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

HISTORY AS PAST ETHICS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

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

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 unmoral.[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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]

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]

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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

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.

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]

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]

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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]

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.

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]

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]

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

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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]

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

(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

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.

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.

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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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]

(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.

(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.

(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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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

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

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.

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.

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.