[714] See above, p. 304.
[715] The last judicial duel in England was fought in 1492, but the
practice was not abrogated in Russia till 1649.
[716] Ralph Barton Perry, _The Moral Economy_ (1909), p. 34. And so
Thomas Cuming Hall: “The glory of Protestant ethics as founded by
Luther and developed by Kant is the autonomous, democratic, unpriestly
character stamped upon it” (_History of Ethics within Organized
Christianity_ (1910), p. 527).
[717] _Culture and Anarchy_ (1875), p. 145.
[718] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 370.
[719] See below, p. 362.
[720] On this subject see Andrew D. White, _Seven Great Statesmen_
(1910), chapter on Thomasius.
[721] S. Alexander, _Moral Order and Progress_ (1889), p. 391.
[722] _History of Rationalism in Europe_ (1890), vol. ii, p. 220.
[723] _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 126.
[724] _The Approach to the Social Question_ (1909), p. 84.
[725] Muirhead, _The Elements of Ethics_ (1909), p. 232.
[726] _An Essay on Crimes and Punishments_, tr. Voltaire (1793), p. 157.
[727] See Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,”
_International Journal of Ethics_ for April, 1907, p. 341.
[728] “It won’t do any longer to lay the blame for poverty wholly upon
its victims. These cruel theories cannot face a growing suspicion that
poverty is somehow involved in the ethics of distribution.”--LOUIS F.
POST, in address; see _The Public_ for June 21, 1912, p. 593.
[729] Lloyd, _Man the Social Creator_ (1906), p. 135.
[730] The most practicable proposal for the undoing of this ancient and
ever-augmenting wrong of private monopoly in land is that presented
with singular force and clarity by Henry George in his epochal work,
_Progress and Poverty_. His proposal is to exempt from taxation
industry and all forms of property save land, and to lay upon land
values, or, in other words, upon actual or potential ground rents, a
tax that would reclaim practically the whole of these for society, and
secure to the public all future increments in land values created by
communal growth and enterprise. Since this tax is to take the place of
all other forms of taxation it has become known as “the single tax.”
Such a change in the tax system would inevitably create a hardship
in a few cases, but a hardship almost infinitesimal as compared with
that now inflicted upon the many by the preëmption of the earth by
a class. The reform would undoubtedly, as claimed by its advocates,
destroy private monopoly in land, the root which nourishes most other
monopolies, and secure to all equal right of access to the earth and
its resources.
[731] Dewey and Tufts, _Ethics_ (1908), p. 162.
[732] See Ira Woods Howerth, “Competition, Natural and Industrial,”
_The International Journal of Ethics_ for July, 1912.
[733] “We may fairly ask whether there is a single moral question of
any magnitude which intelligent and educated men would answer to-day
in precisely the same fashion as they would have done before the
publication of Darwin’s _Origin of Species_” (Taylor, _The Problem of
Conduct_ (1901), pp. 57 f.). See also Huxley, _Evolution and Ethics_
(1899). Huxley maintains that the “cosmic process” is nonethical and in
direct opposition to the ethical evolution going on in human society.
[734] “The best is wanting when selfishness begins to be deficient”
(“The Twilight of the Gods,” _The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche_, ed.
Alexander Tille, vol. xi, p. 191). “The weak and ill-constituted shall
perish.... What is more injurious than any crime? Practical sympathy
for all the ill-constituted and weak--Christianity” (“The Antichrist,”
_ibid._ vol. xi, p. 238). This way of thinking and talking is by no
means exclusively modern. Callicles, in Plato’s _Gorgias_, says to
Socrates: “And therefore this seeking to have more than the many is
conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice,
whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have
more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many
ways, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities
and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having
more than the inferior” (Jowett’s _Dialogues of Plato_, vol. iii, p.
72).
[735] See Kropotkin, _Mutual Aid_.
[736] “The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced
to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained
the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most
prosperous, and the most open to further progress” (Kropotkin, _Mutual
Aid_ (1909), p. 293). See also Bixby, _The Crisis in Morals_ (1891), p.
235.
[737] See Dewey, “Is Nature Good,” _Hibbert Journal_ for July, 1909.
[738] “‘Ye have compassion on one another’: this struck me much: Allah
might have made you having no compassion on one another,--how had it
been then? This is a great direct thought, a glance at first hand into
the very fact of things” (Carlyle, _Heroes and Hero Worship_, “The
Hero as Prophet”). The _Gâthas_ have the same thought: “Who, O Great
Creator! is the inspirer of the good thoughts (within our souls)? Who
... hath made the son revering the father?” (Yasna xliv. 4, 7, Sacred
Books of the East, vol. xxxi).
[739] “In the new way of looking at things, which came to the world
from Darwin, there is hope and cheer, if we but take the matter aright.
Only consider what his doctrine of the shaping power of environment
is leading us to do in bettering the conditions of the poor, the
defective, the prone to crime. His demonstration that circumstances may
make or break a man, is a clarion call to humanitarian zeal. And his
teaching of the infinite variability of species, and of the indefinite
progress which man may make in the cultivation of humane and moral
qualities, is one that looks distinctly to the perfectibility of the
race.”--The New York _Nation_ for January 7, 1909, p. 7.
[740] On this subject see Evans, _Evolutional Ethics and Animal
Psychology_ (1898).
[741] When in 1654 matches for cockfighting were forbidden in England
the reason for the prohibition was not that it was cruel to the birds,
but for the reason that the matches were “commonly accompanied with
gaming, drinking, swearing, quarreling, and other dissolute practices”
(Pike, _A History of Crime in England_ (1873), vol. ii, p. 186).
Consult further, Lecky, _Rationalism in Europe_ (1890), vol. i, pp. 307
f.
[742] _Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology_ (1898), p. 18.
Darwinism has without doubt also aided the vegetarians in their crusade
against the use of animal flesh for food, and in conjunction with the
influence of Eastern ideas and convictions may cause ultimately a
great change in the ethical feelings of the Western peoples respecting
this practice. They may come to regard it with the same deep moral
reprobation as is now felt by Eastern moralists. “For my part,” says
the Japanese writer Nitobé, “the surprising thing is that European
ethics can be so atavistic as to stoop to a sort of cannibalism”
(_Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii, p. 462).
[743] See Frederic W. H. Myers, _Human Personality_ (1903), 2 vols.;
Sir Oliver Lodge, _The Survival of Man_ (1909); James H. Hyslop,
_Enigmas of Psychical Research_ (1906); W. F. Barrett, _Psychical
Research_ (1912).
[744] _The Survival of Man_ (1909), p. 341.
[745] George William Knox, “Religion and Ethics,” _International
Journal of Ethics_ for April, 1902.
[746] George Harris, _Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 392.
[747] _Christian Ethics_ (1892), p. 11. Lecky makes a similar
observation: “Generation after generation the power of the moral
faculty becomes more absolute, the doctrines that oppose it wane and
vanish, and the various elements of theology are absorbed and recast by
its influence” (_History of Rationalism in Europe_ (1890), vol. i, pp.
351 f.).
[748] “It is because the ethical ideals of Christendom have become so
wonderfully enlarged and perfected within the last half century that
the character of God has taken on such new and glorious forms. The
God whom Christian people generally believe in and worship is a very
different being from the one they were thinking about and praying to
when I began my ministry.”--WASHINGTON GLADDEN (in report of address).
[749] See above, pp. 35, 164 and 187.
[750] Cf. Borden Parker Bowne, _The Essence of Religion_ (1910), chap.
iv, “Righteousness the Essence of Religion.”
[751] Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(1908), vol. i, p. 72.
[752] See above, p. 18.
[753] “Along with the gloomy record of the two hundred fifty years
of negro slavery we find the history of its abolition; perhaps the
most impressive history on record of the origin and completion of
a purification of the moral consciousness of peoples.”--CALDECOTT,
_English Colonization and Empire_ (1891), p. 196.
[754] “In Elizabeth’s time Sir John Hawkins initiated the slave trade,
and in commemoration of the achievement was allowed to put in his coat
of arms ‘a demi-moor, proper bound with a cord’; the honorableness of
his action being thus assumed by himself and recognized by Queen and
public.”--SPENCER, _Principles of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, p. 468.
[755] By a provision of the Peace of Utrecht (1714) England secured the
contract known as the Assiento, which gave English subjects the sole
right for thirty years of shipping annually 4800 African slaves to the
Spanish colonies in America.
[756] In the Southern colonies the opposition to the further
importation of negroes sprang in general from the fear of the
insurrection of the slaves, should they become too numerous. The little
opposition that existed in some of the Middle States was based almost
wholly on economic grounds.
[757] The first abolition paper was established in 1821, but the
movement it represented soon died out. The movement started anew with
the appearance of _The Liberator_ in 1831. See Albert Bushnell Hart,
_Slavery and Abolition_ (1906), pp. 173 ff.
[758] “When Garrison began his work, he thought nothing was more like
the spirit of Christ ... than to bring a whole race of people out
of sin and debasement, ... but he soon found that neither minister
nor church anywhere in the lower South continued to protest against
slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him, and that
many northern divines entered the lists against abolition, especially
Moses Stuart, Professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary, who
justified slavery from the New Testament; President Lord of Dartmouth
College, who held that slavery was an institution of God, according to
natural law; and Hopkins, Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who came forward
as a thick and thin defender of slavery. The positive opposition of
churches soon followed” (Albert Bushnell Hart, _Slavery and Abolition_
(1906), p. 211). In 1832 took place the secession of students from
Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, because the trustees and Dr. Lyman Beecher
had forbidden them to discuss the slavery question. Four fifths of the
student body withdrew.
[759] Cf. Henderson, _Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents_ (1893);
Zebulon R. Brockway, _Fifty Years of Prison Service_ (1912).
[760] The New York _Nation_ of March 19, 1908, p. 254.
[761] _The Century Magazine_ for September, 1912, p. 886.
[762] Pike, _A History of Crime in England_ (1876), vol. i, p. 50.
[763] Wines, _Punishment and Reformation_, 6th ed., p. 103.
[764] Pike, _A History of Crime in England_ (1876), vol. ii, p. 287.
[765] His _Essay on Crimes and Punishments_ appeared in 1764 and
produced a profound impression. It did much to abolish torture in
judicial proceedings.
[766] “In proportion as punishments become more cruel, the minds of
men, as a fluid rises to the same height with that which surrounds
it, grow hardened and insensible.”--BECCARIA, _An Essay on Crimes and
Punishments_ (1793), p. 95.
[767] Wines, _Punishment and Reformation_, 6th ed., pp. 122 ff.
[768] The penitentiary system was inaugurated in 1704 by Pope Clement
XI, who in that year established the Hospital of St. Michael at Rome.
For the history of the penitentiary movement see Wines, _Punishment and
Reformation_.
[769] “The whole conception and method of these courts suggests the
religious spirit and almost startles us with its indication of the
spiritualizing of the civil power.”--EDWARD O. SISSON, “The State
absorbing the Functions of the Church,” _International Journal of
Ethics_ for April, 1907, p. 344.
[770] The progressive purification of the social conscience may be
traced further in the changed feeling in regard to dueling, lotteries,
gambling, and the use of intoxicating liquors. Less than a century
ago dueling was common among all the European peoples. To-day in all
Anglo-Saxon lands the duel is condemned by the common conscience and
prohibited by law. During the last few decades in the United States
lotteries have been transferred “from the class of respectable to
a class of criminal enterprises.” So too is it the growing moral
disapproval of the use of alcoholic drinks that has caused drunkenness
both in England and in our country to become much less common among the
reputable members of society than it was only two or three generations
ago.
[771] Thus formulated by the distinguished jurist James Brown Scott.
Cf. _Report of the Seventeenth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference_ (1911),
pp. 35 ff. Professor Scott here shows how the growth of juridical
institutions between nations is similar to that within nations,
only later and slower. The stages of this growth are self-redress,
arbitration, courts of justice.
[772] See Sir Charles Bruce, “The Modern Conscience in Relation to
the Treatment of Dependent Peoples and Communities,” _Papers on
Inter-Racial Problems_ (1911), pp. 279 ff.
[773] _Papers on Inter-Racial Problems_ (1911), ed. G. Spiller, p. 286.
[774] For this subject viewed from a Chinese standpoint, see Edward
Alsworth Ross, _The Changing Chinese_ (1911), p. 170.
[775] Grotius (Hugo de Groot), _The Rights of War and Peace_, tr.
Campbell (1901–1903). On Grotius see Hill, _History of Diplomacy_
(1905–1906), vol. ii, pp. 569 ff.; Andrew D. White, _Seven Great
Statesmen_ (1910), pp. 55 ff.; Dunning, _A History of Political
Theories_ (1905), vol. ii, chap. v.
[776] Andrew D. White, _Seven Great Statesmen_ (1910), p. 79.
[777] See above, p. 240.
[778] James Bryce, _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_ (1901), vol.
ii, p. 167.
[779] Hill, _History of Diplomacy_ (1905–1906), vol. ii, p. 573.
[780] _Seven Great Statesmen_ (1910), p. 73.
[781] We cannot concur with the author, Norman Angell, of _The Great
Illusion_ in his contention that there will be no change in the
practice of nations regarding war and preparations for war till there
is a change in ideas respecting the economic advantage to be derived
from successful war. Moral idealism, finding expression in revolutions
and reforms, is constantly giving denial to the validity of the
economic or materialistic interpretation of history when the economic
motive is thus made the dominant motive in human action. War will
become a thing of the past only when men can no longer fight with a
good conscience.
[782] _Machiavelli_ (The Romanes Lecture for 1897).
[783] This archaic nature of the code is shown especially in its
retention as a survival of the principle of collective responsibility,
which, long outgrown by ordinary morality, still forms the very basis
of the war system. Again, the true nature of the war code as a heritage
from the low level of savagery is shown in its retention of the
primitive rule that the one suffering an injury shall be the judge of
his own cause and the avenger of his wrong, a principle of self-redress
long since discarded by the private law of all civilized peoples.
[784] _Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius_ (1907), p.
94.
[785] Pike, _A History of Crime in England_ (1873), vol. i, p. 211;
vol. ii, p. 414.
[786] _Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius_ (1907), p.
96.
[787] Telemachus was an Asiatic monk who journeyed to Rome for the
purpose of making a protest against the bloody spectacles. “The Romans
were provoked by the interruption of their pleasures; and the rash
monk, who had descended into the arena to separate the gladiators,
was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. But the madness of the
people soon subsided; they respected the memory of Telemachus, who had
deserved the honors of martyrdom; and they submitted without a murmur
to the laws of Honorius, which abolished forever the human sacrifices
of the amphitheatre” (Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_,
chap. xxx).
INDEX
Ægospotami, slaughter of Athenian prisoners at, 194
Æschylus, 191
Ahriman, 124
Ahura Mazda, 124
Almsgiving, 281, 368
Altruism, Greek and Roman, 175, 215;
Christian, 279
Amélineau, 44
Amos, 145
Amphictyonic League, 194
Amusements, humanizing of, 369
Ancestor worship, as a moral force, 13;
in China, 54;
in Japan, 78
Angell, Norman, 376 n. 5
Animal ethics, Brahmanic, 103;
Buddhist, 119;
Zoroastrian, 129;
Mohammedan, 292;
Christian, 357;
influence of evolutionary science upon, 358
Aphrodite, 171
Aquinas, Thomas, 318, 325
Arbitration among the Greeks, 195
Arhat, the, 113
Aristotle, views of, on war against non-Greeks, 180;
ethical system of, 202–204;
views of, on slavery, 203
Asceticism, general fostering causes of, 267;
Christian fostering causes of, 268
Assur-natsir-pal, 51
Athleticism, Greek moral elements in, 177
Aurelius, Marcus, _Meditations_ of, 239, 247
Autolycus, 185
Bagehot, 287
Beccaria, 345, 370
Benevolence, Roman, 236
Blood feud, 20
Brahma, the impersonal, 96;
the personal, 96
Brahmans, the, 97, 101, 102
Breasted, Professor, 31, 39 n. 3
Buckle, Henry T., 1, 2
Buddha, 111;
ethical content of his message, 116
Buddhism, in Japan, 79;
the four truths of, 106;
the eightfold path of, 110;
influence of, on the military spirit, 120
Bury, J. B., 174
Bushido, ideal of, 79, 80–82;
influence of, 87;
in action, 88, 89
Cannibalism, 26;
celestial, 26 n. 3
Castes, Hindu, 97
Charity, Christian, 279–282;
Moslem, 296
Chinese cashiers in Japan, 90 n. 2
Christianity, doctrinal, ethical ideal of, 261;
limitations of the ideal of, 264
Chrysostom, Dion, 243
Cicero, 215;
contempt of, for manual labor and merchandizing, 224
City state, as the mold of Greek morality, 169;
Roman, 213;
effect of decay of, on Greek and Roman morals, 204, 221
Class morality, 344
Clemency, Roman virtue, 249
Clovis, Frankish chieftain, 303
Cluny, 313
Collective responsibility, 18–20;
doctrine of, repudiated by Hebrew prophets, 159;
principle of, as embodied in Church code rejected by the modern
conscience, 364;
a survival of, in modern war code, 378 n. 1
Competition, in primitive society, 14
Confucianism, 53
Confucius, 60
Conscience, new social, nurtured in the medieval towns, 330, 331;
purification in modern times, 364–371;
new international, 371–382
Constantine the Great, 302
Continuance theory, 35–37;
in the Greek moral evolution, 187
Corn, moral effects of free distribution of, at Rome, 224
Cosmopolitanism, growth of, in Hellenistic Age, 209;
in the Roman Empire, 236–240
Courage, altruistic element in, 22, 175
Courtier, ideal of the, 328–330
Criticism, higher, 335
Crusades, as ideal of knighthood in action, 309
Cuba, our dealings with, 373
Customary morality, 18
Cynics, 210
Darius I, inscriptions of, 134
Davids, Rhys, 109, 114, 120
Delphi, relation of, to Greek morality, 172
Democracy, effect of its incoming upon moral evolution, 340;
ethics of, 344–347
Demonax, 208
Demonism, Babylonian, 46;
Chinese, 55
_De Officiis_ of Cicero, 238
Deuteronomy, dual morality of, 151
Dionysus, 171
Double standard in morality, 22–24
Dualism, religious, Egyptian, 32;
Persian, 123
Duel, international, 332;
judicial, see _Wager of battle_
Education, in Japan, 91–93;
its relation to morality, 345;
transferred from Church to State, 346
Election, race, 174
Elijah, 143
Elis, consecrated to peace, 197
Elisha, 143
Elysian Fields, 187, 188
Envy of the gods, doctrine of, 189
Epictetus, 247, 248, 250
Epicureanism, 207
Evolution, disturbing effects of doctrine upon morals, 341;
egoistic tendencies of the doctrine, 354;
altruistic factor in, 350
Fabiola, 281
Fall of man, dogma of, 259
Family ethics, Greek, 181;
Roman, 212, 214;
Mohammedan, 291
Festivals, Hebrew, moralization of, 149
Figgis, J. Neville, 378, 380
Filial piety, Chinese virtue, 61
Filipinos, American treatment of, 373–375
Gambling, prohibited by the Koran, 291
Geneva Convention of 1864, 376
George, Henry, 350 n. 1
_Gesta Romanorum_, 310
Gladiatorial combats, demoralizing effects of, 225;
suppression of, 277;
the last in Colosseum, 381
Gladstone, William E., 360
Golden Rule, as stated by Confucius, 67
Green, T. H., 11
Gresham’s Law in morals, 378
Grotius, Hugo, 375
Group, kinship, 12
Guatama, see _Buddha_
Hades, gradual moralizing of, 187–189
Hammurabi, code of, 49
Hearn, Lafcadio, 84
Heresy, viewed as a contagion, 325
Higher criticism, 335
Hillel, 168
Holy Grail, 311
Holy Virgin, moral influence of veneration of, 311
Homeric Age, morals of, 185
Hopkins, Edward W., 114
Hosea, 146
Hospital, first Christian, 281
Hospitalers, the, 308
Hospitality, 24
Howard, John, 370
Howe, Julia Ward, 324
Humanitarianism, growth of, in Hellenistic Age, 208;
in pre-Christian, of Roman Empire, 234–236;
advance of, in modern times, 369–371
Ideal, moral, defined, 5;
causes which determine, 7–10
Ilus, prince of Ephyra, 172
Immortality, emergence of doctrine of, in Israel, 164–166;
its ethical value, 257
India, Government of India Act, 373
Industrial virtues, Persian, 128;
disesteemed by the Greeks and Romans, 182, 223;
cradled in the medieval towns, 330;
effects upon, of the dissolution of the monasteries, 337
Industrialism, modern, relation to morals, 341;
ethics of, 347–353;
modern, alliance of industry and science, 347;
divorce of industry and ethics, 348
Infanticide, in China, 73;
condemned by Christian teaching, 278;
in Greece, 181
Inheritance, limitation of, 351
Inquisition, 324–326
Insanity, regarded as demon possession, 282
Intellectual progress, relation of, to moral progress, 342
International law, relation of, to municipal law, 372
Intertribal morality, beginnings of, 22–29
Intolerance, Jewish, 163;
Christian, 265, 324;
Mohammedan, 294
Intoxicating liquors, use of, prohibited by Koran, 292, 296
Inventions, relation of, to moral progress, 341
Iona, 280
Iron virgin of Nuremberg, 381
Isaiah, 147;
the Second, 157, 161
Isis, worship of, in Roman Empire, 252
Ixion, 187
Jeremiah, 151
Jesus of Nazareth, relation of, to moral history of West, 260
Judgment of Dead, Egyptian, 36;
Persian, 130
Justice, Greek virtue of, 176
Juvenal, 235
_Karma_, 108
Ka-statues, 34
Kidd, Benjamin, 2
Knighthood, ideal of, 306–309;
contribution of, to moral heritage of Christendom, 311
Koran, ethics of, 289–292
Labarum, 302
Land values, property in, 349
Legge, James, 68, 69
Leonidas, 176
_Lex talionis_, 21
Lindisfarne, 280
Machiavelli, 326–328
Machiavellism in politics, 326–328;
in economics, 348
Malta, Knights of, 310
Mandarin morality, 69
Melians, 192
Mencius, 60
Mendicant Orders, 316–318
Micah, 148
Milvian Bridge, battle of, 302
Mithra, 125
Mithraism, propaganda of, in Roman Empire, 253
Mohammed, 288, 290
Mohammedanism, moral code of, 289–292
Monasteries, cradle of modern social conscience, 276;
dissolution of, 336
Monastic ideal, 270;
discredited by Protestant Reformation, 336
Monasticism, Buddhist, 118;
Christian, 267–287
Monopoly in land, 350
Monotheism, ethical, emergence of, in Israel, 158, 159
Morley, Lord, 377
Nature, Law of, 240
Negative Confession, 37
Nemesis, doctrine of, 190–192
Nietzsche, 355, 356
Nirvana, 109
Nonresistance, Christian teaching of, 301, 302
Occupation, influence of, on morals, 9
Oisin, 272 n.
Opium trade with China, 373
Ordeals, 304
Orphic doctrines, 174
Orthodoxy, regarded as saving virtue, 261
Osiris, myth of, 32
Pachomius, 44
_Patria potestas_, 212
Paulsen, Friedrich, 5 n. 1
Peace of God, 312
Peace, universal, an ideal of Hebrew prophets, 146, 147
Peloponnesian War, effects of, on Greek morality, 194, 195 n. 1
Penitential psalms, Babylonian, 47
Penitentiary system, 371
Persecution of Christians by pagan Roman emperors, 245
Pessimism, in Brahmanic system, 99;
in Buddhist, 107
Petrie, Flinders, 39
Philipson, David, 168 n. 1
Philo, 168
Pindar, 179, 186, 188
Plato, 200–202
Plutarch, 210, 249
Poisoned arrows, disuse of, 27, 172
Polygamy, accepted as ethical by Mohammed, 291
Private war, restrictions on, 312–314
Prophetism, Hebrew, different elements of, 142
Psychical research, import of, for morals, 359
Ptah-hotep, 40
Purgatory, effect of abolition of, upon morals, 337, 362
Pythagoras, 186
Pythagoreanism, 115
Ra, son-god, 31
Ransom of war captives, 315
Red Cross Society, 376
Reformation, Protestant, 333–339
Refuge, cities of, 154
Religion, relation of, to morals, 9, 14
Renaissance, influence of, on the moral evolution, 320, 322–324
Retribution theory, 35–37;
in Greek moral evolution, 188
Revenge, duty of, 20;
a Greek virtue, 183;
how regarded by Roman moralists, 249
Right belief regarded as a virtue, 334
Ritual morality, in India, 106;
in Israel, 151–154, 162
Ruth, the Moabitess, 156
Sabbath, 150, 260
Sacrifice, in Brahmanic system, 100;
in Israel, 138
St. Ambrose, 303
St. Augustine, 284, 303
St. Boniface, 280
St. Columba, 280
St. Dominic, 316, 317
St. Francis, 316, 317
St. Gall, 280
St. Patrick, 272
St. Wilfred, 280
_Saints, Lives of the_, 309
Samurai, 80, 82, 87–91
Sappho, 178
Schmidt, Nathaniel, 154 n. 2, 260 n. 1
Scholasticism, ethics of, 318
Science, ethics of, 353–360
Scott, James Brown, 372 n. 1
Self-redress, a survival of, in international law, 378 n. 1
Seneca, 239, 243, 247, 249, 250
Set, Egyptian god, 32
Shammai, 168
Sheol, 139
Shinto cult, 78
Single tax, 350 n. 1
Slave trade, suppression of, 364–366
Slavery, in ancient Egypt, 41;
among the Hebrews, 156;
in Greece, 180, 203;
Roman, 223;
ameliorations of, under pagan Roman emperors, 243;
influence of Christianity upon, 282;
under Islam, 290, 295;
prisoners of war sold as slaves, 314;
origin of word “slave,” 315;
abolition of African, 366
Smith, W. Robertson, 12
Social ethics, 364–371
Socialism, 352
Socrates, 197–200
Stoicism, 206, 209;
influence of, upon Roman government and law, 241–243;
as a moral force, 241;
teachings of, Christian in tone, 246–248;
insufficiency of, as guide to the masses, 251;
contrasted with Machiavellism, 328
Stoics, views of, on slavery, 203
Suicide, among the Japanese, 85;
among the Romans, 250;
condemned by Christianity, 279
Synagogue, 163, 164
Tantalus, 187
Taoism, 56
Telemachus, Christian monk, 381 n. 1
Temperance, Greek virtue of, 176
Templars, the, 308
Terence, 238
Theology, moralization of, 360, 361
Thirty Years’ War, 375
Thucydides, 192
Toleration, under Buddhism, 112, 120;
influence of doctrinal Christianity upon virtue of, 285;
how affected by the Protestant Reformation, 338
Towns, medieval, as molders of morals, 321, 330
Transmigration, 98
Truce of God, 312–314
Truthfulness, virtue of, Japanese lack of reverence for, 85;
highly esteemed by the Persians, 128, 132–134;
low estimation of, among Greeks, 184
Tyrannicide, among Japanese, 86;
views of Roman moralist on, 249
Ulfilas, bishop, 304
Unearned increment, 349
Universalism, ethical, pre-Christian, 236
Urban II, Pope, 305
Usury, 155
Veracity, fostered by science, 353
Vergil, 235
Vicarious suffering, doctrine of, 160
Wager of battle, 304;
disuse of, 331, 332
War, abolition of, a moral issue, 376;
abrogation of the ordinary moral code by, 377;
obsolescence of, as school of morals, 380
War ethics, as group morality, 20;
as survival from barbarism, 20;
beginning of rules of, 25–29;
Egyptian, 42;
Assyrian, 51;
Chinese, 65;
Brahmanic, 104;
Greek, 193–195;
Roman, 245 n. 1;
Mohammedan, 290, 294;
syncretism of pagan war ethics and Christian peace ethics, 300–306;
influence of martial ethics of Islam upon Christian ethics, 305;
progress in, in Middle Ages, 314–316;
progress in, in modern times, 375, 376;
atavistic character of war code, 378;
unfavorable reaction of, upon peace code, 378–380
Wealth, moral effects of unequal distribution of, 228
Wedgwood, Julia, 9
Wellhausen, 3
Wisdom, Greek virtue of, 176
World state, ethical basis of, 220
Wundt, Wilhelm, 5
Zarathustra, 126
Zeno, 206
Zoroaster, see _Zarathustra_
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
have been collected, sequentially renumbered, and placed at the end of
the main text, just before the Index.
The Index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
Page 159: “the good Osiris” was printed that way, but may be a misprint
for “the god Osiris”.
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