One of the great riches of Christian civilization has always been, as we have seen in previous chapters, its incorporation and transformation of valuable elements from pagan Greek and Roman cultures, for Christianity has never been a cultural monoglot. Ideas of law, corporate living, public theatre (or liturgy), science, and even dress were among the many things taken from the pagan world. Yet one thing was stunningly unique to the Judean, and especially the Christian, tradition: its morality. Of course, many great Greek and Latin philosophers wrote about ethics, justice, virtue, and self-control, such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Seneca, but their works present us with a rather different set of guiding principles from those found in the New Testament. For one thing, all the great classical philosophers were men of secure status, and their ideas on ethics, friendship, the treatment of slaves, and good behaviour reflect their gentlemanly assumptions of superiority. A true gentleman lives a balanced life, avoids excesses, controls himself, enjoys genuine friendships only with his equals, and displays humane condescension to his inferiors – including women. And among his virtues, in the view of Seneca and the Stoics, is a resignation to blind fate.
By AD 60, however, there was something radically different beginning to circulate: the idea that all people, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, even men and women, were equal – at least in the love of God; that charity, mercy, grace, and forgiveness must be shown to everyone. And perhaps most mind-boggling of all, we were being required to love one another, and (from the ancient Jewish Law) love our neighbours as ourselves, and even our bitterest enemies. For everybody was our neighbour.
These teachings, from Jesus Christ, first written down by St Paul in his letters between c. AD 47 and AD 60, and soon afterwards put into context in the four Gospels, were destined to have a profound role in shaping the morality of Western Europe, which would from thence be disseminated to all those parts of the world which did not explicitly reject Christianity. And even some anti-Christian religions cherry-picked whatever bits of Christian morality suited their own purposes.
As a result, Christian teachings about human worth, kindness, mercy, justice, and the underdog became so deeply engrained in the Western psyche that we have come to assume they are natural. We might consider “barbaric” or “uncivilized” the cruel treatments that certain other cultures inflict upon minor criminals, prisoners, women, and even animals, and be revolted by them. But such treatments are not necessarily cruel in absolute terms, as life’s winners have always enforced their will on life’s losers in a social “survival of the fittest”, and our revulsion might simply be due to the fact that the perpetrators are not Christian, and that they reject Christianity and its morality. For Christian morality is neither natural nor instinctive.
What has happened since the late eighteenth century is that certain European, and later American, writers on justice, education, and the human condition have begun to split off Christian morality from the Christian religion. This has, apparently, given them the remit of being able to pour scorn and contempt upon the faith, while at the same time running off with the morality and claiming it as their own. Perhaps the first to do this was Rousseau, with his notion of natural virtue, which we saw above.
Yet let us be honest, virtue is not natural: at least, not virtue of the Christian variety. Such a virtue requires us to muzzle and chain the beast that rages within each one of us, for the uncivilized barbarian in his bloodlust and defensive wrath is closer to nature than is the prisoner who says, as he bows his head before his executioner, “In Christ’s love, I forgive you.” And to do this, one has to refashion oneself, root and branch, from within: not be socially engineered or materially perfected from the outside, but learn to live in and through the love of God. A thing that can never be imposed on people en masse, but which has to happen internally for each single individual as their decision, and not another person’s. The ultimate expression of individualism, in fact!
I suppose that what Christian morality aspires to do is to take the natural affection that might exist within a family, or between close friends and intimates, and apply it to the whole of humanity – strangers, outcasts, enemies, and all. And that is not biologically or socially “natural”. Nor is it remotely compatible with evolutionary “survival of the fittest”. It can require the taking of colossal personal risks which, over two millennia, has often resulted in Christians becoming martyrs. And while it is true that the majority of Christians have not been called upon to make that level of sacrifice, many have, and are still doing so today, in countries where being a declared Christian can carry a death sentence. Indeed, Christian morality is about something much loftier and nobler than just being nice to people.
“Yet surely,” many will say, “natural instincts apart, you don’t need the Bible to teach you how to be a noble, generous, or humane person. After all, just look at the wonderful entirely secular charities that have come into being, busily raising money to put an end to overseas poverty. And as far as sources and models of good behaviour are concerned, we have only to look at the great works of literature. Indeed, what a treasury of insights do we possess in Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, and other great English poets and novelists, not to mention writers overseas! So who needs the outdated Bible?”
Yet secularist moralists who argue this way utterly fail to appreciate how fundamental a role the Bible and the Christian faith played in the education of previous centuries (including, indeed, much of the twentieth). Take Shakespeare, for example. His thirty-eight wonderful plays are in no way examples of conscious religious teaching, yet as Nasseb Shaheen, Stephen Greenblatt, and other scholars have indicated, Shakespeare’s imagination and literary thinking were in many ways shaped by the Geneva Bible and Cranmer’s Prayer Book. And while I am cautious about seeing the Bible as somehow lying at the heart of pretty well everything that the Bard wrote – for let us not forget that he was also influenced by classical and recent literature and history – modern scholars reckon that there are well over 1,000 scriptural references or allusions in his works. That comes, at a very conservative calculation, to over twenty-six per play, which is not bad going for “secular” literary creations! In his sense of justice, and of the value of marriage, love, affection, and mercy, Shakespeare is instinctively Christian. Indeed, some of his most memorable speeches echo the tenor of Bible passages, such as when Portia, in her famous courtroom speech in The Merchant of Venice (4.1.184), says of mercy that it “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”, using an image interestingly similar to that used by Job’s comforter, Elihu, speaking of the coming down of God’s blessings: “For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof: Which the clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly” (Job 36:27–29). A similar form of words appears in the “Song of Moses” in Deuteronomy 32:2: “My doctrine shall drop as the rain…”
And even Charles Dickens, with a rejected loyal wife and a secret girlfriend in Ellen Ternan, wrote novels in which good triumphs over evil, joy over despair, and love over hatred: a thing which his overwhelmingly Christian readers expected in their fireside reading. And were not Leo Tolstoy and many other Russian novelists down to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn steeped in the idea of “Holy Russia” and the morality taught by the Russian Orthodox Church? A morality kept alive during the decades of Soviet oppression.
So what we are really getting in so many of the great works of “secular” literature is Christian morality – with distinct echoes of the parables, teachings, and images of Scripture – worked into a “modern” literary narrative: or what one might call biblical morality at second hand. But what these most definitely are not is deliberately secular exemplars, providing an alternative morality to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Let me emphasize, however, that I am not for a second claiming that any of the above authors were writing consciously Christian narratives. But on the other hand let us not forget that all of these great writers, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish, would have received a lot of scriptural teaching during the process of their education and development, and it would have formed the conscious and unconscious warp and weft of their thought processes, and hence of their creative literature.
And let us remember, moreover, that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century British people, along with those of some European countries, probably belong to the first generation since Western schooling began for whom the Judeo-Christian tradition did not lie at the very heart of their education. The first people by whom Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac, David and Goliath, the Three Wise Men and shepherds, the Sermon on the Mount, Palm Sunday, the crucifixion and the resurrection, and the morality that radiated from them, were not imbibed as their cultural mother’s milk. And irrespective of whether you consider this to have been a good or a bad thing, the fact remains that the Judeo-Christian moral and narrative tradition lies embedded in the collective psyche of Western civilization, and that even in our so-called “secular” world its resonances are still to be found. And overpoweringly so, if only we care to cast an honest glance. Where else do our modern concepts of human rights and human equality, and our urge to give our money and time to help impoverished people living in far-flung places whom we are never likely to meet, come from? What is the source of turns of phrase such as being a “Good Samaritan”, a two-faced “Judas”, a moaning “Jeremiah”, a “Jezebel”, a real “saint”, a “martyr”, and countless others that pepper our language and thinking about good, evil, and charity? Certainly not evolutionary theory. And if you find them in the teachings of any of the fashionable secular pundits, then guess where they probably got them from!
So next time you see “post-Christian” morality on display, just remember that you are almost certainly being offered stolen goods: pillaged from the shop of Christian civilization!